Changes

I am sitting here at my desk in my office on my last day of work for the summer. I'm listening to the Giants playing the Braves on my iPad (a rare 9 am game time) and am trying to get a few things wrapped up before heading out on a few weeks break.

Tomorrow we are headed off for a few nights of camping with my wife's niece and her family. Should be a, hopefully, peaceful break with some inner tubing and boating fun mixed in for spice.

We've got a few more camping trips on tap and a bunch of house projects to try and move forward. And some revenue projects that could use a little love and attention.

I'm just looking forward to sleeping in some, going to the beach and trails with my wife and kids and having a little fun before the school year kicks back into gear! And my kids will be starting junior guards next week so they'll be getting all beach ripped!

Scorecard Weekend Wrap

Decent form but my center of gravity is too high.

Like much of my life, my expectations and reality are like ships passing in the night, they can see each other but are clearly not on the same trajectory. But all is well that ends well which is a more elegant way of saying that as long as you wrap up the weekend on a high note, the rest of it will seem that much better through that lens.

And the weekend did wrap up nicely. I finally got out for a very badly needed mountain bike ride, book ended by some laps on the pump track, the later laps with my two boys rolling too. Lots of fun and really a great place for them to get some exercise and learn how to handle their bikes better. So much fun that today actually marks the fourth straight day of pump track fun for them.

Way Back Then, Then and Now

My, oh my how the time flies. From our first trips to Dennis the Menace Park in Monterey to our most recent. Hope you had a stress reducing holiday break, no matter how your flavor rolls. I'ma go back to complaining about kid toy's that make noise and have no mute or volume control (seriously? this is still overlooked?).


Pretty neat progression if I do say so myself!

A California Kind of Sunday

There are moments, minutes and hours that, for me, pull together all of the various threads of my life and gather them into one neat bundle. After a busy Saturday with my boys including working on the deck, setting up the tent in the backyard and having a campfire complete with S'mores for the family, Sunday was a bit more low key to start with.

Whoa, Fell Off the Wagon Something Fierce There

Yes, he meant to do that. And he landed it too!

You know its been a long time since you've blogged when you get an email from your mom asking why there haven't been any new posts in a while. And then I swing through here to see that we're going on three weeks since the last peevy post about stuff I'm over.

What's been going on? Work. Lots of work. Combine that with two boys play tee ball, working at least one and usually two nights a week and then also trying to get in workouts and that equals something gets squeezed out.

For now that has been this blog which is okay. It doesn't mean I don't enjoy blogging any less and don't find value in doing these posts. I certainly do but the more immediate nature of Twitter is distracting me from posting. As well as all of the other hats that I have to wear in a given day.

Let's do a quick scorecard to catch up, shall we?

Family Milestones

Just wanted to make a quick blog post to note that, as of yesterday, Grady is no longer in need of using training wheels at all. When we bumped him up to the bike with the 16 inch wheels, he decided he really needed the wheels to keep him upright. After a couple of outings with the wheels I could see he was being slowed down and his bicycling skills progress was being hampered by the wheels. So when he hopped off to get a drink of water, I grabbed my ratchet wrench and removed the wheels.

At first he was rather unhappy about it but when he climbed back on board and took a mere two pedal strokes, that big awesome Grady grin broke out on his face and he blazed across the parking lot at a new higher speed than ever before.

Oh yeah, training wheels are gone for good now!

And Sullivan has moved up from his low-slung tricycle. He's now riding the 12 inch wheeled bicycle with the training wheels firmly attached still. But he's doing really well on it and is farther along than Grady was when he'd started using the bigger kid bike.

To celebrate we rode all the way from West Marine to the bridge and back (maybe close to a mile) on the slough path which is gravel-ly and a little daunting to new cyclists. But both boys kicked some butt, took some names and rocked it out like the little stars they are.

We had a great time even though the wind was howling across the lot!

What's The Haps

After a day and a half of four kids (my two boys and their two cousins), two big dogs (my Nande and their Murphy) and my wife's brother staying with us, this morning is calm and mostly peaceful. Even with Murphy still staying with us, he's a great big, sweet and goofy black lab/New Foundland mix.

My cold sore is about 75% healed up now, which is good because it was a really bad one while it was settling in. Probably the worst I've had in five years. But, through a combination of yogurt, lysine, Abreva and Kyani Nitro FX, it has eased up considerably and should be completely gone in another day or two at the most.

And that's a good thing because I need to get back to working out and riding my bikes. I can feel some pent up energy that could really use a release.

We took several steps forward with our Kyani business this week. Say hello to our newest distributor, WindBlossom! We also spoke for the first time the other day as I helped walk her through the sign up process. With her joining our Kyani team, we will start to farm and own Canada because there is little to no presence there as of right now. And virgin territory is huge, huge, huge in this early land grab phase of the game.

If you are looking for an amazingly good Plan B that could easily turn into a Plan A then drop me an email, leave a comment or otherwise get in touch. Kyani is our future and our future looks fantastic! There is no obligation whatsoever to check it out and, if you happen to have sick people in your network of friends, you can make a substantial improvement in their lives.

I had to do a little creative organization in my office to get my computer to be Skype-ready so that WindBlossom and I could video conference but its worked out well, I'm ready and my office is even a little bit sleeker than before!

I've been putting in quite a fair amount of work on websites. I've purchased a new domain for my photography business, used iWeb to create the new site, set up an entirely new account with Backprint and done a pretty ridiculous amount of trouble shooting to make Intellectual Poison work properly again as I'd busted one of the pipes in the process. I'm also starting to lay the groundwork for our as yet unlaunched new bicycling website.

And I've also been tending to several auctions on Ebay to help clear out some valuable but unneeded stuff in the office. Nothing like converting goodies into cash even if I seem to be spending too much time at the Post Office lately.

One big event on the near horizon is Graydon's fifth birthday this Friday! It is hard to believe that he's turning five already but he is. I'm excited for him because I know he's going to absolutely love his main present, a limited edition Automoblox race car. Oh yeah! If you've got young kids, especially car crazy boys (or girls) then you should definitely look into these beautiful toys. We've already got a bunch of the mini cars but the big ones are even more awesome.

The other big events on my horizon are two weddings that I'm going to be photographing the weekend after next. I'm excited, busy with preparations and a little bit anxious about not screwing anything up too badly. Once the weddings are behind us, we'll all be able to breathe a little easier, maybe take a camping trip to Big Sur or somewhere else and start to really enjoy the summer awesomeness out here on the coast. But, until then, there's a ton of things to work on and get ready. My tasklist is just as long, if not longer, than it was when I was working as a computer tech for four schools.

And, lastly, I'm saving my pennies to buy myself a long, long, long wanted goodie, the ContourHD high def helmet cam. Just thinking about my video capabilities with this thing makes me giddy!

So, I may not be quite as crazy busy as WindBlossom but yeah, there's alot going on right now.

The Logistics of 14 Kids and No Husband

A tweet by my friend, Helen, got me to thinking about the new mother of octuplets in addition to the six kids she already had. She separated from her husband last January and is now facing the insanely daunting task of raising 14 children on her own.

Overlooking the scary possibility raised in this article that Nadya Doud may be addicted to having children, there are some pretty scary realities she's going to be facing.

Dressing 14 kids will probably take a couple of hours, feeding them all will take a couple of hours, bathing 14 kids will probably take a couple of hours. Heck, getting them all loaded up into the car, or bus, and secured into their seats will probably take a couple of hours. And I wouldn't even want to think about trying to put 14 children down for bed. One starts crying and you've got a pack of screaming, crying and unhappy kids at once.

I just don't honestly see how it is possible to care for 14 children without substantial assistance.

The fact that all of her kids were conceived via in-vitro fertilization tells me that there are some pretty unscrupulous doctors "caring" for her without regard to the state of her life and already existing kids.

While some are calling the octuplets a miracle, there's a pretty fine line between miracle and 18 year nightmare of screaming and crying.

And then there's also the question of her ability to actually mother each of them. How do you effectively nurture 14 children at once? How do you address and resolve each of their personal issues and problems? The simple answer is that you cannot unless you literally do nothing else and even then you're probably going to miss alot of their problems.

I am often overwhelmed by just my two children, it is beyond my capacity to comprehend having SEVEN TIMES the kids under one roof.

The Trouble with Little Brothers

One trouble with little brothers is that they always try to steal your thunder.

This is Grady being very proud of the map we drew together. It includes a mountain region, a lake with a big shark in it, a rainforest and a city. And Grady drew the roads in between them all.

He was only too happy to pose for a picture and Sully was only too happy to keep running through the scene with his Dennis the Menace grin in full effect.

I Have Been Conditioned Trained

It is now just past 7 am. I am awake. Nobody else in the house is awake yet which is kind of nice but it also means the multiple mornings of pre-7 wake ups have conditioned me to start waking up on my own before 7.

Thanks, kids!

At least I can get some undisturbed computer/coffee time!

Fabulous Day at the Beach

We had a blast out on the beach the other day. We have been working through a wicked heat spell right now which makes the beach a real possibility even though that water splashing over Graydon is really, really cold!

He had his best time ever at the beach. He would chase the waves back and forth, would scream in delight when a wave would bash over him and he loved it when I'd rocket him up above a breaking wave.

And, oh yeah, he slept like a rock!

And I got a whole bunch of fun photos too. Man, I really need a full sized DSLR to start to really leverage the photo opportunities. Hard to justify dropping a big chunk of change right now though.