No Better Place To Be

Riley is 11 weeks old today and her favorite
place to nap is still on Daddy's chest.

Mountain Biking

Cherry and I got Grandma and Great-Grandma to babysit and we headed off to Boyette Scrub Preserve (Trail Map PDF) for some mountain biking. The place was PACKED on a beautiful Saturday.

We started off on some easy green trails. While not very hilly they had lots of switchbacks and the challenge became not catching your pedals on palmetto knobs as you rounded corner after corner. Cherry ROCKED at this. I think we found her new calling.

We then made our way back to some blue trails. One, named Gator Pit has a steep 35deg drop in, a short flat and then a 35deg 30-foot incline. Cherry made it most the way up. I dug in and made it to the top, only to not be able to get my shoe unclipped where I fell right over.

To add insult to injury (Chery had bet I'd bleed before the end of the day) we hear another rider coming up the trail. It was a guy on a off-road unicycle. UN-BE-LEIV-ABLE. He put as all to shame.

We have to head back and test out the black trails next. Maybe we can escape without any broken bones.

My New Time Trial BIke

I bought it for $100 off a guy who was selling them out of a back of a truck. Cool hunh?


Actually it's Lance Armstrong's time trial bike. It was stolen from their team truck after stage one of the Tour of California.

Since it's a one of a kind I'm guessing the thief plans on selling it for parts.

Fantastic Contraption - Time Waster of the Week

OK, enough of this baby stuff ;) Time for some good old fashioned internet time wasting fun. I discovered Fantastic Contraption last week.


Fair warning: You will end up wasting at least a hour of your day if you visit this link.

It's a online Rube Goldberg machine maker. The object is to get a ball or block into a scoring zone using a few basic building blocks. You are given:

1. Clockwise and CCW rotating wheels
2. Idler wheels
3. Water Linkages (they can pass through other objects)
4. Stick Linkages (they cannot pass through other objects)

Some are pretty easy. Some look to be impossible. The coolest things is that there are an infinite number of solutions to a puzzle. Once you solve a puzzle you can see other people's solutions (some of which can only be described as genius)

Max loves this game as well. Makes the engineer daddy so proud! Here are a couple of Max's and my solutions to some of the puzzles.

Just click the START button in the upper left corner:

Catapult

Ramp Jump

Two Month Check Up

When Riley was born she weighed in at 6 lb 4 oz and was 19 inches long. She just had her two month check up and is 10 lb 11 oz and 22 in. Quite an accomplishment. So now the only question left to be answered is...Rockette or Bucs Cheerleader?

(...or SEC Football coach, Riley "Hootie" Dotson -Sean)

Ed Grimley

We finally figured out where she gets her good looks...