Nothing to say?

I feel like I have a lot to say but it's just not coming out. I haven't had a chance to get my pictures together, maybe soon. My ankle is still swollen from my crash at Mathew Winters 2 weeks ago. It's getting better slowly but I'm going riding with the ESW boys tomorrow anyway. The snow is melting off at least so this will be my first road ride in about 2 weeks. I never miss it until I get back out for a ride and remember how much faster it is than the mountain bike. I'll probably be back on the mountain bike on Sunday though since this is technically still a rest week until Monday. Come Monday though begins 3 hard build weeks and around 500 miles. Most of that however will be on the road.

What else? Marni's voice is returning so hopefully it will be back to normal by Monday. Jessica is stuck in NYC but will finally be back from Italy tomorrow.

90 days

A lot can happen in 90 days and a lot has. I intended to update this more frequently but it didn't happen. Maybe I'll do better going forward. Maybe I won't. I'd certainly make a bigger effort if someone else would. You know who you are. I still wish I knew what was going on in your life more.

Since I last wrote I've ridden my bike(s) about 1000 miles. That's been going awesome since I got my 2005 Trek Fuel 80 at VeloSwap for only $800 brand new . I've also discovered single speed mountain biking and am hoping to get my first single speed frame for Christmas. I've ridden to work every day except maybe 1 when I had to drive to Boulder for a meeting. I even rode my bike to Boulder (20 miles each way) for another meeting. Yesterday and today the temperatures are in the single digits with lots of snow on the ground but I still rode. Today I added ski goggles to my list of gear so that my eyelashes don't freeze again like yesterday morning.

We've also moved into and redecorated our new house. We closed at the end of September and started living there a couple weeks later. We've redecorated and remodeled the master bedroom, upstairs bathroom, second upstairs bedroom, the living room and bits and pieces of the rest of the house. It's a lot of fun to fix up the house and it really makes it feel more like our home. Marni loves having a space for her car in the garage and I love being able to work on my cars and bikes with *almost* all the space I need. I'm still angling for a 3rd garage space with a lift and to redo the concrete but we'll see how much the quotes come in at for that. We also closed our lease of the apartment and even got a few dollars back so no more dealing with that! Plus we don't have to move anywhere anytime soon. We are all thrilled about that. My mom also got to come visit and stay with us for the first time. Hopefully her comfy room and surrogate golden retriever will make her want to come back.

Where do we go from here? Well I'm going to continue biking and ramp up the miles for a bunch of fun planned rides and races this summer, including Leadville 2006 "The Revenge". We'll be working on the house more. There is another room full of wood paneling and pink paint that has to go. Plus Turbo has redecorated the yard by rolling all the landscaping rocks to the middle with his nose. Biking again has got me working on even more design projects than before. And who knows, maybe in 2006 I'll finish getting out of my Visa debt and get the Galant to Bandimere. I'll post a bunch of random pictures later to catch those few people who read this up on what I've talked about here. That's all for now except...

Welcome back to the US of A Sister!

Lunch Update

So i'm eating english muffin pizza's for lunch. According to the wife they are quite good. I dunno about that but I just invented them yesterday when she said she had nothing for lunch.

Take 1 english muffin and split it
Apply pizza sauce (best), tomato paste (okay), or catsup (if that's all there is)
Add cheese
Add 2 pepporoni
Microwave 1 minute on high
Burn hands
Eat
Burn mouth

They are pretty good. Miss Jessica I am still waiting!!!!!!

So I've still been riding my bike which is awesome. I'm starting to feel strong again for the first time in probably 2 years. We're supposed to have Crit practice on Sunday with ESW which I'm looking forward to. Still haven't got off my lazy butt to get the running underway though. All is well on the house front. Just waiting the apprasial and if that goes fine then we're set.

Maybe more updates this afternoon if it's as slow as I predict it's going to be...

Waiting to hear pt.2

Jessica...you promised to update your blog. I'm stil waiting.
House people...you promised to fax me the sheet saying you agree. I'm still waiting.
Shearer...you promised me my header months ago. I'm still waiting but also happy not to have to pay you the rest yet. Haha.
RRE...you promised to ship me my camber plates when you charged the card since they were on back order. I'm still waiting.

Waiting to hear

Today is the resolution deadline for the inspection on our house. We heard all is well and the papers will be signed today but haven't seen that happen yet. Hopefully soon. Our real estate agent has been sick and in the hospital so I hope she's doing okay.

The long weekend was great. Lots of relaxing and fun. I went on a nice bike ride after 4hrs of sleep on Saturday morning since the girls were over Friday night for Kareoke. The ride was in Colorado Springs and went through Garden of the Gods which was awesome! We had Death Match 1 for our Eastside Wheelmen team and I chased Ryan up the hill in 22:05 to his 21:40. Next time I'm going to beat him. Today continues my consecutive ride to work streak as well. Apparently it's raining outside but from my windowless desk I can't tell.

Time to enjoy lunch, the best part of the day!

Bike to work (or carpool or vanpool etc)

So ever since Leadville kicked my butt I've been riding my bike to work. I took 1 week off after the race to recover and today is the 9th consecutive work day that I've ridden. So far I'm really really enjoying it. Now I've ridden bikes a long time and have ridden to work many times before but this is the first time I've given up the car totally. Okay so having "my" 2 car(s) broken and sharing our reliable car with the wife doesn't hurt the situation, but hey, i'm not clamoring to fix my ride(s). In fact riding to work has made me enjoy my commute to and from my house despite the fact that I basically live in the middle of town and ride with a decent amount of traffic both ways. My 5 mile commute each way takes about 20-30 minutes (depending on how hard I ride) which is about 10-15 minutes longer than by car. On the plus side I keep a minimum of 50 miles a week off my car, stay in better shape and reduce our countries dependance on oil and the currently skyrocketing gas prices. Even when I drive the Honda Civic the savings is still nice! Those with longer commutes or less fuel efficent cars could save a bundle.

And I'm not the only one. My dad has been riding and taking the bus in combination almost everyday for months now. Did I mention he lives in Illinois, commutes to St.Louis over the river, is over 50 and also is diabetic? Now what was your excuse again?

So what does the banner at the top of this post have to do with it? Well it's just a program here in Colorado by our RTD to help the environment and get people informed about alternative ways to commute other than by driving alone. You can carpool, vanpool, walk, take the bus or ride your bike or do any of those in combination. And all we ask is try it 1 day a week. When you realize how nice alternative methods can be you may find yourself doing it everyday! Now everyday doesn't work for some people or in emergencies but they have programs for that already including a guarenteed ride home via Taxi. I know this is available here in Colorado and also in the St.Louis area so there is a good chance it exists whereever you are.

So try something new for your commute, save some money, save the planet and reduce our countries need for oil all at the same time. It only takes 1 day a week and it's easier than you think. Just try it :)

A little more house info

So I said we were buying a house. Well it's true I guess. Marni got a job, our lease is up in October and we crunched some numbers. It said we could buy a house if we could find one that wasn't rediculously expensive. We talked to the banker/lender guy. He said we have good credit and here is your loan. Holy crap.

So we went out looking. 60 houses later we found a place. Called to make an offer. It was gone. Found another place a couple weeks later. Made an offer, not accepted due to another offer. Looked again. Found a place, made an offer. It was acccpted!

So here is 10530 Holland St, our new home if everything goes right between now and September 27th. Turbo already made friends with the neighbor dog. I hope that's a good sign.



There are some more pictures here if you would like to see them.

Inspection is tonight so I'll have more inside pictures later today.

Sister is gone!

Well my sister is gone. She's off to Florence, Italy for 6 months to study fashion design.

Her blog is here so I guess I should start posting again.

Here's the 30 second update:
-Race car is broken waiting for the following to happen before we fix it. Damn did the shocks and springs make it faster.
-We're buying a house
-Marni got a job
-We're buying a house
-I raced the Leadville Trail 100 Mountain bike race
-I'm working out again and getting skinnier. only 164lbs this morning, down a bout 16 from post honeymoon weight :)
-we had our 1 year anniversary and it was lots of fun

More to come I supposes...TGIF!!!

Shocks shocks shocks shocks

It's pay day, it's pay day. Now I can finally get my shocks. I've been waiting to get my Koni's since I got the car but now I finally have enough free cash to do it. The first piece of the puzzle towards having a competitive car will soon be on the way to me. Hopefully the fact that they're lightly used doesn't come back to bite me but i'm going to have them rebuilt eventually anyway to double adjustables with revalving in the rear for higher spring rates. Now I need to find a way to get my camber plates and coilovers so I can actually install the new shocks.

On a note of earning more money, my tubing order shipped the 7th (finally). Once all this stuff arrives I'll be ready to eliminate one more piece of credit card debit and be one step closer to buying our house.

I'm Kevin Nealon and this is...Weekend Update

So as not to have a blog containing nothing I'll post an update of last weekend's (6/4 and 6/5) events. Does the title date me?

Saturday
The entire night, Friday, and all Saturday morning I listened to it rain. Rain rain rain. Sleep for 2 hours. Rain rain rain. Repeat. Normally this would be a good thing in the land of draught and water restrictions but my own selfish interests wanted to go go-karting on Saturday morning. Which happened to take place outside. Where is was raining. Now normally being a speed whore alone would be enough to justify wanting to go karting but there was an even better reason today. Erik and Michelle were getting engaged and it was Erik's birthday which meant it was all the more reason for everyone to get together and race karts, eat some food and enjoy the weekend.

Now we're supposed to leave about 11:30am and it's about 10am when I get an updated Evite that says we're moving the karting indoors! Sweet. Now I have a real reason to wake up the wifey and the dog and get ready. By 11:45 we're out the door with no idea how to get there other than it's at 70 and Colorado. Luckily the computer's battery decides to die leaving us with no mapquest on the screen. We drive there, just as lost as Steve and Keith and exchange cell phone calls explaining where we went that the karting place was not. Eventually I get ahold of Michelle who tells me how to find it and a minute later we're there.

Now we hadn't been karting in a while and Marni has improved her driving considerably since our last outing thanks to our autoX adventures. We're all helmeted up and ready to go. After the first round I'm about .75 second behind the current FTD (fastest of the day) in our group and Marni is less than a second off of me. We discuss our lines a bunch and pay for the next session. While we wait for the others to go I decide to take a bunch of pictures with Marni's new D70. Although 90% of them were crap, a couple turned out sweet and I got to watch Steve, Keith and Mike battle it out during their session including Steve and Keith getting black flagged for blocking and passing in corners. Haha. On our last session I improve another .7 seconds while Marni speeds up to 20.73, faster than my first session time by almost .2 seconds. She ended up beating a ton of people and instead of being last like the previous outing, she was solidly mid pack. After karting we went to lunch with everyone and got to see Michelle's new ring. They both looked very happy and I can't wait for the wedding.

Sunday
Sunday morning bright and early brought our 2nd autoX in the Colt, aka Snork. This time we had the Azenis on it but it was still basically stock. Steve met us over at our apartment and we headed to the DIA lot just after 7am. We met Mike and Jon there and got the car all ready. Then we hurried through a couple course walks and headed back to the cars. We were all running in heat 3 which meant we were working heat 1. Just before it was time to head to our work assignments we figured out where Steve's wheel issue was that he discovered last night. The lower control arm was missing a bolt(!) and the back of the arm was moving all over in the bushing. Steve, Jon and Marni had to get to their corner to work so Mike and I tracked down a big bolt from the rear seatbelts and got the car fixed up. Good thing we were able to fix it as it was not safe at all to drive, much less race. Heat one went quickly as Mike and I fixed the car and at the end of the heat I went do to my work assignment which was cone audit. While it's an important job you have to do it after they heat which means you are working right before the heat you run in. I hurried as fast as I could while Marni finished getting the car ready. I got done just in time to head out on course. As rushed as I was, things only got worse as I hit the first left hander. The car cut out completely. We were way too low on gas and the g forces from the turn pulled all the fuel away from the pickup. I got the car going again and finished my lap with a DNF after missing the last slalom. In the hot pits I ran around trying to find some more gas while Marni got ready to drive. Luckily Jon had 2 cans of 103 unleaded so I threw one can in and we headed out again for Marni's run. In all the rushing around she missed a turn right at the start and DNF'd her first run too. We got back to the pits and got settled down and our 2 runs each went better. We both were clean our last run and improved our times despite the car starting to cut out again. Next time i'm going to make sure there is at least half a tank in there. I went for a ride with Steve after our runs were over and he did really well. His last run was his fastest but he coned so it was a bit higher than before. Jon was the fastest out of our group for the day but everyone had a kick ass time and are all planning to be ready for the next one on Saturday June 18. Marni and I both improved a lot with me finishing 18/26 in street modifed where we are horribly under modded for. We both picked up over 50 points on PAX too which is awesome. We also beat a couple WRX's, and EVO and a few other nice cars. Not bad for the $500 1989 Colt. Here are a couple closing pictures. Maybe i'll have the suspension done this season so we don't 2 wheel anymore?


Steve



Marni



Chris

Personalized the template

Spent a little time to update my side bar and template. Nothing fancy but at least it's more personal. I guess I could have been working instead but oh ya, there's nothing to do. Tomorrow is friday and a payday, woohoo!

Running

Went for a run tonight for the first time in a long time. I feel so fat and lazy when I don't run and bike. Hell at 175lbs and 6 feet tall I'm the fattest I've ever been. At least tonight I'm 30 minutes of running skinnier. It felt really good to run again even though I wasn't that fast. I really need to get on a regular workout schedule again.

Let's try this again

My first bunch of posts are gone so we're going to try this again. This time I'll be more successful. I'll even get some pictures up I suppose.