Tru, Asher and Amy made some cool pumpkin carvings tonight.

This looks crazy:

I rolled 40 years on the life-odometer last Saturday. Amy and I celebrated with my 91 year old grandma, my mom (who turned 62 the same day), and my uncle (who turned 60 the same day). And no kids! It was fun and relaxing and the weather was excellent (we were in the Sacramento area). My uncle restores vintage Schwinn bikes, and Amy and I rode a couple of his beauties around downtown Vacaville. Those old single speed cruisers really help you sloooow down. It was really nice to just roll lazily around town, checking out the sights with no agenda whatsoever.

That night we went to Buca di Beppo, in Sacramento. My aunt and uncle had reserved the Pope room. It was a big round room and the walls were covered in Pope paraphernalia/mementos. In the center of the table was a large clear plexiglass box containing a bust of the Pope. It was awesome! And right around the corner, near the restrooms, was a huge Frank Sinatra shrine. (pictures of these places coming soon) What a cool restaurant. Looks like there are a couple in the Seattle area, so we might be back someday…

Amy masterminded some ridiculous underwear prank for my birthday. I started receiving gifts of underwear from friends last week (one pair of underwear even came with a complementary bottle of porter, which was a very nice touch). Today I rolled into my office, only to find that it had been desecrated with underwear in my absence. Amy strikes again, with the able assistance of Janis, the office manager!

All-in-all, it was a memorable birthday weekend, and a great way to start off the 40’s. 🙂 As an interesting side note, Amy and I will be celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary on Thursday. 10 years has flown by faster than I could imagine. Of course I have always loved Amy more than I can express in words, but even more remarkable is that she appears to continue to love me. 🙂

All this thinking of momentous life-events made this blog post about the life countdown catch my eye. It’s a good read, but what struck me the most was Stewart Brand’s concept of the 5-year project cycle. He says that 5 years is a reasonable length of time for any worthwhile project. Like Stewart, it makes me wonder how many “5-years” I have left. More importantly, what’ll I do with them? If I’m anything like my grandma Hazel, I’ve got at least 10 “5-years” remaining. It feels like I’ve squandered the 8 “5-years” that I’ve burned through so far, which makes me a little anxious to do something conscious and intentional with the remainder. Raising Truman and Asher well can’t really be viewed as a project, but it’s certainly something I strive toward, and I’ll count it among my life’s achievements. I’ll have to keep considering what else is “my work to do.”

Matt‘s been riding a bike around NYC for the last few years. And he’s been kinda crowing about it the whole time. I’ve successfully ignored him until now: I got a new bike.

I bought it with the intention of riding to work one or two days a week. Haven’t done that yet, but I’m still planning on it. It’s a long-ish trip, requiring much advance planning (kids, meetings, etc). And I’m a little skittish about mixing it up with cars without having some decent lights that say, “Watch out for me!”

I rode my new bike in an 8-hour adventure race a couple of weekends ago. That was awesome, and I plan to do more of those. I’ve also been riding everywhere but work. Truman loves this. He’s a big fan of riding his bike, and loves it when I ride too. So we’re out riding whenever we have the chance. There’s a BMX track right next to the skatepark and Tru loves to double up. Skate a little, ride a little track. I’ve got a rack on my bike, so it’s easy to carry both our boards and gear down to the park.

Okay, this post is really about nothing. But I do like my new bike.

Whew. I don’t care what this guy’s background is, this doesn’t look right:

If you like that, join the Facebook group, or just buy a shirt.

Ran this morning. Very moderate: ran 2.3 miles in 19.46 minutes, which is an 8.4 minute mile average. Not a bad pace for getting started again, but it wasn’t a very long run. That’s what I need to work on–longer distance, but keeping the pace relatively quick.

I’ve realized that I won’t run if I don’t have some kind of concrete goal to achieve. So I’m going to troll around the intarwebs to see what races are coming up and pretend that I’m training for them (I’ll really run the races, it’s just hard to admit that I’m “in training”…sounds goofy to me).

Ran today. First time in a while. I’m in Boise for the week, and hauled my shoes along. I always take my shoes and I never run. This time was different. I’m, you know, motivated.

Relatively short starter run. I don’t even know how far it was, but it lasted 24 minutes. It was a weird winding route through hotels and industrial complexes. I think I’ll try to find something more direct tomorrow.

Finally got around to recharging the battery on my camera and then uploading pics from our roadtrip to Vacaville. I made a bunch of sets and then organized them in a collection. You can find them here.

We’re on vacation at the moment with Ron & Erinn and their family. Last Wednesday we drove from our house down to the Oregon Caves National Monument. Checked out the caves and crashed at a local bed and breakfast. Thursday morning took us down to the Humboldt Redwood State Park, where we camped for two nights. Saturday saw us drive to Vacaville where we’re currently staying until Tuesday. On Tuesday we’ll make the standard mad dash back up I-5 all at once (roughly 9 hours of driving).

Highlights thus far:

• spending so much time with the family
• playing Ewoks, Jedi and Stormtroopers in the redwood forest with the kids
• visiting Gram, Sherry, Steve, Ryan and Lacy
• watching the kids collect postcards from all the places we went and make memory books of the vacation
• exploring caves with Benny, Truman and Ron

Lowlights thus far:

• camping in poison oak (disasters apparently averted!)
• no swimming in the Eel River due to “algae blooms” which make kids sick
• occasional navigational frustrations due to having only a handheld GPS and no paper map
• Truman’s “water treading” moment in the pool

On the whole, we’re having WAY more fun than not-fun. At least in my mind we are. 🙂 Not really looking forward to that long drive on Tuesday, though.

Just ran for the first time in a while. Started easy with the 1.5 mile loop. Kept a 7.6 mile pace, which felt fine. In fact, the 10 minutes of stretching prior seemed more uncomfortable than the actual run.