Have Not Fallen Into a Crevasse

Nope, I'm still around. I'm tweeting quite regularly (and knocking some tweets into orbit with their extra special awesomeness, IMHO).

But I've also been on summer break this last week. Technically the week before doesn't count because it was an unpaid furlough week from work but you know what? My ass can't tell the difference between furlough time and summer break time. I'm sure my paycheck can but we'll worry about that one later.

The last few weeks have been much family time fun. Some rough patches with so much time at home with the whole house filled up with all four of us, the dog and the cat too. But it has mostly been a really nice time. I've been putting in a bunch of hours doing computer repair stuff which is nice, it pays well, expands my circle of clients and gets me out of the house.

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?

Whoa, What?

Things have been busy lately and the new work structure makes me work more and blog less which I suppose is a generally good thing. If you're my boss. Or I should say bosses since I technically now have eight bosses. I work at seven different schools with seven different principals and still have my director. Lots of bosses but it isn't a crappy Office Space situation.

Anyway, I'm working full-time and getting in increasingly long workouts as we've now entered less than two weeks to go time on my next triathlon. I've been training pretty consistently and pretty hard and feel confident in my fitness levels. I still need to work on my ocean swimming and transitions but I'm approaching this triathlon much like the last one. I'm not racing the people around me, I'm racing myself. If I race as well as I can then I truly do not care where I place (well, unless I'm DFL but that's unlikely).

And when I'm not working or training, I'm trying to give my wife a break from being on mom duty almost 24/7 with no school. They do have a bunch of stuff going which helps keep the day's moving but its still alot of work and very, very tiring especially since Sullivan basically does not stop making noise from the minute he wakes up until the minute he goes to sleep. He is an amazing little chatterbox and, when he's not speaking, he's barking, grunting, singing or doing something else to make noise. It is relentless and wearing after several hours. But Sully is a delightful little kid so it is mostly dealable. Not always but that's when the ability to "tag" out is invaluable. I have no idea how single parents possibly cope with young children, especially two rambunctious boys. Without a break I would absolutely without question lose my mind despite the fact that I adore my boys more than anything else in the world.

Graydon has his own share of things going on right now. He's pouty, petulant, selective and sometimes just downright difficult. This is, of course, not his norm. He is most of the time a happy, playful, funny and wonderful boy. He's mischievous and has a flair for the dramatic, he'll make up dances, he'll put on magic tricks and then he'll get very, very shy when someone asks him to show them his trick or dance or whatever. Its kind of funny but I sometimes worry that he might be self-doubting and that's preventing him from performing his tricks. He is old enough now that he and I can sit and talk and try to work things out. He will often utter some very surprising observations that remind me of both how clever he is and how he misses almost nothing. And he delights in adding to his resume of skills.

How odd, this post was going to be a post of links of good stuff I've been reading online and turned into an update on my (mostly) happy little family. Yes, I skipped my wife, she doesn't care for me to discuss her too much on the blog. I will say she's been doing a Cross Fit type class at the gym and is really liking it, its also getting her in really good shape which helps everything else. I love having an active family, I love knowing that we've got camping trips and biking trips and kayaking and skiing (or snowboarding) and surfing and everything else ahead of us.

But I need to get some work done before packing it in. So many projects half done that its nearly impossible to know which one to work on at any time. The competing priorities make it hard to get started.

Oh, and one last note, the boys and I have been watching and really enjoying Avatar: The Last Airbender via Netflix to the tv. Great entertaining series. We're just about to finish Book Two and move on to Book Three. We are absolutely loving having Netflix accesible via the tv, its almost made up for the several years of barely used Netflix-ing we did. We'd get a movie in the mail and sit on it for six to eight weeks before eventually sending it back unwatched. Not anymore!

Off to the darkroom for some photo work, I think.

2010 is Half Over Today, Or Not

Today marks the halfway point of the year (or is it really July 1st? yeah probably, damn). In a couple of days it will be my mother's birthday, she's getting herself a new hip for her birthday this year. Some titanium contraption that will let her jump higher than Michael Jordan and run faster than Michael Johnson. Not bad for a lady just under the edge of 70.

A couple of days later it will be my older brother's birthday. My guess is that his birthday will be celebrated with a big group of friends going out, much wine drinking, some songs (perhaps even around a campfire on the beach) and more than normal dissheveled hair the next day. And then a couple days after that is my cousin, Ellen's, birthday.

Next weekend we will be engaging in a double birthday party for our boys with pretty much their entire school class and a bunch of other friends coming to have fun at a park near the house. It will be very tiring but I hope/expect the boys will have a ton of fun.

And sometime this week I should get some kind of word about work over the summer. Rumors of full-time benefitted employment abound but there's been nothing concrete as of yet. I must confess that I was kind of looking forward to a slightly slack(er) summer schedule which is now gone. But regular income and health insurance trumps more free time.

And now its time to go and wrangle some tech issues. Today was a bad day to force all the school district's staff to change their passwords, there's a week left of school, couldn't this have waited?

Oh well, it keeps me popular. Now if only the clouds would break up so I could plan and schedule a trail ride for after work.

Speaking of which, I need to write up Grady and Sully's progress on their bikes. They are both coming along muy rapido! Grady is closing on starting to do some trail riding with me and I absolutely cannot wait!

The Weekend Wrap

So here it is, Monday morning again and I'm plugging away at computers on one of my school campuses. We had a pretty good weekend even if the weather never did live up to the hype. And I got two distinctly different and good workouts in which have shown me just how far I've got to go before my body is ready for the triathlon.

I also signed up for another race in about three weeks at the 2010 Sea Otter Classic in Monterey. I'm going to do the Cat 3 Cross Country starting at a bleary and cold 8 am on Sunday morning. I sort of pushed myself into it because I've always wanted to race at the Sea Otter and, because I'm a cheapie, I could get $10 off my entry (the offer for which expired at midnight last night). I've never raced mountain bikes before so this should be fun and it is the Sea Otter's 20th year so there's that too. I'm not quite sure how that weekend will work since I will likely have to camp out there or hit the road butt ass early on Sunday to make the start. But there is time to sort out the details now that the race is on.

I also did some additional tweaking on NorCal Bikers, added some Amazon affiliate links because I need to get some stuff at Amazon anyway and might as well generate a little side income from the process.

And for the workouts, I converted an 8 week training schedule into an Excel spreadsheet, then uploaded it to Dropbox so I could check it anywhere and then went a step further and uploaded it to my Google Docs so I can access it AND update it with workout data on the fly. Jay suggested going even further and importing into my Google calendar but I have a tendency to flip my workouts a day forward or backward so not sure if that'd work.

But I did get a good run and swim in on Saturday and then a good mountain bike ride in on Sunday. My legs were pretty worked after the run and swim but those sored-up muscles didn't infringe on my cycling at all. I'm well ahead of my training schedule at this point but still need to bring my running up by quite a bit.

Today is a scheduled rest day which is good since its also my big work day with a nearly full day at one school and then heading out to another school for a shorter day there.

My swimming is coming along pretty well overall. I need to work on my ability to keep going without needing to stop. But its good for now and I'm improving my technique and stamina each time I'm going out. I'm in the market for some better swim trunks since the board short style is like wearing a big ol' drag suit. No, I am not going for the banana hammock Speedo style. At least not yet. For now I'm going to get some square brief style trunks.

The one downside to swimming on Saturday is the little heated pool area got very crowded with people who seemed to screech almost constantly. It got kind of annoying.

The run was pretty good too considering I haven't really done much running since back in high school when I ran cross country for a couple of years. Then I discovered mountain bikes and was like, running is for suckers, biking is for me! Only now I'm having to learn how to run all over again. I'm working on my stamina, working on my stride and trying not to pound my shins and calves into cramped up jelly. Seriously, I've never had to deal with cramping in my shins like this and its rather painful. But it is coming along.

I fully expect to be on the starting line for the triathlon fully confident in my preparations for the race. Over the next few weeks I will start to work on my transition work and actually changing over from swimming to biking and then from biking to running.

On Sunday I got out and hit Nisene Marks for my standard (though awesome) ride. The trails had really dried out alot more in the last week since I was there. Still some sloppy spots but overall the system is in great shape and I did not crash into a pricker bush this time which always helps. On Sunday afternoon I took the kids out to the huge parking lot behind West Marine and they rode their bikes around the lot for a bit before Grady decided he wanted to try riding the hill that leads down to the slough path. And he rode up and down the gravel hill 20 or more times. He has really taken to riding without his training wheels and is fast as heck now.

The next step will be bumping him up to a bike with 16 inch wheels and getting Sully going on the little bike with the training wheels re-attached. And then the whole family will be almost ready to go bike touring together. I can't wait!

And last night everyone had a pretty low key evening. Sully passed out on the couch at about 7:30 and Grady put up virtually no fight when it was time to take him up to bed.

Another good weekend with lots of good exercise!

Catching Up

So I've been pretty busy over the last few days, between working at two schools and taking care of my two boys and doing multiple presentations and a training for Kyani, things have been moving pretty quickly. Which gives me little time to put thoughts to blog. Certainly not enough time to put coherent, well thought out thoughts to the blog, that's for sure.

But let's try to to catch up a little bit to share what's going on in my/our world.

Both the boys are now full engaged in and loving their preschool. Grady is old enough to have gone on to kindergarten, he's also bright enough to do it but he's not emotionally ready to make the leap. And, after many conversations with other parents, teachers and anyone else who cared to talk about it, we decided that it made more sense to hold him back a bit than to shove him into a full-on school setting. So he's now one of, if not the, oldest kids at the school. Which is fine by me and him.

Sully, who was exposed to the preschool last year, loves, loves, loves his school, his teacher and most of his classmates. He's a great group player, he engages in the circle time singing, he rides the trikes with gusto, he's just a very engaged little kid.

But he was also running a pretty good fever yesterday afternoon and into the evening so he's being kept on the sidelines today, much to his chagrin.

For my own part, I've been starting to settle into something resembling a schedule. I've got three days of work a week right now at two different schools. It has been a bit of a hassle to have to keep pulling on my old department for access, passwords and authority to do things but I understand where they are coming from as well as the fact that they are seriously (and woefully) understaffed now after the loss of more than half the department to the budget cuts.

By the way, our school district just found out last week that they are going to have to cut another $10 million from this year's budget. I do not have the faintest idea how this will be accomplished but I can all but guarantee that the fat cats at the top won't be suffering any pay cuts even though they get paid the most and do the least to actually educate the kids. My suggestion would be to cut any salary of someone making more than $150k by 10% and anyone making more than $75k by 5% across the board. How much would that save? How much solidarity would it show with those of us in the trenches? How likely would something like that be to happen? Not bloody. These are the same jackholes that voted themselves raises last October and then further voted to make those raises untouchable in the budget cut talks they knew were coming in the next year. Which is, of course, unconscionably scummy and lame of them.

Anyway, when I'm not working, my wife is so I'm on kid duty which is fine by me. The better her shop does, the better we all do. We're still looking to fill out the schedule there with an additional hair stylist and someone in the back room, either a manicurist, esthetician, massage therapist or waxer. Once we do this, the shop goes from being a net negative to a positive which would be just fine by me.

We are also putting in quite alot of time with our Kyani business. I drove up to Morgan Hill the other night for a training session. It was an Advanced Leadership session with some of the top people in the entire company and it ended up being immensely useful and empowering. I wrote up my notes from the session and posted them over on my Kyani blog. We also had a presentation on Tuesday afternoon before the training and then another one on Wednesday evening. We've got a couple of quieter days and then a big presentation on Saturday where we are hoping to sign up some distributors for our new star.

Things on My Mind

Just a little peek inside my busy little mind of the things that are going on in there.

State Park closures - I was speaking a lady over the weekend who mentioned that some of the pending State Park closures California is considering would include some of our rather magnificent beaches that are run by the state. I think this would be an absolutely horrible idea to try and shut down the beach. But then, I think its a ridiculous idea to allow our forested State Parks to turn into massive hobo camps if they close them to the public.

Seniority and Bumping - its great to be a part of a bureaucracy if you are sufficiently high up the totem pole to be doing the bumping. It sucks if you are fairly new and easy to bump. I checked with my school district's HR office the other day and found out that I'm 6th on the totem pole of site techs to be called back. I'm not holding my breath.

Fictionarium - I've been on a roll creating new words lately. From my recent post about the development of a Twitter lexicon to random new words, I think I'm running at about two or three new words a day right now. Which means my brain is working pretty well.

Cycling - I've been making more of an effort to get out on my bike lately. I've averaging about two rides a week right now and am trying to push that number up to three per week. I find my body is happier, my brain is happier and it just makes me a more balanced guy. The one or two downsides are that my bike is in bad need of a major (and expensive tuneup) and I need to get some good cycling shoes with stiffer soles. My feet are starting to get really sore during the long descents down the backside of Nisene Marks. But I'm still loving my rides more and more.

Kyani - Our business is starting to really get going which makes the likelihood of my having to go back to a full time job less and less which is just fine by me. You are welcome to check out my blog that I've started about my experiences with Kyani and network marketing.

More to come as I'm headed out the door with Nande and the boys to go for a walk at the dog park.

Scorecard

- I've processed somewhere on the order of 700 photos from this last weekend with a mere 1150 or so to go. It is slow work but the results are worth the effort. So far I've posted a little over 100 to my Backprint site for sale. I hope to get the second batch finished this morning and posted today.

- My black eye is now the technicolor yellow, purple and black eye. It doesn't hurt too much anymore except when I absent mindedly rub it.

- I got my first check from Kyani the other day. Not a big one but a step in the right direction for sure. The nice thing is that my wife got a matching check. As these totals go up, it'll get more and more awesome.

- Also on the Kyani front, I'm working out a trial run with a famous Bay Area columnist after a column he wrote. I'm looking forward to him becoming an advocate for the products after he uses them for the month.

- Several packages to get shipped and then we're supposed to be heading to the East Bay to do some war-walking. Not sure if it'll happen today as there's still plenty of other stuff to do around the house and calls to make but we are working on expanding our empire.

And now, back to the photo processing. I'm close to finishing up one entire wedding and then I get to start on the second. If I don't go cross-eyed first.

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.

Little Engines That Could and Can

We've been chugging along for several weeks now. It doesn't feel like there has really been any break for a long time. And we're all tired. But just a couple more days and then things should settle back down to whatever passes for normal.

We've been doing quite a lot of family stuff, lots of fun really. After coming back from Mexico, we've spent time with cousins and grandparents, more cousins and uncles, stepmoms and cousins again. BBQ's, county fairs, train rides, trips to the aquarium, walks out on jetties.

And, in couple of days, we'll celebrate Grady's birthday. It'll be great fun, I'm sure and I'm looking forward to playing around in the bounce house (a castle this year). But I'm also really looking forward to Monday morning when things start to return to a less random and more scheduable existence again.

I've also taken lots and lots of photographs with my new camera. Have built my professional site, even found a great printing company to handle the e-commerce side of the arrangement. A few more key steps (like getting business cards printed) and I really should be able to start working for real.

Next week should be a less complex week. And I fully expect to get at least one good long bike ride in, preferably with Nande. Hopefully, several good rides but I don't want to sound greedy.

Slack on Blogging

I cannot tell a lie, nor would I directly contradict easily demonstrable reality. I have been a slack blogger. Kind of strange that I have less time to blog now, when I'm not working full-time, than when I am working full-time and that sort of tells me that maybe my time wasn't being spent especially wisely. Maybe it still isn't.

Either way, it isn't that there isn't plenty going on. Far from it, there is always alot going on in my house. With two little boys, a rambunctious hound and my wife and me, dull moments are as rare as quiet ones.

The funny thing is that I've had several really good posts begun in my mind. About this last weekend's birthday party and stroll through a bamboo forest. About Curt Schilling sticking his entire leg in his mouth by spouting off about Barry Bonds'. About the Red Sox bottom of the ninth comeback win against the O's the other night (hint, I was not pleased). About the fun we had in applying for four passports with expedited service to, hopefully, get them back in time to make a family trip to Mexico in June. About a couple of new ventures I've been exploring. A new invention on top of the other new invention that we've begun to make prototypes of. New words, new blog names, funny observations (well, potentially funny) and a couple of funny photos as well.

But nope, instead you get this lame excuse for a post discussing what I should have been posting. If only for an extra three or four hours in the day.

Which reminds me, I got to get to bed, tomorrow is barrelling down on us like a truck filled with 30,000 pounds of bananas and bad brakes.

A Big Week Ahead

I can't imagine anyone who doesn't love a three day weekend. But the short week ahead has at least 25% more to do because of the missed day. And there was already alot to do.

But, with some luck, it'll be a good week.

Though I'd be lying if I didn't say that I could very easily go back to bed for another fifteen hours of sleep.

In good exciting news, I found out that a couple of friends are expecting a new baby. Its very early in the pregnancy but we are really excited for them to have some babies. So yeah, that's pretty awesome.

And we did have a nice weekend. It was chilly but we got some sun and got alot of stuff around the house done too. Still plenty more to get done but we made a little dent in the pile.

We've also got to get our passport applications taken care of so there's no crunch come June when we're heading to Mexico for a week.

Happy Fat Tuesday and Happy Pancake Day!

Tags: work, catchup, pregnant, Mexico