close to Christmas

I'm 1 work day away from Christmas break.  That means I've held my current job for just about 2 years.  And I still will have the job when Christmas is over. That's something to cheer about!  Over the last couple of months I've decided that I should learn some java.  Not only will this make me seem really cool, but I will hopefully have a better understanding of what I'm testing (tomcat, apache, and more!!!).

Since the students are now gone for the holiday break, our church only has a single service that starts at 10:45.  As we struggled to minimize the extent of our tardiness, I asked Clara if she ever felt bad about being late.  She said no.  So I wondered if she ever felt bad about anything she's done.  She hasn't.  Jill suggested that she get some counseling (Uncle Matt is certified).  She refused to entertain the idea.

Size charts are available all over the web for children, but I've never heard anyone mention a conscience development chart.

Did I mention that we went to Nashville for Thanksgiving?  It was a bit unusual since Lupita and the kids were away, but Clara and Janny had fun anyway with Grandpa and Grandma.

I helped Matt a bit with installing a wood floor in their guest bathroom.  My job was to figure out how to mark the boards around the toilet.  Not easy!  I wish that I had gotten about a cm closer all around, but not bad an amateur.

Our adopt a student group helped set up the Christmas tree.  This was the year of engagements for our group.  3 weddings are planned for the upcoming summer!

 Christmas is also the time for kids' performances.  We forgot our camera for the church one, so you'll have to image the super cute group of kids with Clara and Janny as angels.  Clara impressed us all by singing loud enough to hear in the 2nd service.  Janny mostly looked at the crowd.

For the school performance, Janny was a (black) sheep, and Clara was again an angel.  Good work by Mrs. Strom to get the kids to sing a number of songs!  We practiced at home a little bit.  Clara knew many of the songs and did great.  Janny knew bits and pieces, and did sing a bit.

 After the show by the Christmas tree.  Janny was a sick with a bad cough this week, so we left the party without eating any cookies.  Plus we hadn't eaten dinner yet.  Clara became very sad.

I continue to be obsessed with limiting our gas usage during winter.  This year, we have another person in the house, so I was curious to see how we compared to last year.

Since I'm still an engineer at heart, I made a chart.  The x-axis is the average degree-days for any given month (I've tried calculating a few different ways, but they all give about the same result.  SoI take the difference between our thermostat setting and the average temperature for the month from Ameren).  The y-axis is the gas used for that month (this includes heating water, but not cooking (electric stove and oven)).

The 3rd point from the left is November of this year.  It's a tiny bit more than our usage last year, but is quite close the the linearized fit.  Stay tuned for more exciting data!

Lastly, I wish a happy birthday to my big sister Lisa.  

brrrrrring on winter

Yeah, it's cold again. But it wasn't for most of the fall.  Let's reminisce a bit on this frigid "fall" day.

Our neighborhood park got a playground makeover this year.  We only went a couple of times, but we're excited for next year.

 Clara has been practicing taking photos.  Maybe 1 in 10 is okay, which is not too bad.  Thanks to her skills, I can show a picture that has both me and Jill.  I'd say we've still got it.  Feel free to agree.

 Another photo taken by Clara.  Yes, Jill is often happy now that the babies are growing up.

 Clara and Janny are learning violin from Nikki for about 15 minutes per week.  Clara enjoys the lessons, and maybe is making some progress.  Janny's ability to focus is, um, limited.

 Leaf pile 2014!   That's somewhere around 2000 gallons of leaves.  Last year, my last batch of leaves remained uncomposted until about Sept.  I'll try to be a bit more proactive this year with turning them over and crushing them.

Thanks to Jarrod's photo on facebook, I learned a better method for transporting leaves.  Sadly, I didn't learn it until I was about 70% done.  The trick is to rake the leaves onto a tarp.  I had been cramming them into leaf bags.  Productivity is up about 50%.

 Jill is doing some end of the year prep for next year's garden.  Janny is cold!

 Last night, we watched Mulan together. Janny used one of my favorite Janny-isms when talking about it afterward.  She said something like, "Remember that one guy? [Pause]  Could you tell me what he looked like?"  Well, Janny, that's not much to go on.

She used to ask us to tell her about her dreams and get really upset when we didn't know what happened.  I can relate to Pharoah's magicians, and there doesn't seem to be a Joseph around.  We're pleased that she hasn't thrown us in the dungeon yet.

Finally, I participated in the 2nd annual Joker's Jaunt.  I hung with the lead pack through the roughest stretch of road (where I got dropped last year).  But I got dropped by Jeff (and Larry) when he ramped up the pace into the wind with about 3 miles to go.  I feel silly writing that (how can you get dropped in a headwind???).  So here are some excuses:  (1) I rarely ride more than 30 miles in a day (2)  Jeff and Larry are both pretty small on a bike, so there isn't much draft to catch.  Plus they ride fast, (3) I really worked hard on the bad stretch of road and every other time Larry and Jeff rode hard, and (4) I should have eaten more.  

A case for family tandems

Did you enjoy my previous embedded WolframCloud project?  Yes?  Great!  Let's do it again, this time with a tandem bicycle.

One of the nice things about tandems for kids is that they are (theoretically) never outgrown.  To show how this works, I put together another wolframcloud project.

I made a rough model for a kid growing over time.  Mathematica has data for childrens' sizes (== girls growth chart, or just go to wolframalpha.com and type the same).  I scaled all body parts linearly for the graphic.  Our kids' thighs are relatively a bit short compared to Jill's, but this is pretty minor.  All other bike-related body dimensions scale quite linearly.

I'm drawing the frame using an extension of the code I wrote last time.  Somehow, Mathematica doesn't have bike frame geometries built in.  I'm sure we'll address this oversight soon.  Perhaps we could use image processing methods (accounting for image distortion away from the center of the image) to grab the numbers.

In the tandem embedded graphic, the kid's age can be adjusted, from tiny 4 year old to 14, or basically fully grown.  Note that Clara's face doesn't age along with her digital age.  We don't have a function for that built in (yet!), and anyway it would freak me out to see the results. Also, my apologies for not giving her a helmet.  As digital kid gets older, you can adjust the saddle height and position of cranks to find a nice fit.

You may find some combinations that cause the kid's knees to bend the wrong way.  I didn't specify which solution for the quadratic equation (someday I might fix this), so Mathematica sometimes grabs the nonphysical one.

The handlebars can be either a swept back bar (current) or drop bars.  As the kid gets bigger, drop bars enable the kid to stretch out more comfortably, especially if you use the drop position (3).  If you do that when the kid is very young, she can't reach all positions on the bars.  That would be really dangerous in the real world!

If iframe isn't working try our cloud directly.


One other fun thing about tandems is that daddy and kid have to pedal at the same cadence ( technically not true, but changing this requires using different sized chainrings on the timing cranks.  This is a bad idea because either (a) the kid pedals slower, but needs to push harder or (b) the kid pedals faster.  Neither is a good idea in my opinion.).

Despite having the same cadence, our foot speeds are different.  Right now, the kid's cranks are 120 mm long, while daddy's are 170.  This means my feet are moving about 1.4 times faster than the kid's.  When the kidback cranks are no longer needed, both sets of cranks will be the same length (not modeled).

Check out more information about the Wolfram Cloud.

return of the bunny

Clara turned 5 years old last month.  We continued the tradition of having birthday parties late morning (before mom and dad start to feel worn out).  She wanted cake and cupcakes, both with pink frosting, and a pinata.  

 Pinatas are way overbuilt these days.  Thankfully, a 6th grader came to the party and put some hurt into it [at the Wolfram Research summer party, we needed the biggest guy in the company to break it open after the kids failed to make a dent].  Clara was able to finish hers off.

 Not to be outdone in the growing up department, Janny asked to ride the tandem with me.  I lowered the saddle about an inch, and off we went up and down the street.  We're still a bit hesitant to take her far on the thing, since she's our "fall out of a chair for no reason" kid.  But watch out next spring!

 I guess that I forgot to write about the loss of Bunny during our Michigan vacation this summer.  Somehow bunny jumped out of the car between Aunt Jan's house and Boyne Mountain.  Clara was really hurt by the loss.  Jill bought a different version (I think it was an owl?  I haven't seen it in weeks) but it didn't take.

Then, Ebay!  And Clara has New Bunny.  She loves it, but not with the same affection as the original Bunny.  Sometimes, she forgets to bring it to bed.  I guess you never get over your first love, no matter how young you lose it.

 We let Clara use the camera for a morning.  Have you ever wondered what the view from inside the trailer is like?  Here you go!

There are 2 boys interested in marrying Clara [I say, we'll see].  Janny recently told me that she doesn't want to marry anyone when she grows up.  However, in a rather sporting gesture, Clara offered one of the boys, and apparently Janny accepted.  So that's all settled.

Really vacationing, this time in Shawnee

It doesn't seem all that long ago that we were vacationing with the family in Michigan.  But were Jill and I up for a short trip without the kids?  In a word, yes.

Jill's parents paid us a visit, and then really paid us by (a) paying for our hotel for 2 nights and (b) watching the kids while we were away.

We decided to visit Shawnee National Forest because it's not too far away (3 hours) and though we had been to the area before (WildCard spring cycling camps), we haven't done any exploring off road.

The photos below are not in the order of our visits (frustrated with blogger).  The common theme is rock, a rare site in our town.

Below is the view from just inside Cave-in-Rock, located just off the end of Highway 1 (one could take the ferry across the Ohio River in a car, but the road ends here).  We had lunch at one of the 2 restaurants in town, chatting up some of the old-timers from town.  We didn't get a chance to meet the 102 year old guy, who was at the restaurant the previous evening.  Anyway, pirates, counterfeiters, and all-around bad guys used the cave as a hideout.  Now that's it's a state park, it's a bit harder to use it as such.

Cave-in-Rock has a painted bike decorating theme.  Here's the pink one, with the lovely Jill in the foreground.

On the way back from the Cave, we were deciding between Iron Furnace, an 80 foot tall rock structure that was used to make iron during the civil war, and Rim Rock State Park.  We chose the latter, and were rewarded with natural 80 foot tall rock cliffs.  Highly recommended.

Our first day, we visited Giant City.  Look how surprised Jill is to see a large rock.

That is a natural rock wall canyon (er, gap?)  right here in Illinois.

The visual highlight of the trip was Garden of the Gods.  I don't know how this ended up in Illinois.

A Mennonite group was there at the same time.  The young men climbed the rocks, while the young women sat together singing.  It was really lovely.

At no point during our trip did anyone cry about eating food, ask to stay up late, not share, or make a giant mess and refuse to clean it up.  In fact, there was no complaining at all.  

Now we're home, and we're glad to see the kids.  Somehow, we did miss them.

We're nuts, like all parents.

ready... go ... set

Real life took off like a shot after we got back from vacation.  We got home during our temporary resident's stay (Katy needed a place for a week between leases and had moved in during our vacation) and a few hours before our long term boarder arrived.  Nikki is a Parkland freshman staying with us for the school year.  Very soon, she will be an expert at the local busing system.  She is also using Clara's race bike to do some multi-modal commuting.

Clara and Janny started preschool already.  This is Janny's first year and Clara's last.  They are in the same class at Wee Disciples, just down the road.  Jill say's the couple hours without the kids goes by VERY fast. This photo was from the first day of school, 2014.

Clara now has a career path picked out:  she wants to be an artist.  For now, I'm doing my best to teach her to keep costs down.  Janny is not quite clear on the concept:  she wants to be Sleeping Beauty when she grows up.  At first she also wanted to have white eyes, but just today she accepted that her eyes will remain brown.  I've yet to figure out if she wants to the sleeping phase or the post-waking up phase.

Below is my favorite Clara project to date.  She found a double-kinked stick (which she then lost amongst hundreds of similar sticks, but daddy found it again after a few minutes), and came up with the idea to make a Pteranodon.  In the photo, the leaf wings have dried out compared to when new.

Having a boarder and growing kids inspired us to reconfigure the bedrooms.  We had a local guy build a loft over a queen bed.  Clara sleeps up top, and tiny Janny gets the queen bed.  When guests come, we'll move the kids to our room so that guests can use the queen (or the loft, if they want).

Jill continues to be excited about gardening. Check out her latest project:

Just kidding!  That's the arboretum!  We paid a visit to be inspired and grab some ideas.  I'm hoping for some Lantana and a blueberry bush.  I'm still scheming about the best place in our yard for the blueberries.

Fun fact:  both Clara and Nikki were born on Labor day!  Soon we're off to celebrate with some canoeing on Crystal Lake.

The rest of vacation

Because our last adventure with Jill's cousins went so well, we decided to bring even more family along for this year's Northern Michigan vacation.  Beth arranged a gigantic vrbo cabin near the top of the Boyne Mountain ski resort (the hill fascinated me.  It's a giant sand dune.  As in, you cannot find a rock bigger than your hand anywhere on the hill.  Sand, sand, and more sand.).  We filled all 8 rooms of the place, including the master bedroom with the taxidermed wolf.

By the way, I'm still struggling to take enough pictures.  Below is a shot of the flower girls from Calvin and Kim's wedding in July.  We had a great time, and the kids just loved being flower girls.

 There is a small lake at the bottom of the hill with a nice beach.  The lake floor is very flat near the beach, so all the kids could walk into it as far as they dared and splash around.  We spent a lot less time here than I thought we would because there were a couple of rather chilly days during the week.  On perhaps the nicest day, we visited Petoskey State Park on Lake Michigan.  The water was frightfully cold.  I could only take short, force breaths for the first minute and a half after wading in.  Eventually, I felt fine enough to stay in the water for about 15 minutes.  Then back to the towel.  We looked for Petoskey stones in the sand, but didnt' find any stellar examples.

 We thank Uncle David for encouraging Janny to eat some food at nearly every meal.  Perhaps as a result of this, her hair is growing faster now.  She might have even gained an ounce or two.  Playing with Ricky and Enoch wore the kids out every day.  Below, Beth was supposed to rear the whole Wizard of Oz story to Janny.  Janny stayed awake for the first 70 pages.

Thanks to the presence of grandparents and other givers, our generation got to have some fun adventures without the kids on the vacation.  On several mornings, coach Brent led us through some tennis drills, and then we played a set or so.  Jill and I really enjoyed this, so the tennis rackets might get dusted off a few times before winter sets in.  

The biking around Boyne was just great.  The Boyne ski hill is about 500 feet tall, and the road to our cabin wound around and up and down it.  I also rode back from Harbor Spings to our cabin along some nice dirt roads.  And I rode a good bit more than I could handle of the single track mtb trails at the resort.  There are lots of jarring roots and some very steep short climbs that weren't suitable for either my bike or skills.

Finally, the TCBC softball came to an abrupt end.  Because of numerous rainouts early in the season, the semifinal game happened while I was in Michigan (as was Matt, our left fielder).  Apparently, the team staged a comeback from an 8-0 deficit, only to lose at the end.  I was a bit sad to miss the game, but had too much fun on vacation to regret it.  We'll try again next year, and plan the vacation during the regular season.

What we (okay, I) did for summer vacation, part 1

We're back from the big family summer vacation.

Because of a minor scheduling conflict, my vacation started a day earlier than the rest of the family's. Hmmm, what to do on a day off without any obligations? If you said ride my bike a long distance, you're right.

 I chose to do my big ride of the year toward the confluence of the Vermillion and Wabash Rivers, or Cayuga, Indiana. I rode towards Homer Lake and veered south towards Fairmount and Georgetown.

After leaving home around 7:15, I got to Georgetown at 10am with two choices for a second breakfast: McDownalds or Casey's. I chose McD. I meant to get a sausage and egg biscuit, but the meal # I actually ordered was a truly disgusting "steak mushroom muffin". As a hungry person, I ate it anyway and headed out.

 The bluff just west of the Vermillion River was the best riding of the day. The gravel road went up and down steep (for this region) hills with a view of the valley about 100 or so feet below. I crossed the Vermillion on the covered bridge (blocked to car traffic). The only way I knew to get across the Wabash River was to ride the shoulder of Highway 63 to recross the Vermillion and then take 234. Somehow 63 has a decent amount of traffic on Thursday mornings.

I followed the flat, sandy road along the east side of the Wabash up towards Perrysville. I didn't want to ride on Highway 32 out of Perrysville, so I took a gravel road detour and ended up back on it near Danville. At this point I didn't know the roads, so I stayed on it all the way to downtown Danville. I had studied maps for several days prior to the trip but decided to not print any out (and I don't use a gps). My general approach was to head in the right direction (my compass came in handy a few times on the way back) toward the towns that I had memorized while avoiding the "major" highways. In every county outside of Champaign, this means riding on numerous gravel roads. They add to the adventure, but slow progress (despite my stupendous Boulder Bicycle with 35 mm Panaracer Pasela tires).

 I got stuck behind a long train on the main road in downtown Danville (what other big towns have a rail line that blocks the main street?????), which gave me time to realize that it was lunch time. I settled on Penn Station east coast subs!, which I had never frequented. My 8" philly cheese was fine, but not good enough for a return visit.

 After lunch I headed towards Kickapoo state park, initially thinking I would ride parallel to i-74 back home. But that road is straight and flat, so I turned south towards the hilly, gravel roads south of Danville.

 While on the way, I found the path to the Great Vermillion Rail Bridge. I hesitated before deciding to follow the path since I was still about 30 miles from home, but when adventure calls, sometimes you have to answer. Because of the remaining rocks of the rail bed, no plants grow in the middle but branches from trees and bushes on either side of the bed form a hobbit tunnel about 3 feet tall. I pushed my bike about 200 yards through the branch tunnel before deciding to stash it and continue on without it. Many cobwebs in the face later, I walked out onto the Bridge. It was glorious, just like the pictures I had seen (except that now I could see the drop to the ground far below. Since I hate to make Jill angry (she told me to never walk on it, which I took to mean that I shouldn't walk all the way across it), I only walked out a few tens of feet before heading back to my bike and the open road.

 I ran out of water at Homer Lake, but decided to not detour the whole 1 mile out of the way to refill my bottles in the park. This was a poor choice, and I struggled for the last 5 miles home and felt wiped out when I arrived.

Assessment:
 I rode somewhere around 130 miles in around 9 total hours. I'm pretty happy with that pace. If I bring more food with me (and water.  I brought only 2 bottles, next time I'll take 3) and avoid exciting detours like rail-less bridge walking, I can reduce the time a bit.

I felt fine until the end of the ride. I should have eaten a bit more food and refilled my water bottles. In my mind, I've been thinking that 40 years old is the age when I should switch from racing short distances to endurance riding. I'm on schedule.

I didn't bring a camera.  Which is a bit sad for the blog, but now you can use your imagination (or click the link to see photos of the Bridge).

Bikes in the Cloud

Lots of happenings recently at my place of employment, Wolfram Research Inc.  A new version of Mathematica is now out, and we have released the Wolfram Programming Cloud (WPC).  Why the WPC, you ask?

I'm glad you asked.  Well, it's a very nice way to share fun Mathematica projects with friends, like you guys, like this one:

      Bike adjustments with body in cloud

If the link is broken, I'm doing a bad job as QA.  The page should be something like this, but interactive.

Fun, right?  There are real numbers and equations behind the pretty picture.  Some things that may happen in the future include telling you the values that you selected, or other relevant measurements (saddle height, set back, reach, drop, etc.).  Eventually, I'll set up an API function which will allow users to specify bike size and body dimensions.  Then, I will be rich and famous and powerful.

That's basically what I spend most of my days doing:  writing fun stuff to make sure that our products work just fine.  It's not a bad job.

Update:  Joel reminded me that I can directly embed here.  Voila!  Update:  Move around all of the sliders to get have the whole bike and person rendered correctly.  I'll try to fix this soon.

Happy 4th!

Clara and Janny are learning to share.  As expected, there are some regular conflicts (whose turn it is to choose the tv show, or to wear the sparkly shoes, or to drink from the fizzy-whizzy-cup).  The fizzy-whizzy-cup solution is somewhat reasonable.  When one has finished drinking at a meal, the other gets to drink from it.  The sharing that gets to me a bit is the toothbrush.  I had hoped that once we got rid of the red toothbrush, they would be happy to have their own again.  Not so.  Apparently, Scoobydoo is better than sponge bob, even though brushes are both blue.

 We have one less giant tree in our neighborhood.  Two quick days or working in rain or shine got rid of it.

 I got a couple of sweet ties for Father's day this year.

 Clara finally let us cut her bangs this weekend.  What finally convinced her was that she could spread her hair in the garden to keep the bunnies away.  Janny needed more hair cut as well after learning this fact.

Knutson estate farming continues to ramp up, by which I mean that within about 10 years, we'll really have something in our yard!  Because this summer has been plenty wet and rather mild (thanks, El Nino!), we can only blame ourselves for a small harvest.  Lessons learned so far:
1.  Our cherry tree did not care for last winter.  Not a single cherry to be had (same story with our neighbor's pair of trees).  The trees blossomed, but no fruit.
2.  Raspberry season has just ended.  I think more fertilizer is needed for the black ones.  Our cane diameter pales in comparison to the idea garden and to Eric and Amy's.  Red ones were pretty successful.
3.  Garden bed in general needs more soil enrichment.  Salad greens and herbs grow very slowly.  We're still thinking about how to do this.

Finally, I think softball season is nearing the end.  We had rainouts for the last two weeks, so it feels a bit removed.  We've won all of our games, though most have been quite close.  Runs continue to be a challenge to come by this year.  Our defense is stellar, and all other teams either have pretty good defense as well, or our hitting was terrible against them.  With the playoffs around the corner, I must believe that we'll get it going.

Farms and family

Life is coming at us about as fast as we can take right now.  Since my last general update, both sets of grandparents visited us, and we took a weekend trip to Michigan.  "Why is this vacation so short?" was Clara's question of the weekend.  We assured her that at longer trip is forthcoming during which we'll travel even further north.

On recent bikes rides through the farmland surrounding our fair town, I've wondered about the economics of corn farming.  Thanks to a quick internet search, I'm an agricultural economics expert.  Farm roads around here are generally on a mile grid, so that's what I'm using for the numbers here.  Granted this is far from 40 acres and a mule, but I have no idea when that was a typical size, and I don't know the typical size "family" farm around here.  The bottom line:  a square mile has about $500,000 worth of corn.  About $100,000 of that was spent on fertilizer, $200,000 on all other stuff (seeds, pesticides, tractor, etc).  If all goes well, the farmer takes in about $200,000, IF they own their land outright.  Not too bad, if you inherited the land.  If you want to buy that square mile of land in our county, consider paying about $6 million.  Which you will pay off in somewhere around 30 years (I've made a zillion wrong assumptions here, but it's probably close).  Or you can rent land to farm, but you'd be pretty lucky to make about $30,000 each year.  As a non-owner of land, I'm sticking with my desk job.

Since grandma K was in town, we have some great photos to share.

Our adopt-student family has a big overhaul forthcoming.  4(?) of our students graduated this year, leaving us with only Tariq the senior and Sean the grad student as actual students in the group.  We're planning to recruit Kim's younger brother and hopefully some of his friends.

We got to see the Smith/Whites twice in the last month.  Our trip to Michigan included Jill's cousin's son's high school graduation party, where we also got to say a belated happy birthday to great-grandma (we decided to not drive the icy roads to attend her actual party in winter).

We're in the middle of softball season now.  The squad is undefeated so far, with a couple of nail-biters and a couple of 10 run rule wins.  The wind was blowing in from left/left-center at about 20-30 mph for the middle two game, which made it very difficult to get hits.  We won those games 3-1 and 5-0 (pitcher Jim filled in for the co-rec team on of those weeks and pitched a shutout for them.  3 games, 1 run scored.  He's just unhittable!).  In last week's game, the wind wasn't blowing as hard and was blowing out to right.  To make up for lost time, we scored 15 runs in the first inning (also thanks to some poor defense by the CFC gang).  Then we didn't score again until the 5th inning.  Consistency is overrated.

A Jack to go with Jill

Last year at about this time, Jarrod told me that there were some tandems at our community's used bike sale.  My mind started to think a little bit.  The girls are getting bigger, which means two things:  (1)  it takes more work to pull them in the trailer and (2) they could potentially contribute to our motion.

Fast forward to last week when I saw a nice tandem for sale on the internets, but it was in Knoxville, TN.  I inquired, and it turned out the seller has a sister in Savoy and was willing to drive it up here and pay a visit to her.  Done and done.

Here it is:

 A 1980 Jack Taylor touring tandem.  Jill rode with me up and down our street.  She didn't hate it.

That's a huge improvement from our last tandem ride.  We borrowed Kirk's tandem just before dusk and rode up the hill from White Rock to Los Alamos (1000` up).  We were about 2/3 of the way home when it started to snow, hard.  So we had snow, dark, and a bike that didn't fit all that well.  Jill hated not being in control.  Does that say something about her, or just the tandem?  [Ouch].  Probably just the tandem.

The tires are 32 mm, but eventually I'll put on some much fatter tires since there's room.  I ordered a seat post because the captain's post is too short for me.

The other big change will be adding some kid stoker cranks.  Hopefully, they'll be in the mail soon.  And Clara and I will be off on adventures!  Hopefully for years to come.

Bump bump bump

Clara and Janny have a chant for bumpy roads while riding in the trailer.  The chant can be repeated a number of times before the conversation turns.  It goes like so:
    Bump bump bump
    we we we
    mushroom me!***

*** an alternate translation:  mushroomy.  Scholars continue to debate both the phrasing and the possible meaning(s).  In fact, the first line may also be interpreted as bum bum bum.  However, external evidence (previously mentioned bumpy roads) strongly points to the first interpretation.

Recently, Clara suggested another chant, but it was far too complex for Janny to memorize it.  I enjoy it because it is reminiscent of the classic Oski yell first cheered at UC Berkeley (Cal, California, etc.) in the 1940s.
      Oski Wow-Wow!

Whiskey Wee-Wee!

Olee! Muckie-eye!

Olee! Berkeley-eye!

      California! Wow!
The University of Illinois (UIUC, U of I, etc) also claims a version of the chant, but I'm too lazy to look up the lyrics.  Also, there is no possible better final line than Cal's.  Wow!

Recently, Janny has resisted going to bed at night.  She says, "I need to go potty," and then sits on the potty for longer than I can stand.  So I carry her back to bed.  Before I leave their room, she has to go potty again.  On Sunday, I had enough.  So I moved the tiny toilet to their bathroom and told her she was on her own.  After watching our favorite show (White Collar), we decided to check on her.  Janny was silently sitting on the potty.  I think she is stubborn.

I'm trying very hard to get Clara riding her bike without training wheels this spring.  And by hard, I mean trying to be very patient and a little persistent.  She's doing great with her balance bike, but her pink bike is pretty intimidating still.  I took off the training wheels last weekend for a couple of laps around our patio.  Most of the time I was holding on to her seat, but she rode a short stretch on her own.

Jill continues to wake up unenviably early most weekdays.  Wake up is around 5am, but I couldn't say for sure for obvious reasons.

Spring is happening this year!  Jill planted some seeds.  Some green leaves are poking up.  We harvested our first set of chives to put in tonights peanut pasta dish.  I changed my big chainring from 44 to 48 teeth.  I bought new chains for our commuter bikes (interesting to me note:  the total cost for the 2 chains was around $40, which is quite reasonable I say.  I was quite surprised to find that my chain was $12 and Jill's was $26 (7/8 speed vs 9 speed).  Long live 7 speeds!

Janny is 3

Janny turned 3 a couple weeks ago!  To celebrate her birthday, we invited a few friends (plus Grandpa and Grandma S) over to eat snacks and have cake.  Janny blew out all 3 candles on her first try!  I can't remember who initially came up with the idea, but we are starting birthday parties at 10am and go to about noon.  That way, no one (read mom and dad) is tired yet.

Scene:  a toy is in mommy and daddy's room.  Dusk.  

Clara:  Mommy, could you turn on the light?

Mommy:  It's not dark.  Plus you can turn on the light yourself.

Janny:  Clara, I will help you.

Clara and Janny walk into the room together and get the toy.

 Today was glorious.  60 degrees and sunny.  We ate popsicles outside.  I think we earned it.

Janny can ride Clara's pink bike (today with an umbrella).  Clara is zooming around on the pedal-free bike.  I might have to start perusing craigslist for another kid bike.  Hopefully, Clara can get up to speed on a real kid bike without training wheels while Janny cruises around on a different bike with them.  Clara tried to crush my spirits recently by stating that she doesn't like riding bikes (I don't believe her, but words hurt).

TCBC basketball ended unceremoniously last week.  In the first round of the playoffs we rematched the team that beat us in the finals last year (CCC).  The teams had a couple of key changes from last year:  our superstar moved away, and they picked up a 6'6" skilled guy to go along with their 2 other huge guys.  We played well, giving them a bit of a scare with about 10 minutes left.  Then we stopped making shots, and they pulled away.  Overall, the season was a success.  We won every game that we should have and were mostly competitive is other games.  Upcoming.... softball.

In other church news, our small group now has 18 adults and 17 children (and sometimes a grandchild), 11 of them under 6.  Though we rarely we have everyone at a meeting, we are planning to split into 2 groups.  

It's interesting to see the number of young families continuing to increase at church.  Ideally, we want to maintain age diversity in our group but family's with older/grown children are scarce.  In fact, more young families want to join a group like ours because they want to know people who aren't drowning in child rearing (I can't say if the reverse is true.  I hope it is!).  This can lead to a Yogi Berra-ism; nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded.  We need to step up our recruiting!

Finally, we'll conclude with Janny's prayer.  Repeating this may not grant you untold wealth and fame, or even nice sweaters.  But it might.

    Pray for everything

    Pray for goats

    Pray for everything

    Pray for God

    In Jesus name, amen!