Random and occasional thoughts on

No, I'm not closing up shop or anything, this is just a weekend recap/summary. I went for a Bike ride Saturday. I rode about 27 miles to an activity at church and then another 27 to get home about an hour later. I had estimated it would be about 25 miles and planned on leaving 90 min before I needed to be there and was shooting for an easy 15-16 mph pace. I was a few minutes late getting started and it was a few miles longer so I ended up with about an 18 mph avg speed in order to try and avoid being too late. By the time I headed home, it was about 90* F out, so I did take it easy and averaged about 15.5 mph for the ride home. Yard work, church, groceries and laundry were all done on Sunday with some help from the guys -- it just doesn't sound right to call them boys when they are getting so big and acting so darn responsible. Then we played a little Aerosmith Guitar Hero to finish the day. Well, gonna try running in the morning and then planning on Functional Strength T...

Well, tonight was my 5th Functional Strength Training class. After that, I stayed for Boxing class. That was my first ever introduction to any sort of fighting. It was fun. I learned (and others practiced) jab, cross and hook punches. It was certainly a learning experience for me. I am looking foreword to the next boxing class and will also be trying out some of the other classes they have. The plan at this gym is for the first month you can take any class they offer but subsequent months, each additional class costs extra. It seems a bit steep pricewise, but the instructors are all really good. Most of them are MMA fighters and will be competing in a tournament next month. Sometime in the next 30 days I will need to decide what I want to work on the next month.

Google announced an initiative called Project 10 to the 100th. The project web page says May Those Who Help Most Win. Their goal is to put people with ideas to improve communities, the environment, health or education together with money to help implement those ideas. It seems like a great idea. It will be interesting to see what ideas are submitted. Maybe the end result of this project will be to stir up some ideas that get the Google funding and some ideas that get enough interest to get other people interested in helping to make a difference in their own communities. Stop by their web page and see if you can come up with any ideas or if any of the ideas spark a chord with you.

I was looking over my Analytics report for my blog today and this proves how smalltime this little blog of mine is. I've had 300 visits in the past 3 months (Jun-Aug). To be fair to myself, I have not been very active in keeping things updated and active and I've posted less than 10 entries each month. I hope to break that this month, but won't go all Twitter-like and blog that I'm having lunch or sitting in a meeting waiting to escape or anything like that in order to get my post count up. You can be sure that if I post something, it is important or interesting or funny to me. Hopefully, some of these will also strike a chord with you. On the flip side, during the same 3 month window I did have a visitor from Latvia and so far in September, I've had visits from Finland and Australia. I know who the Latvian and Australian folks are but have not figured out who dropped by from Finland. Pretty interesting though since my mother is full-blooded Finn.

When we were in MN last month, my oldest son allowed me to take some pictures of him. This was one of my favorites. I think it has a senior picture feel to it. While I don't like his hair (it was a windy day) I decided to play with this a bit more. I found a tutorial on how to selectively colorize part and change the rest to black & white and thought this would be a good one to try it out with. Here is the result: I will definitely be doing more of this kind of thing.

OK, so I was wondering if anyone has ever offered a class on NONFunctional Strength Training. "We build up muscles that you will NEVER need to use." So I went to my first Functional Strength Training. Let me tell you that the word FUN does NOT need to be part of the word functional. After a few warm up laps of running, skipping, sideways sliding we did some crunches, pushups, jumping jacks and leg raises. At that point I was ready to phone it in the rest of the night. I didn't. Next we did belly crawls (using only our arms to pull us, toes were ok if we needed a bit of extra help). This left me with some very nice mat burns on my elbows. Then a few more drills that reminded me of HS gym class (which I hated) and then we got into the station drills. They set out 10 stations that we would do for 2 minutes each and then with a short rest move to the next one. Weighted lunges, wall squats with light weights in your hands and keep your arms moving, hindu squats (what ...

Well, they have gone and done it now. I have a few games that I like to play on my GameCube and on DS#2's Wii, but for the most part I rarely play. While we were on vacation last month, I was talked into trying GuitarHero and Rock Band. We now own Guitar Hero Aerosmith. DS#2 and I split it and that is the most I've spent on a video game in a long time (the kids save their $$ when they want something). Now I have another excuse to skip running. Rock on people!

While reading a friends post about something his daughter said, I remembered something (on a lighter note) that my youngest recently said. We were driving and we enjoy spotting things when on the road and he saw a tire on the side of the road, pointed at it and said "dead tire". I said "RIP. You know Rest In Peace". He laughed and said, "more like Rest In Pieces". He has a great sense of humor.

Well, I have been trying to get good pictures of lightning since I got my new Nikon back in June. There are a few problems with trying to photograph lightning. You never know when or where the next strike will be. It is frequently raining. It is dangerous due to the possibility of getting electrocuted. Tonight, things lined up for me. It was stormy, but not right on top of me. The lightning was striking pretty regularly in a few places, so I went up to our balcony, picked a spot and locked my tripod in that direction. After a few shots to get my settings lined up, the game was on. Trying to time lightning is a game of chance. As with any game of chance, if you play often enough, you stand a pretty good chance of at least a small win. After a few hundred exposures tonight, I ended up with a few shots that I think turned out pretty good:

Well, it was a whirlwind trip, over 4000 miles in 10 days. A lot of driving, but a great time with family and a great wedding for my sister. In spite of the great time, it was really nice to see this sign: I have a lot of stuff from this trip, but I need to do some work with a lot of the pictures first, so stay tuned.