Say What?

Riding my bike has been a struggle all season.  Home projects occupied most of my riding time early on in the year but when I did manage to take to the road, very seldom was I comfortable out there. I'd occasionally have a good ride but they were too few. My knees have been much sorer than ever. Tammy mentioned that maybe it was time to go back to Flanders and see if Scott could find anything wrong with my position on the bike. That thought kept coming back to me but I kept putting it off even though I was pretty certain she was right. I'd replaced my saddle three times in the last 18 months and each time I thought I'd done a good job of dialing it in but it was becoming apparent that I hadn't. I finally threw in the towel last week and loaded my bike into the back of my truck to spend a few minutes with Scott Flanders. Scott took one look at my Brooks saddle and gave me a look that said, "really?" I was a little embarrassed but I told him it only speaks t...

Big sigh! That's the sound of our lives returning to normal now that Rachel's graduation party is over. Tammy did an excellent job of keeping the entire production headed in the right direction while Rachel put in a lot of hours assembling photos and helping me with a video production we cobbled together to run in the background on a few TV's during the party. The weather forecast from earlier in the week held up and gave us a beautiful day. It really couldn't have gone better and we're all thankful for that. We never felt all that comfortable about how much food we needed to provide so in typical American fashion we erred on the side of too much. We should've stayed with Tammy's original phone order for 300 wings from BWW . Instead, we upped the order to 500 earlier in the week and we didn't need to. Rachel's father and stepmother made 100 eggrolls which were quite a hit. In addition to all of that we had dozens of croissants with all the fixi...

Many of the guys in my dads' dance group are fond of saying, "the things we do for our kids", meaning, that's why we're all there. I'm good with that. Dare I say that our lives are about to return to normal? A couple months back I was writing about how over-scheduled I was feeling with weekly commitments of small-group meetings for our church, dance lessons, and glassblowing classes. All those are over now and I'm breathing a bit easier but we still have Rachel's graduation party to get through this weekend. So far the weather forecast (for what it's worth this far out) looks good with partly cloudy skies and 80 degrees. That will be a considerable change from the wet weather we've been experiencing almost daily for what seems weeks. Last weekend was Rachel's and my (mostly Rachel's) dance recital weekend with one performance on Saturday and two on Sunday. As she loaded up her car to leave for the recital at Eastview high school on ...

"Watch out world, here she comes !!!!! I can't wait to see the impact God's princess will have on this world." Those are words of a friend of ours, Tom, from Hosanna commenting on Rachel's Facebook. I couldn't have said it better myself. We attended a Baccalaureate service for her graduating class Wednesday; pretty much her last official function prior to receiving her diploma. I'd never heard of a Baccalaureate service and was actually a little surprised to learn that they held them. It's a Christian service put together by students and involves some of the local clergy as well as students from the graduating class. Rachel played a small role . She's graduated now and we're very proud of her. We trekked to Target Center last night for her graduation ceremonies and mingled with a bunch of other Lakeville residents while waiting for the program to begin. There were many familiar faces in the crowd—friends, neighbors and some we only reco...

This is a continuation of a series of writings about my time in the Navy. The first in this series of posts can be found here or go here for the most recent. We moved our ship into drydock in the way early morning hours of Monday, July 16 for a yard period that would relocate all or most of us from the ship into barracks on base. Getting off the ship was such a relief to me as one who never opted for an apartment off base the way many of the guys I served with did. At this point in my enlistment, I was antsy for a change, and barracks life would provide that for me. I was able to avoid a lot of the mind-numbing-needle-gunning-paint-chipping work that was a large part of the yard period by accepting an assignment to base shore patrol. The duties ranged from undercover (literally) work to being a presence in and around the Enlisted Men's' club. The undercover work involved keeping an eye on one of the main parking lots off base that sailors would use. I would spend 8 hour...