Taking it to the Streets, Hosting, Pups and Project Update and Gran Torino

I headed out into a light drizzle with a temp in the low 30's for my Monday morning ride today. You'd be surprised at how nice riding can be in those sort of conditions once you get moving and are generating heat. Of the three elements working against me, the cold, rain, and wind, the wind was and usually is my least favorite. I was going to take a pass on today's ride but it looks like it may be several days before I'll have another chance.

I was able to get outdoors to ride twice over the weekend. It's nice to have that option again. The only dicey areas were the side streets close to home where there were some scattered patches of ice. Otherwise, the roads were dry and fine for riding.

I saw my first Robin of the year along the side of 185th street west of the freeway as I put the finishing touches on yesterday's ride. I no sooner saw the one before seeing a couple dozen others poking around the only earth I could see among the still deep snow. I can never figure out why they're in such a hurry to get back here.

I dropped my blue Serotta off at Flanders Brothers shop in Minneapolis Friday morning for its yearly overhaul. I used to do all of my own mechanical stuff but I quit that a few years ago opting for allowing the pros to do their thing. I'm talking bottom bracket, rear hub, and headset overhauls. Any of the other stuff I'm fine with taking on.

Tammy and I have volunteered to be a 'host house' for a nine-week small group focus Hosanna is organizing during the coming Lenten season. So far we've had six other people join our group with room for four more. We'll be meeting on Thursday nights beginning in a couple weeks. The topic will be John Ortberg's book, Faith & Doubt. We've hosted a small group before but we've never put ourselves out there to lead one as we will with this group. I'm looking forward to it.

Allie and Charlie are quickly becoming good friends. They love to play together. I wish I could say the same for Toby. He's still having very little to do with Charlie. I'll try and get some more video of them this week to upload to our YouTube account.

I'm enjoying having a stained glass project to work on. I can't get the colors to come through with my digital camera but there's a photo to the left to give you an idea of what it looks like so far. The colors have been morphing some and they will some more. Once I'm satisfied with them we'll begin to make much more progress. I'm more or less playing around with it at this point.

Our project will be interrupted for a week or two while we do a stained glass project for some neighbors. Bob and Julie don't have a design in mind so we'll be sitting down with them one night this week to get an idea of what they'd like. We need to do that now or there's a good chance we won't get to it until next winter and I don't want to disappoint them by keeping them waiting.

Tammy and I went to see Gran Torino last Saturday night. We both liked it a lot. Clint Eastwood plays an extremely bigoted character, Walt Kowalski, who is left a bitter and isolated man after his wife dies. He has a family but there's no real love between him and them. He has his dog, his lawn, his front porch, and his beer. That's it, or so he thinks. We're all a work in progress and so is Walt Kowalski. Go see it.