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Our Christmas Gift to You

2009-12-24T17:07:32Z

Clay and Noah

Move over Osmond Family here come the Weeks Kids:

Noah singing Santa Claus is Coming to Town (MP3 352kb)
Noah saying Grace (MP3 928kb)
Noah and Clay singing Jingle Bells (MP3 336 kb)

Now you're here...........

2009-01-15T16:09:02Z

I never felt magic crazy as this
I never saw moons knew the meaning of the sea
I never held emotion in the palm of my hand
Or felt sweet breezes in the top of a tree
But now you're here
Brighten my northern sky.

I've been a long time that I'm waiting
Been a long that I'm blown
I've been a long time that I've wandered
Through the people I have known
Oh, if you would and you could
Straighten my new mind's eye.

Would you love me for my money
Would you love me for my head
Would you love me through the winter
Would you love me 'til I'm dead
Oh, if you would and you could
Come blow your horn on high.

I never felt magic crazy as this
I never saw moons knew the meaning of the sea
I never held emotion in the palm of my hand
Or felt sweet breezes in the top of a tree
But now you're here
Brighten my northern sky.

- Nick Drake
Northern Sky

1000 Words

2009-01-11T01:05:36Z

wow, what a week...........

Ain't no sunshine

2009-01-07T17:03:55Z

Wow, I just stumbled across these two videos and they are both so damned good. This song got played to death on the radio when I was a kid and the familiarity made me miss out on what an amazing song it is. I think I'm starting to find that that is some sort of universal truth in my life. I overlook or miss the amazing beauty and value of the things and people most familiar and closest to me.

Freddie King: Ain't no Sunshine

Bill Withers: Ain't no Sunshine

I would love to be able to write this kind of music. The dude on the guitar in the Bill Withers video is so cool and plays some really nice guitar accompaniment, and Freddie King, well, he just rocks my world. You can tell these guys feel these words to their core. I swear if you look closely at the beginning of the second clip that Bill Withers is crying while he singing this. Please take a few minutes to check these out, they are just amazingly beautiful, simple and poingnant. The rest of your life will still be waiting for you when you finish

Winter

2009-01-06T17:45:27Z

Woke up with this song in my head today. I'm certainly looking forward to the summer when the light of love will be burnin' bright!

(M. Jagger/K. Richards)

And it's sure been a cold, cold winter
And the wind ain't been blowin' from the south
It's sure been a cold, cold winter
And the light of love is all burned out

It sure been a hard, hard winter
My feet been draggin' 'cross the ground
And I hope it's gonna be a long, hot summer
And the light of love will be burnin' bright

And I wish I'd been out in California
When the lights on all the Christmas trees went out
But I been burnin' my bell, book and candle
And the restoration plays have all gone 'round

It sure been a cold, cold winter
My feet been draggin' 'cross the ground
And the fields has all been brown and fallow
And the springtime take a long way around

Yeah, and I wish I'd been out in Stony Canyon
When the lights on all the Christmas trees went out
But I been burnin' my bell, book and candle
And the restoration plays have all gone 'round

Sometimes I think about you, baby
Sometimes I cry about you
Lord well well well

Sometimes I wanna wrap my coat around you
Sometimes I wanna keep you warm
Sometimes I wanna wrap my coat around you
Sometimes I wanna burn a candle for you

Lake life slide show

2008-10-27T02:55:05Z

Just threw together a quick flickr set of some lake photos:

The larger slide show can be viewed here

Habitat For Humanity Halloween 100

2008-10-10T17:28:40Z

I'll be riding in the Halloween 100 again this year to help raise money for Habitat for Humanity of Durham, NC. The first year I did this we raised over $500. The second year, over $800. This year I'd like to shoot for $1000.

I know the economy is really bad right now and many of us have had the additional expenses of paying more to fill up our cars and donating to political campaigns recently, but anything you can spare will be greatly appreciated and will help to carry out the important work that Habitat for Humanity does.

Thanks!

Another one of Palin's Peeps

2008-10-10T16:06:02Z

Just another crazy Alaskan mo-fo. How would you feel about this guy having direct access to the Vice President?

Sarah Palin: Palling Around With Secessionists

2008-10-08T16:30:17Z

Another Cyclist is Killed by Another Drunk Driver

2008-04-24T16:41:01Z

Bicyclist fatally injured by truck
NCSU junior, 21, faces DWI charges

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/crime_safety/v-print/story/1048055.html

RALEIGH - After shin splints sidelined her running hobby, Nancy Leidy turned to biking. It was something she and her husband, Ross, enjoyed together.

So when she called Ross on Wednesday morning with plans to bike a 10-mile path the two maneuvered together Sunday, he simply reminded her of a good parking place and then wished her well.

Nancy Leidy, 60, was half-way through the trip when police say an N.C. State student hit her with his pickup truck about 11 a.m. She died just before 8 p.m. Wednesday.

Brian Anthony Reid, of 302 S. Sixty Court in Graham, had turned 21 on Wednesday. The arresting officer said he smelled of alcohol, had glossy eyes and slurred speech at the scene. Records indicate Reid had a blood-alcohol content of 0.12. A level of 0.08 is considered impaired.

He was charged after the accident with one count each of felony serious injury by vehicle, driving while impaired and failure to reduce speed. Those could change because of Leidy's death, Raleigh police spokesman Jim Sughrue said late Wednesday night.

According to the police report, Leidy was riding on the right side of the road when she was hit. She was thrown 58 feet by the impact. According to the police report, she was wearing a helmet.

Leidy was taken to Wake-Med Raleigh Campus, where she died, officials said Wed-nesday night.

Reid was not injured. He was released from Wake County jail Wednesday after posting a $10,000 secured bond and signing a promise to appear in court next month to answer the DWI charge. He will appear in court today on other charges.

Leidy's interests

Ross Leidy said his wife took on many tasks when she stopped working in 1991.

She worked for free as an entomology professor at N.C. State University. She ran a local support group for wives of soldiers stationed overseas during Operation Desert Storm. She also hunted for antiques and racked up ribbons for her jellies at the State Fair. And she biked.

"She was the kind of woman that when she got into something, she really got into it," he said.

Wednesday night, as Leidy mourned his wife, he also empathized with the young man charged with hitting her.

"I feel bad for the guy," Leidy said. "I was young once, and I remember getting [drunk] before. I don't think it was at 11 a.m., though."

What a weird week.........

2008-02-29T19:20:31Z

What a week this has been. Last weekend seems like it was months ago. On the positive side of things our oldest son lost his first baby tooth. Then a couple days later he lost another. We got him a really great used bunk bed off of craigslist last weekend. He had outgrown his race car bed and wasn't sleeping through the night because it was uncomfortable. That was fast. I can't believe that he is growing up so quickly.

Somewhat out of the blue we ended up getting a great deal on a beautiful 2001 Volvo C70 which will be my new commuter vehicle. I usually drive the 10 miles from home to the ballpark and then get on my bicycle and bike the last 9.5 miles into work. It even has a trailer hitch so I can take my hitch mounted bike rack off my gas guzzling truck and put it on my Volvo. The convertible mechanism is so cool it almost gives me a woody, but not quite. I feel like such a rich businessman driving this thing around. Funny how a car can do that as I'm not really rich nor am I much of a businessman.

It's odd how we go into consumer mode at times. (That's "we" for my wife and I, not the collective "we") I think in general we have less of those tendencies than most Americans in our age and income brackets, but on the other hand we're no slouches in that department and I do feel very self-conscious when we have these little spurts of spending. I imagine the Durham Quakers will disown us sooner or later for having too much "stuff". Then again I can't ever imagine wanting something like a big screen plasma HD TV, so maybe there is hope for me yet. When my kids grow up maybe L and I will go and spend 6 months at Pendle Hill to do penance and get deprogrammed from our stuff acquiring, non-simple ways. Maybe not.

I feel like a Quaker with Tourette syndrome most days. I don't know if they can fix that at Pendle Hill.

On the not-so-positive side, my doctor is sending me for a brain MRI to see if I have a brain tumor or tumors. It's too weird to even think about. I guess it would explain a lot, but I'd prefer to find other explanations. I fluctuate between being really calm and ok about it to being totally freaked out and on the verge of tears. I hate not knowing and having something like this hanging over my head. Hopefully there will be no tumor(s) and life will just continue on with our regularly scheduled programming. It feels weird to even mention it to anyone, but I was never that good at keeping things to myself especially after years of AA. What can you do? To top the week off, something happened at work that is a total bummer. It's something I've worried about for a while so it doesn't come as a huge surprise, but it sad and will require a big adjustment.

I'm not sure how I got into this position of being a husband, a father and an employer. They all take a lot of mindfulness and energy and I can be so damned clueless at times. My wife is beyond amazing so that doesn't really take that much energy. It actually feels like the most natural thing in the world most of the time, but the other stuff can be hard, amazingly hard. 15 years ago I woke up sleeping with the homeless people in lower Manhattan, and now here I am, "Mr. Gotta lot to Loose". Hmm (scratches head).

Life is so bizarre. It coasts along for a while and then there are periods of upheaval. I believe I have a lot to be grateful for, even in the times of upheaval. It would probably serve me well not to loose track of that.

ps: I'm a totally pretentious turd for putting this picture here.

2007 Habitat for Humanity Halloween 100

2007-10-31T16:02:48Z

Here is my fundraising total for this year:

Here is the GPS data from the Friday night ride:

http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/player/4308372

And a few photos:

Habitat for Humanity - Full Moon Meander

The ride was great. Wish I could have ridden in the Saturday 50k also.

I owe a few folks some mugs and Habitat gets 6 hours of volunteering from me.

It was a great week. Can't wait until next year

Firewood

2007-10-15T20:21:14Z

The first cold nights of fall arrived last weekend. When I woke up on Sunday morning it was 39° which is pretty cold for this part of North Carolina at this time of year. One of the weekend chores was to refill the firewood rack on the front porch. In the winter we keep half a cord of wood on the front porch and we try to have another 1 1/2 - 2 cords of wood by the big shed, away from the house, stacked up between three big pines.

When we first moved out to Bahama we had a guy who delivered our firewood. I'll call him D. D always helped me stack the firewood he delivered and he always made sure to bring us some cedar kindling. He liked to talk a lot while we were stacking wood onto the large piles. He had worked at Nortel during Nortel's heyday and he seemed to be really effected by the downsizing. He used to tell me that he was retired but he didn't seem any older than I was. I knew he had a wife and kids and that he was divorced or separated from his wife. Being away from his kids seemed to bother him the most. Now that I have children I can imagine how he felt. From what I could tell first he lost the job, then he lost the family. I read at canadianencyclopedia.com that Nortel had "hacked away nearly two-thirds of its staff" starting in 2000. I've met a number of people who were pink-slipped by Nortel and they all had that same deer-in-the-headlights look about them.

D always seemed pretty depressed but he was talking about how he felt so you figured that he was ok, maybe he was going through a rough patch but that things would turn themselves around eventually. The last time I saw him he was delivering a load of firewood to us a few years ago. He had had an accident with his chainsaw and had cut the backside of his arm up pretty bad. I think he said he had over 100 stitches and that he had almost bled to death. This time things seemed bleaker than they had been before. He had a lot of physical pain on top of the mental pain.

The next fall when it came time to call him I had a feeling that something wasn't right and I was scared to find out. After a while I asked my neighbor if she had heard from him since I knew that she got her firewood from him also. She said that she had called his house and his son answered and told her that he had killed himself over the fourth of July weekend.

It's been a couple years gone past now since we got that news and we get our firewood from another person now. But as I was going through the big pile of firewood I recognized some of the wood that D had brought us. I have a feeling that I'll think of him every year at this time of year. The firewood D brought us got us through a terrible ice storm when my oldest son was just a baby and we had no heat or electricity for over a week. As soon as the ice storm was over I remember D checked up on us and brought us some more wood since we had gone through most of ours trying to heat the house with a drafty old fireplace.

I'm not sure what I want to say here but when I was looking at that old firewood I got the feeling like I needed to say something. You think, maybe I could have done something, then you think maybe not. Maybe I should have tried a little harder to have been a friend to D the firewood guy but then again maybe it just wouldn't have mattered. I'll never know.

Where the money goes

2007-10-04T14:59:23Z

Here's the second entry in the "Stuff I've bought" category. I ordered this a week or so ago but since it just came I'm going to include it. Here we have 12 pieces of rubber and two wiper arms for my MG Midget. The shortbread is a little treat that this vendor throws in. So 12 pieces of rubber which more than likely were made in China, and will probably not last very long since Chinese rubber is crap, plus two wiper arms which were made in Taiwan, plus shipping comes to $57.

Now it would be one thing if these parts were up to the same quality of the original parts and I could put them on the car and expect to get a good 20 - 30 years worth of service out of them. But these are not the same quality and will last no where near as long. Oh the joys of globalization and putting corporate profits above all else. I should start keeping tabs on how long the parts last. I just put in a new signal / high beam low beam switch on the steering column just a couple of months ago and the other night the high beam switch stopped working. At this rate I will probably be better off in the long run financially by buying a new Porsche Boxster than to pay to continually replace substandard parts on a 37 year old MG.

Things I'd like to do before I die or get too damn old to do them

2007-10-03T21:03:34Z

I'm sitting here at work, waiting to go to a meeting and that thought just crossed my mind that there are some things I'd like to do with my life beyond get up, go to work, go home, have dinner, go to bed, get up, go to work, go home, spend the weekend doing chores..... I figured I'd put them here when they cross my mind so I won't forget them.

1. Ride a bicycle across the country or at least across the damned state. I've wanted to bike across country since I was in high school. I'll probably have to wait until the kids are older, yadda, yadda, yadda
2. Along the same lines, get back to riding 3000 miles / year on my bicycle. This year has sucked for bike riding
3. Buy and restore to show condition an old MGA
4. Go camping more
5. Become a better guitar player
6. Become more creative
7. Work less and have more money at the same time. (Sure, yeah, right)...

As my 5 year old son would say, whatever.............