Best lunch ever

Loving the flavors, but it hurts like hell when I open my mouth.

The home stretch

Down to the home stretch of my latest injury ordeal. Holly's terms, not mine (but I understand). The pic above shows the hardware that I've been sporting for the last 40 days. I am now down to 34 hours. I'll be sitting in the dentist chair getting them unwired on Friday, then headed to breakfast. I hope that I don't gain the entire 13lbs that I've lost in one sitting. By the way, the scar from the cut is on the left side of this pic (my right), almost invisible. Great job by Dr. Cherny.

The family at the zoo. Tim, Hiliary. Zoe, Holly, Hannah, Madison.

Trail Report

Walnut Creek as of 5pm on Thursday night. It was expected to rise from this point.
Don't forget about the Cita workday tomorrow at Summerset/Banner State Park @9am.

Kitchen Upgrade

We have never been totally satisfied with the original kitchen in the house, but being stubbornly frugal, I've never wanted to upgrade. On the other hand, I've upgraded a few bikes in the past six years, so the chance of adding another new bike before the kitchen was slim.

The original look. White appliances, white Corian counter tops.

The new granite counter tops, with the white appliances. Had hoped this would work, but still not the finished look. We did sell the appliances and counter top on Craigslist.

The finished product. The new appliances completed the look that we were going for.

Birthday Photos

As stated in the past post, the girls had their birthday sleepover last weekend. Six friends and the two of them. Holly and I mostly left them alone and they had fun in the basement.

Sign of the times. Everyone checking their text messages. Probably just from each other.
The birthday girls.

Lots of gift cards for shopping. They went out with Holly to spend them on Sunday.

Then watched a movie before crashing for the night. All of them were well behaved and good memories were created.

Birthdays, Braces and Bikes

It was a long week so sorry about the lack of updates.

Friday was the designated night for the girls birthday party and sleepover, so near 6pm we were invaded by 6 tween-agers and their high pitched voices. We feed them pizza and sugary drinks and sent them to the basement. They proceeded to gossip, dance, scream and play games. We brought down the cake and I tried not to embarrass them as I snapped several pics (they will be uploaded later). They had fun and all were well behaved. We can probably stand to do that once or twice a year.

Braces: I made it past week three (just barely). I can definitely say that week two-three is the hardest as the novelty of eating the same 8-9 items becomes old. Once I made it into the work week it got a little easier. I'm in the home stretch now and will get them cut off on the 21st. Officially down 10lbs as of this morning.
Bikes: Was able to commute to work two days last week and hope to continue that for the next two three weeks. I did ride another 30 miles today and too a nice tour of the city. I even stopped by the scene of the accident and took few pics. The bench was made by "Squirrel" with the tree that took me out. If you zoom in on the other photo, you can see the scar from where the tree I was standing on had rested against this tree. I was obviously higher than I had anticipated.