How much does this cost?

Not to be the kind of blogger who never blogs and then finally blogs something completely negative but here is the most up to date price tag for providing "freedom" in Iraq.

Fine print: Prices do not include the impact of the falling dollar, rising oil prices, and high unemployment that you might be feeling in your wallet. Nor do prices include estimated future costs for rehabilitating our armed forces. Nor do they ease the pain for 4000+ dead young americans or 100,000+ dead Iraqis and the those who have been severely injured.

Thanks George, love ya, can't wait till you're gone. We'll miss your lies.

Poke'n Facebook

I was talking to John, aka Johnny GoFast of BeatsGriff - yeah, I actually talk to that dude quite frequently to give him new material for his blog. Anyway, we were talking about Facebook and how difficult it is to use and how we don't understand it and what a couple of 40-year-old loosers we are for not being so hip. I'm sure you'll understand. Anyway, this sort of sums it up right here. You'll get a kick out of this John:

Spencer's First Baseball Game

Spencer started playing baseball a few weeks ago on an optional coach pitch team. That means they can hit a coach pitch or off the batting t. His first game on his Granite Bay Cardinals was yesterday.

We're going to go check out the real SF Giants vs. STL Cardinals this weekend with Mondo and Jackson.

Tahoe to Truckee Great Ski Race

Field size: About 1000
Team Riders: 2 (me and J Laine)

They started us in waves and I went in the 4th wave, about 400 back.
J Laine went in the 1st wave with the olympians. I felt really good
off the start and immediately started working my way to the front of
the pack. Felt very much like the start of a mountain bike race where
you get up toward the front until you find a group that is going your
speed. There wasn't much room for passing though so it took a while
to move through the group.


My trek toward the front was going pretty well until someone stepped
on me and made me fall. Doh. Then a few minutes later someone
stepped on my pole and it came it apart. Doh. After I got that
fixed, I started moving again toward the front but had lost a lot of
places and a little steam.


We started to hit the big sustained climbs and people began to slow
down and it became even more difficult to pass. I came upon a 5k
marker and thought "crap, we've only gone 5k". We had another 5k of
climbing. After so much climbing, I started to cramp. After all,
this was only 6th time doing this and it was a month since the last
time I tried it. I really started to lose ground to my competitors
when I cramped, and those muscles were cooked for the rest of the race
even after we crested the climb at 10k.


Since I was just in this race for "fun", I took a moment or two to
stop at the check points for a frozen snickers and a couple of
drinks. Probably lost about 5 minutes in all, but who cares when
you're so far of the back anyway.


Things got a lot easier physically after the summit, but also a lot
dicier and mentally demanding as we were descending icy slopes. I
fell three more times, losing ground to people I had labored to pass
each time I fell. Doh, doh, doh.


I finished in 1:51 which I guess is good for a rookie, but J Laine was
1:23 so lots of room for improvement and the winning time was a
seemingly physically impossible 1:06.


Ok, that's the end of my cross country skiiing adventure with the
Tahoe-to-Truckee Great Race. Now back to our regularly scheduled
programming (bike racing).

Just riding around in in Kauai

Novell gave Veronica and I a vacation trip to Kauai because I knocked it out of the park last year on the sales gig. It was a bunch of fun with lots of stuff to do with about 200 other Novell-ites from around the world. Not often we get to get away from the kids for some R&R like that. The biggest bummer was Veronica was sick the whole time! I mean stay in the hotel room bed with the flu type sick. She spent all of about 6 hours outside the room. It was miserable for her.

I took my bike stuff and rented a roadie for a few days of riding. I went on a couple of 4 hours rides up the canyon. The first day it rained almost the entire ride. At least it wasn't that cold. The second ride out was beautiful and I captured some video. Warning: pretty boring video. You'll only like this if you really love me (like my mom) or you really, really love cycling.

What a flippin rip...

It better be fun!

Not that, but that

I grew up being forced to watch british shows on PBS and channel 54 in the Bay Area. Aside from MASH it was pretty much all PBS all the time. On the comedy side, it was Faulty Towers, Monty Python, Rumple of the Bailey. My parents are both Brits and BBC on PBS was the tether to England. This video below is for my parents and my other friends who share a British sense of humor". Enjoy.