Got my smart car, finally. I took a few pictures of it while I was mounting my bicycle rack on the car. Yeah, it's dirty because it has rained almost every day since I got it on Sunday. * Here's the link *

The car is every bit as much fun as I thought it would be. It handles surprisingly well for such a short wheelbase, I was doing 90 mph on my way to the dealership in high winds and it was not squirrely at all. It rides better than the suburban did with the lower profile tires. I'm already tired of the stock radio, so watch for the upgrade when the new stereo arrives...

Tomorrow's show location, from today's rehearsal...




Near Gustavus, Ohio.

Right now, we are here:



The train is parked temporarily on the bridge separating the US and Canada, with half of the train in the States and the other half in Canada.

I've been pretty slack on the posts - I am in India until the 5th. Somewhere around here:



Actually, I'm working here, which if it looks like what we would consider an abandoned building, it pretty much is.

I'm going to call twitter lame. It doesn't seem to update very frequently, so take that with a grain of salt.

correction - it seems to work in I.E. but not updating so fast in FireFox. lame.

<----Added a 'twitter' feed over there somewhere. It's a doodad that allows me to make quick updates from my phone, which I suppose I can also do to the main blog here, but whatever.

Yes, that last twitter update is correct. I have no baggage and am still on my way to Delhi.

Oops. Did a little ramp taste-test tonight at the skatepark... Knocked the wind out of myself, but other than that no harm done. I guess you know you've done a good job when there's a print of the seams on the ramp on your shoulder.

Tonight in the garage, I discovered Godzilla on one of the storage shelves... I'm not a big fan of lizards, much less ones that are a foot long and crap all over my garage, so he had to go. Unfortunately for Godzilla, he cornered himself in a box and he's not faster than a shop vac. :-)

Mostly finished workbench:



Today was some kind of sinus / allergy hell day so I didn't get the bin made for the scrap wood, and I may look for a garbage bin to fit the last place on the bottom right without a door. The handles were an item that Lowe's recently changed suppliers on, so I have 1 left that will go on the wood scrap bin, and I don't feel like having to figure out how to order more. They were actually cheaper than using knobs - a plain black knob was $3.97 whereas the handles were 2 bucks and change.

New workbench project ***here*** inspired by **this** project on the New Yankee Workshop show.

Wow. I went to the skatepark tonight for the first time in about a month and found out that one of the riders I knew there died in a motorcycle accident. I can't find the news story - most likely it was a one-vehicle accident from what the internet theorists say. I guess if the newspapers can't villify a motorcycle rider because they're speeding they won't even mention them.

I barely met the kid, but he was a very talented BMX rider that everyone liked and he could ride any bicycle like it was nothing. Funny thing, he never had his own bike - seemed like he just enjoyed stopping in to see what was going on, ended up bumming someone's bike for a few minutes and threw down amazing tricks. He borrowed the bike I broke my ankle on from me one night and just tore the park up like it was nothing. He and I went in the skatepark with my sidehack - terrifying, but ridiculous fun at the same time.

'Racer' John, we'll miss ya at the skatepark.

Haven't posted anything in a while... I was waiting for something big, like my new Bitchin' laundry room. Well, okay, it's the same old laundry room, but I did replace my water heater with a new tankless one, build new pedestals for the washer & dryer, and repaint the whole place. Thrilling stuff, no? So, I guess that answers what I did with my 3-day weekend.

I put up a couple of pictures from my trip to Norway. I was really busy, so I didn't get around much, but I did want to see this: Monument

Oh yeah, I took a picture of Ed

This is the first flower (since I nearly killed this plant from not being able to water it when I was out of town) from the plant Bart and Lena gave me last year at my housewarming party.

This is the 'before' version of the new window box I built for my garage.

'After' picture of the window box, posted from my phone. Interestingly enough (to me) the 'title' field disappears when posting this way.

Stumbled into this from Critical Miami:

17

Bring it on, little chumps!

I went to the 2008 NBL Gator nationals in West Palm Beach yesterday at Okeeheelee BMX and it was pretty cool. I got totally sunburned and still had a great time. This race was the last-chance Olympic qualifier for North America, so the 2nd half of the race was sanctioned by the UCI. The NBL pros were no slouch, but the UCI racers were noticibly faster. ** Photos are here **

I started to take some videos, but with over 300 motos prior to the finals just in the NBL racing, I ran out of space pretty quickly. Here's one of the UCI races I kept:

Yeah, I almost forgot - I had my GPS with me and this is where we were at for the launch. 6.61 miles as the Google flies...

Went to see the space shuttle Endeavour launch last night in Cape Canaveral. It was really cool to see, but some late low clouds cut the show off early and we only got to see about the first 30 seconds of the flight. It was a bit anticlimactic in that sense, but the experience was great overall. I took some pictures that actually came out better than I would have expected and they are ** HERE ** Thanks to Quais' son Khalid for the last-minute camera setting advice. I am going to try and get copies of everybody's pictures if they got any and will put them up later.

I have been building a shed for my air compressor because I got tired of listening to it, and today I finally got to build the 'green' roof on top of the shed. Thanks to Erik at Flamingo Road Nursery, I was able to get plants selected that should survive not being cared for.

I put pictures in the gallery, or there's a link *** Here ***. Hey, it's not Singapore Botanical Gardens, but it's a start.

On the way back to Miami now...

On the way to Grand Cayman.

Near Cozumel - up early because of the ship's time change / radio engineer mixup. We're actually up here a hour before necessary. Oh well, time to kill... We're here:

This is where we're at for the KFAN radio broadcast on Monday.

My sister just came out and visited for a few days over the long weekend. We went to Ikea and saw a cool bench in their waiting area, but they don't sell them, so we decided to make one. It came out pretty good ***Pictures are here ***

I also did some re-organizing of the photo gallery. I moved all the stuff from my 'old' house into the miscellaneous album and stuff from the 'new' house into the 'house stuff' album. Fascinating!