Say What?

...is an abbreviation on cycling forums for just riding along and it usually precedes details of an unexpected occurrence. I was JRA yesterday afternoon in front of Fleet Farm on my way to do the Jordan Loop when a car sped by. There wasn't much more than a foot between us with the driver giving me the finger. A few years ago I would've responded in kind but now I simply wave and say 'thank you'. The driver no sooner got past me then moved into the left turn lane to go into Fleet Farm. Idiot. I followed close behind and met the kid as he exited his car. It's difficult to keep your cool when this sort of thing happens but I did my best. I asked him if he had any particular problem sharing the road with cyclists. He admonished me for being on the road at all and told me that my place was on the sidewalk. I politely explained that the law allows for me to be there in addition to a 3-foot buffer between my bike and any vehicle. He said, "that's fine but...

Keith took Mom to her heart specialist on Friday as a follow-up to her heart troubles of the last couple of weeks. She's not out of the woods and has what she describes as a long road ahead of her but the prognosis was better than I think many of us allowed ourselves to expect. Her doctor isn't sure she'll ever get back to the level of heart-health she had before the congestive heart failure episode but with a new drug (Coreg) added to her regimen he's confident she'll make a very good recovery. Rachel left Tuesday afternoon for Willmar and this year's Sonshine Music Festival. She and a whole lot of her friends got there a day early to stake their claims and set up their tents. She's not thrilled with the line-up of bands but that's only half the experience from what I can tell. Still, she's enjoying the show. She says it gets so packed with people toward the front of the stage that it's nearly impossible to work your way back through the crowd...

Keith and Tracee took Mom to Michigan's UP last week and along the way or before they ever left, Mom developed what was later diagnosed as an acute case of congestive heart failure. Lots of swelling in her legs and an inability to breath deeply or breath very well at all for that matter plus a lack of energy. She made an appointment with her doctor as soon as she got home and was put on Lasix to help rid her body of excess fluid. An EKG was also done and the results indicated that her heart is struggling and very much dependent on her pacemaker. My older brother Bryan who lives in Portland and was just here last month is returning with his daughter, her husband and their one-year-old to spend some time with her. It's difficult to know if she's in her last weeks/months or if she'll rebound and return to her normal self for possibly years to come. They didn't admit her to the hospital so I would think that would be a good sign. She'll be 82 in November. We too...

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. During my enlistment, I was very good about sending money home to be put into a savings account which wasn't readily accessible to me. I'd managed to squirrel away over $5000 in that time on wages that ranged from $5000 to $7500 annually. However, my days of living debt-free and being able to easily add to my savings were coming to an end and I knew it. I'd soon be on the hook for rent, utilities, car, insurance and I could only imagine what else—and what sort of work would I find to pay for all that? For the past four years, I'd not had one monthly bill.  But still, I had one last purchase to make, knowing that if I didn't act on this impulse now I'd be hard-pressed to justify it later.  With all the cash I'd spent building up my Eisentraut frame over the last year, I would've thought that I...

I set my laptop up in the geek room at work last week but couldn't get the screen to come to life. I could hear the hard-drive booting up but that's as far as it would go. I pulled out my Droid and searched for similar problems with HP laptops and found a few forum threads related to the issue I was having. I tried some of their suggestions and after a few minutes of fiddling with it, it came to life. I decided it was a good time to make sure I'd backed up anything remotely important onto my external hard-drive. My HP has served me well for 3.5 years so I'm not all that surprised that it's begun to show its age. There's a problem with the wiring in the hinge causing a short-circuit of sorts the best I can figure. It continued to operate sporadically over the next few days before I decided it was time to look for a replacement. Was it finally time to consider a Mac? We'd just been to the Apple store at Mall of America the week before but buying a new lapt...

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...