Riding? no! Busy? yea!

Time is just flying by. Beth and I have been back in Nashville since the second week of Feb or so and have no out of town plans for months. It's a strange feeling. Right now it's great because we're excited to be able to participate in all the social activities being planned. I have a feeling that we'll get stir crazy though pretty soon...though our lives are changing in a couple months also, so free time will be a rare commodity.

It's strange, my calendar has been full since the day we got back from NYC. Awesome and amazing. I've worked 9 days at home too editing Radio liners for CRS week. It was fun to be able to do a lot of work at home and it also prompted me to re-evaluate my home-studio/office setup and do some rearranging.

New office setup, much better feng shui

Thankfully with all the recent studio work I was still able to schedule in some friend time and got to get out for a friend's birthday and also get to the Ride For Reading Work Day (Party) at their new headquarters. A big crew came out to help Mathew get his new building finished up. I bet we had 20 or more people come to help out. There was lots to do but we soldiered through and got a ton of it done. We got concrete walls cleared off and sealed, studs de-nailed, floors cleaned, electrical sussed out, lights installed, drop ceilings removed, drywall hung and even got started mudding the drywall. All the while we also had time to of course have fun, and eat some awesome lunch that was generously provided by Mathew's neighbor Cafe Coco Italian Kitchen.

I brought my still camera and my new Flip camera but didn't manage to shoot too much footage. I kept thinking I'd grab the camera later, but never did and I was a bit apprehensive about protecting it from harm in the commotion. Here are a few of the images I did get and a short movie of a walkthrough during the day.

The Man, Mathew Portell, doing the work himself!

Dan & Rick scraping off the residual wood paneling

Grant managed to get some solid work done, amidst his many fans calling him.

Rick found his way into some high places

catch up, again

How many times have I started a blog lately apologizing for not having posted in a while? I don't even want to count.

I've been quite busy the past month with the usual mix of travel, house work, and friend time but also engineering work. December is generally a very quiet month in the studio but this year has been different. November was dead but December was full with interesting sessions with Michael Bolton & Sarah Buxton/Jedd Hughes. I also got the opportunity to help a friend of mine finish out a little home studio/drum room in this basement. He's been doing a lot of the work himself but needed some more muscle to help hang drywall on the ceiling. He has really planned out the room and is putting up 2 separate layers of drywall with a floating stud system in between to help sound proof the room. Side note: He's also invented a new remote hi-hat that is taking over the drum world.

I really enjoyed helping hang the drywall and of course learned a lot in the process. Work is continuing in our upstairs room/nursery. I've finished cleaning the aged shellacked trim and have 3 coats of primer on the trim and door frame and have started priming the rest of the room. The old yellow paint is getting covered up and all my plaster work is getting a nice coat of white primer. Looks like we'll be picking out the new paint after we get back in town from the Atlanta Wholesale show. This project is going well but quite slowly.

Troy had his annual homebrew party this past wed. Beth wanted to stay home and get some work done so I headed over alone. The night temperature was in the 50s so I rode the crosscheck over. It was a perfect evening to be out on the bike and it felt extra good since I have not been out on my bike much lately. Troy brewed a special Pale Ale experiment where he made 4 batches of Pale Ale which are identical except for the hops used. He had these bottled in the fridge and also had a killer Vanilla Stout and English Bitter in the kegerator. Lots of the usual crew showed up: Sharp, Dan H, Doug, Ivan, Angela, Melanie, Holly and even JutRut made a special appearance. I didn't realize at first but it had been a while since I'd hung with the crew. It was nice to catch up with everyone and fun to meet some new friends like Melanie's brother. Of course the beer was great and Sharp was sharing some crazy news.

bike's where they belong: inside

Troy's Hop Project

Angela enjoying the tasty Vanilla Stout

Dan modeling his now-tame beard

The man (and woman) of the hour

I also had the opportunity to go to the Titans / Dolphins game with my father in law. The game was awesome, as the Titans played well for 3 out of the 4 quarters, almost losing it but sealing the game in overtime. The stadium has upped it's beer selection so Tad and I scored some Magic Hat #9 and also had some awesome turkey legs! I scored a picture of this great hat. . . probably the best use for a case of Miller Lite:

Christmas 2009 was another amazing Christmas. We spent the entire day at my in-laws and exchanged gifts and ate like Kings. Even Zero got in to the festivities:

can you see the disdain on his face?

What a fine Thanksgiving!

Here a little photo dump of Thanksgiving and the day after...

Beth making her (now) famous Mac & Cheese

I was in charge of sausage balls, and they were yummy!

Someone had to taste test the Mac & Cheese!!

Is there something on my face?

The enormous spread of comfort food!




The desert table



Beth was allowed to sit at the adult table.



We took a nice stroll through the park to work off some calories




Zero taking in the sights

The dogs lead the way

Zero has a new girlfriend, but she's shy.

Fall

Got out for a couple great fall bike rides the past week or so. I hit up Percy Warner last week to try out my new handlebars and did a loop and enjoyed the amazing colors of the changing leaves. I met up with Adam and Keith this morning for a jaunt around Montgomery Bell. The trail was completely dry but also completely covered in leaves. Surprisingly we only had a couple explorations outside the trail boundaries.

Monty Bell has been my go to trail this year so truthfully it's been getting a bit mundane to ride there. I've been neglecting many of the other great trails we have here like Lock4, Hamilton Creek and Chickasaw but also in my defense, we have had an incredibly wet riding season and Monty Bell has been the only dry play to ride. All that to say that we tried to change it up today and after heading into the trail and immediately taking the less-often rode Blue trail off to the right, we thought we'd try to ride every trail in the "less-often" ridden direction, or backwards. We rode almost the entire blue trail in reverse up til the 4 way Green Downhill entrance and then got the crazy idea to ride the Green Downhill (which it seems most Tennesseans skip nowadays) and then turn right around and ride it backwards (against the rules and almost entirely uphill.) Wow, that was fun in a "I feel very accomplished that I made it up all the climbs" but CRAP that was hard! Keith thinks maybe that's the hardest of the longer climbs out at Monty Bell. Thankfully the trail was totally empty on this fine Thurs morning so we had no downhill traffic to contend with as we rode the wrong direction on the only One Way trail at Monty Bell.

We continued on to ride Blue forwards (breaking our own rule) and connect up with the Yellow trail to ride a good chunk of that backwards. I know that if I were by myself I would not of done this and would of wussed into riding a few miles out to my car and heading home. My fitness isn't where I wish it was and riding to two people in better shape than me is exactly what I need to keep at it and ride longer. Yellow is hard forwards or backwards but we had a great time today riding it. I finally threw in the towel after about 12 miles and Adam wanted to stay somewhat fresh for his upcoming Swank65 race this weekend. We rode the few miles back to the car and called it a day of good hard, slow riding. :) We ended up with around 14 miles at an average of 7.8 mph.

Contrary to the norm, I'm hoping that I can up my saddle time this fall and winter. I've had a lot of distractions and good (and bad) reasons to be off the bike a lot lately & I'm hoping to remedy that. Halloween has come and gone (our first in our new house) and the temperature is continuing to fall. Great time for some long gravel rides, night riding and some fun urban rides. I just need to act on the motivation!

Here are some fun things that kept me off the bike

quick update

I'm just back and cleaned up from a nice ride out at Montgomery Bell State Park this morning. We had a good group show up and had a fun, leisurely ride. I decided to try a new gearing on the SS for Monty bell and it worked great. I've always ridden 32x17 out there but wanted to try 32x18 again since I haven't been riding much lately. It was a welcome change that made the whole ride more manageable and enjoyable. No pics as we were all riding sans technology today.

I'm about to lay down for a bit before Beth and I head to small group so a photo dump will conclude this post. (Why not, everyone else is doing it)

Can you see the joy?

Me, on the phone, shopping mortgage lenders.... need I say more?










Our booth setup this past weekend at the Germantown Festival outside Memphis.











Beth's yummy dinner of salmon and shrimp ravioli at Ya Ya's in Germantown









The "Best Dressed Weenie" competiton at the Germantown Festival










Heat #2 of the Weenie races at the Germantown Festival










A little friend that visited us at the Grant Park Festival in Atlanta the other week.









Beth found this bright little grasshopper on a car in Green Hills and couldn't help but snap a shot. Her new camera takes great pictures.