Lightning Storms

I got home from a great Labor Day at the lake nervous about the week ahead.  Kicking off the budget cycle at work, big meetings, a big birthday party, and loads of important stuff that I haven't finished yet on other fronts as well.  I needed something to take my mind off the looming wall of responsibilities...

Well, the evening presented a pretty good excuse to pull out the camera and test my almost 40 year old reflexes...

Of half a zillion pictures and one dead battery pack, I got two.  I'm happy with the shots though.  This back yard is presenting a pretty spectacular venue for photographs...

Oh, and I lied about the reflexes part...  The trick is have very low light conditions, find a storm with lightning...duh, set a camera up on a tripod with a 30 second exposure, grab a chair, keep shooting while watching the storm, and presto!  See, honesty in blogging right there folks...

Happy Monday.

1st Day of School

The kids were up...slowly...  It was really early, so I understand.  The bus was supposed to arrive at a much more tolerable 6:45am vs the 6:20am at Rocky Ridge.  

The big difference this year is that aside from the kids being a year older and much larger is that Aiden had his first day at kindergarten!  He got to ride the bus for the first time!  The years of him watching from the door as the other two headed out to the bus were over.

The kids decided to trace the cat footprints in the front yard instead of going down the sidewalk.  Who wouldn't want soggy shoes and socks in 1st period?

The bus came and before we knew it, they were off and running in a new school year.

2012

Bus pictures through the years *sniff*  They are growing too quickly for my tastes, but it's beautiful to see...

I missed 2011's picture because we took them to school that year.  The bus came at 6:20am.  I would leave with them at 7:15 and get them to school just as the bus arrived.

2010

Ansley's first day...

2009

2008

I hope the year goes well!

Happy Monday everyone.

Human Weapons and wasting time...

I was wasting time on this new fangled internet thingy the other day and ran across this image.  An image of other people wasting time in a field and posting the results on the mostly-junk-filled-interwebs.

Sooo...for those of you who haven't see this yet.  I present another example that people with loads of time on their hands are creative and pretty awesome...

You're welcome...

Pride

I know it's one of those se7en deadly sins, but I do have pride.

Ok, I realize that I just put a somewhat old and disturbing movie reference in a post about good family adventures...I'm apparently on this earth to pass on random thoughts and pseudo-knowledge that roil around in my skull...  Now you know what I have to deal with ALL DAY LONG.

ahem... back to Pride...

Pride in one of the things that I know I really should take pride in.  My kids.  Specifically, one of them in this case.

It has been a long time coming, but Bryce has finally picked up water skiing!

It all happened a few weeks ago.  queue up the sappy flashback movie music...

We (being Nathan, Rick and I) had been taking the little kids out on the surfboard behind the boat for the past two summers.  

Here is an example of 2011 with Bryce on the surfboard.  He was big then...

And Aiden on the board from this year.  He tends to spend a lot of time splashing...Perfect.

The small kids are no big deal, and they love it.  Plus, riding like that gives them a good feel for how a ski moves, and what it's like to ride one with the security of an adult with them.  We got Bryce up on it with us last year on various lake weekends, but when he asked this year.  A resounding "NO!" was the answer.  Not that we didn't want to, but he is now 5 feet tall and far to large to even bother trying it.

It was unanimous that it was time for him to ride on his own if he wanted to ride at all.

Without further discussion, he hopped in the water and listened to our semi-useful coaching and gave it a whirl.  He may be too big to ride with any of us, but his weight gave him a big advantage and he popped right up!  Wooot!!!!  

I am so happy to have another generation of skiers on the boat!  I know that Ansley and Aiden won't be far behind now that Bryce has pioneered the sport for them.  On the 4th of July weekend Bryce tried out Wake Boarding for the first time too and after a few tries was making some long runs.  As soon as he was up and stable on the board, he was already cutting back and forth inside the wake to learn the control of the board.  I'm still smiling at the memory.

He looks like he's having fun!

I'll now treat you to a few awesome shots of Nathan, Rick, and myself from the 4th of July weekend.

Why?

Because they are awesome, and it's my blog!  That's why!

My boy Nathan carving up the wake on his new board.

Rick doing what he does.  Wowing the crowd and making wake boards look easy to ride...

 Back on a ski again after the broken leg.  The slalom ski feels pretty good, and its been a while for sure.

And finally, a Timewaster Studio production!  I tell you, there is just so much great content on this blog... Why it isn't the most read blog on this interweb thingy, I have no idea...

The really important part is that this is Bryce in his first Timewaster Studio feature!  I'm sure it won't be the last!!

Summer WakeSurfing from Brad on Vimeo.
Wake Surfing and Wake Boarding on Lake Lanier, GA.

Have a great weekend!

What are we thinking?

Man.  I break yet another bone, spend gobs of money in the process.  The kids are getting bigger, more fun, and more time consuming by the day.  I'm in Physical Therapy, but walk like a gangsta on most days with my spectacular limp.  I'm working a good job with the budget season coming soon so busy will be the order of the day, and Brenna is trying to get a job teaching again.

Yet, we still decide to pack more into our lives.

Let's buy a house and move in the middle of all of this.  Hey, life is short lets fill it up right?

You might ask, good God, why??

Oh, yeah, it'll be worth it.

I hope this works out...

Reasons for Thanks

I talked with the doctor today and my Fibula has healed well.  (with the help of a lot of screws) The Tibia is still awful looking, but I can now put full weight on the leg!  When looking at the X-rays, the doctor pointed out several pieces that he said he was literally putting and holding in place with his thumb during surgery.  There were so many splinters of bone it was a complete jigsaw puzzle.  Bleh.  It still looks pretty bad to me, but to the doctor, who honestly is the only one that knows what bad really looks like, it has healed enough for me to walk a couple of weeks in the boot without crutches.  After that, I'm free of all this.

Now that I'm limping around without the crutches, I'm thankful for several things, and I'm noticing more and more by the hour.  I imagine that I will continue to notice things that I can now do that I just couldn't a day ago.

First of all, I'm thankful for all the people that helped me through the worst of this mess.  Thanks to my friends who got me home from Montana, my wife who has since driven me everywhere for the past 9 weeks and has put up with my numerous lows in dealing with this.  I also need to give some thanks to the people at work that helped me get through the day when I couldn't carry anything.

Things that I am really happy about:

1. I can walk/limp without crutches.  (Now would be the time for one of those awesome pimp costume canes)

2. I can DRIVE again!  (I think that Brenna may be the one more thankful in this particular case.)  I might hug my Honda when I get home, but the 2 feet of pollen coating it would just make that idea gross.

3. I have been cleared to get back on my spin bike!!  While it's not riding through the trees on my favorite possessions, it's a major start down that trail.

4. I can carry my own coffee back to my desk at work without fear of wearing it or endangering others.  (one of those small yet oh-so-important elements of every day life)

5. I can walk down stairs instead of scooting down on my rear end.  (I won't feel like such an invalid but the kids won't like that I'm harder to catch and climb on.)

I'll stop now, but life is getting back to normal and I feel encouraged that I will be able to do something aside from sit by a pool when I head to the deserts of Nevada and Utah in 6 weeks.  Now I have to get stronger, drop some couch surfing weight, and get back to life as normal.

A comparison but not really...

A fellow co-worker was reading through this blog and compared me to Evel Knievel.  Heh Heh...

I enjoy fast paced and somewhat risky sports but I'm hardly a daredevil.  Just look at the Red Bull website or any number of GoPro videos if you want to see what I do NOT do.  Well, at least things I don't do anymore on the skydiving front...It's official though, I injured myself much less falling out of airplanes/helicopters than I have done in several other sports.  I only broke an arm in 10 years and 730 jumps back in my skydiving days.  Hence, Skydiving is way safer than wake boarding, road and mountain bike riding, ice skating (lame story), and skateboarding down stairs.

And NO there is absolutely nothing wrong with my statistical sampling there...so just take your mathematics degrees and stuff them.

In the humorous moment of thinking about the comparison of me to Mr. Knievel, I went to the one source that could give me some random trivia for the day.  Al Gore's interweb* thingy directed me to this other thingy called Wikipedia, which I guess is becoming the repository for all of human knowledge and will eventually become self aware like Skynet  and destroy us all... 


Back to my random trivia after a collection of tangents.  Sorry.

Evel Knievel broke a lot of bones...and by a lot I mean, “The 433 broken bones he suffered during his career earned an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records as the survivor of "most bones broken in a lifetime."[2]” Wikipedia: Evel Knievel

Holy Cow!  How did he even walk after his career was over...or did he?  In retrospect, I will probably break bones again since I don't really have an intention of quitting the sports I love, but I hope to hold out for at least a decade before the next skeletal catastrophe.  This current one sucks worse than any of my others.

I'll see a doc this week and see if I can actually walk without crutches anytime soon, and I'll badger him to let me on my spin bike.  I'll let you all know how it goes.

*No, Al Gore didn't actually claim to invent the Internet...He's just a typically self aggrandizing politician and not very good with phrasing in interviews during an election season.