Each Morning

I start my day off with reading the local newspaper. There are several articles that I read each time and a few I avoid. Dr Bill Roy always has a rant against the Republicans and I avoid him about as much as I do Glenda Overstreet who is the the local NAACP president who has a son in jail for murder. My favorite is Harvey B. Mackay who writes a business column. He always has some little tidbit of wisdom and humor to lighten my day. OK, I don't miss the funny page very often but given a choice I will read the business column first. His column this week is about doing things the Cowboy way. 1. Don't squat with your spurs on. Don't be stupid and harm yourself. Pay attention to your business. 2. The easiest way to eat crow is while it is warm. The longer you take to own up to your responsibilities the harder it is to recover. People don't get fired for making mistakes, they get fired for covering them up. 3. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. I always said this was "Do what you did and you get what you got". The surest way to change something is to get up off your rear and change it yourself. (Or buy Mom a 42 in HD Plasma TV and I'll probably have to go over three or four times to help her reset the remote.) 4. One of my favorites is always drink upstream of the herd. Avoid playing with the office gossip, it'll p'ison you for sure. 5. If your are riding out in front of the herd always look back from time to time and make sure they are a followin'. There is a difference between leadership and thinking you are in charge. 6. Letting the cat out of the bag is a whole lot easier than putting him back in. You may not have control of what goes through your mind but you do have control over what comes out of your mouth. The last piece of advice comes from Texas Big Bender. "Good judgment comes from experience and a lot of that comes from bad judgment." I'll bet a lot of you wish I had just talked about the needed bodily function after drinking three cups of coffee in the morning. Don't 'cha.

One final thing, I absolutely refuse to put hehehe in my blogs every third column. I also don't use those blasted little faces that smile, wink and do stupid things. Whatever.

Things About Me!

- I hate stupidity. Not speech by the stupid, but speech that is so stupid that everyone knows fundamentally that the speaker could not possible believe what he is saying. The Phelps family comes to mind.
- People say they hate prejudice. I think they don't understand the word. I have a prejudice to McDonald's french fries, 57 chevys and DelMonte Catsup. It is when you let your prejudices get in the way of making an intelligent decision that it is wrong.
- Money is really easy to understand. Income must be greater than or equal to outgo. All forms of spending are in this equasion. Just because you don't have to pay the money back today doesn't mean that it won't be due tomorrow.
- I consider myself a conservative but mostly in the fiscal sense. I believe in change but I measure it in terms of outgo and income. If it costs more in the long run you better have a plan to pay for it.
- In this world there are people that cannot change. You must build a plan and bypass those that are frozen to the past.
- I believe there are many life skills worth having
Creativity This is the part of you that asks why and then thinks of a way to do it better/cheaper/different just to measure/or just different for the heck of it.
Listening If you spend as much time listening as speaking you will be a lot better off. I have a problem because I have a lot of good ideas and they come quick.
Speaking People that are successful can speak to one or a hundred thousand with equal ease. Just remember to listen now and then.
Reading I truly believe that my education started when my sisters taught me to read and will end when my eyesight no longer lets me read. I think that the sum total of classroom teaching is far short of half of my total learning.
Decision Making I can't impress you enough with letting children make decisions on their own now and then. Discuss what happened in an open way and truly help them understand that there are good ideas and bad ones and some really dumb one's out there that can kill you.

I have a chapter in my Franklin Planner (the Franklin part has long since ceased to exist in the daily part.) where I wrote down a lot of good ideas. On one page there is the note to not forget to bury the horses after you shoot them. I just wish I could remember where I read or heard that.

As a baby boomer (Born right after WWII) I went through schools that were crowded and all the classes were 30+. The High School (Wichita East) had almost 5,000 students and I graduated in a class of 1200. You can imagine that I hated school and the main thing I wanted out of school was me. I had a car, a girl friend and darn near a full time job. It is a wonder that I survived. I am thankful that I didn't marry my high school sweetheart. I probably would be living in Wichita and working in an aircraft plant.

Two major events happened that were for the good. First Donna's parents moved to Seattle and second she went with them. The best thing that ever happened to me was meeting my wife. She is by far the best thing that has ever happened in my life. Now all I have to do is live to the end of my life. Alls well that ends well. Be smart and have fun

K-State Dog Attacks KU Pillow

It is Friday, the last one in September 2006. I am writing this to Microsoft Word in the hopes that my computer connection will be fixed today and I will copy this and paste it to my Blog site. Yesterday about noon my computer could not refresh a page because it had lost the connection. At different times during the day it came back on for a moment and downloaded messages but without the connection I cannot get to Yahoo Mail to read them. I know they are there because at one time when this whole shebang was running they appeared and then as I clicked on them the system lost the connection.
Yes, this is the new AT&T high-speed hook up. Some deal! It is supposed to be cheap but it is also supposed to work. The Gateway Modem shot craps and a new one made it all better. So much for the warning from the service center that if it was my wiring it would cost $60.00 for the service call. You can bet your sweet #$% I would have got my $60.00 worth had it been a problem in my wiring. NOT!

I had just found out that there is a file I need to be able to use the DVD to make copies. It is called Roxio and now that I need it, I can’t go out and find a download to use it. I tried to use CD’s to copy the photos off my computer but at about 200 per CD I would need about 20 at about an hour per to download.

OK, enough of the being Petty. The other night Barbara and I ate at a Chinese restaurant and she got a fortune in her cookie that said to not be petty. I will try to be the gregarious guy that is ubiquitous (everywhere) and handsome. Well, one or two out of the three isn’t all that bad.

The Washington Post's "Mensa Invitational" asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting or changing one letter to create a new word, and then to supply an appropriate definition for the new word. Here are my favorites:
BOZONE: The substance surrounding stupid people that stop bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

CASHTRATION: The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

INTAXICATION: Euphoria at getting a tax refund from the IRS, which lasts until you realise it was your money to start with.

OSTEOPORNOSIS: A degenerate disease.


REINTARNATION: Coming back to life as a hillbilly. (I think Jed Clampett said this one but I can’tprove it.)

I wonder if sex and money is surrounding my thougts as I get older. At least I think my sense of humor is OK. I went to a Psychiatrist and he said I needed to avoid stress, so I didn’t open his bills when they came.

The picture at the top of this blog is my pal Grissy easting a KU pillow my Mother-in-law sent me. Grissy has all that energy and every once in a while it leaks out and she just has to tear up something. Who knows what evil lurks in the minds of dogs.
Do your best and keep smiling. Make them wonder what you have been up to.

This is Mom's magic cat. Yesterday after my sisters visited Mom, I got a call and Mom said, "Denny, my cat's missing." It took me about 20 minutes to get my stuff together and get over to Mom's. I stopped by the school and got Barbara and by the time we got there the cat had reappeared and all was well. I guess the kitty has a hiding place in the top of the closet and Mom couldn't see her way up there. We all know that cats don't come unless there is something you have they want. Tiger comes to meet me each time I go out there because he thinks I am bearing food. Most of the time I am.
I took Barbara out to dinner and she wanted pasta. We went to Mandino's where they have a great buffet. Barb's sense of smell is all out of whack because of her cold and nothing really tasted good to her. I had a great meal that included pizza, pasta, salad and baked zitti smothered with cheese. Poor Barbara.
Yesterday morning,I took my bike over to the Shunga Trail near David. The trail there now goes from 29th and Fairlawn to downtown at 10th and Adams. About 7 miles as the trail goes.That damn crow couldn't fly anywhere that crooked. 14 miles round trip. It was a great ride. I wore a windbreaker jacket and was way sweaty when I finished. On the way home the truck broke down. I had to pull a tire and remove a brake caliper. One bolt had come loose and it would drag on the rim when I applied the brakes. Thank god for bungee cords and bike tools. I bought a $30.00 set of Park bike tools many months ago and that saved me from having the truck towed.
Stupid adventure of the day. When I got home, I took off the caliper bracket that the bolts had come out of and took it to the hardware store to buy replacements. I measured everything up and went right to the special Grade 8 bolts. I fitted the bolts and got the right length and went home. Upon arrival home I realized that I bought bolts for the wrong set of holes. Back to the store for the right one's. I also put red "Locktight" on the bolts so they won't work loose again. $2.00 worth of bolts and $8.00 worth of Locktight. There is locktight leftover but by the time I will need it again it will probably be dried out in the tube.
I am having some trouble getting the DVD R/W to work on this computer. It does pretty well until I actually try to make a copy of pictures. It immediately changes the copy format and tries to make a CD. When it reads that a DVD is in the drive it says wrong format. Duh! I'll keep at it until I can find the right program to make it work. I have about a million pictures on my hard drive that I want to remove. The pictures just slow my computer reaction time way down. In my impatience I double click again and then Dr. Watson wants to send a report to Microsoft until I shut the damn machine down and start over. Last night I actually resorted in taking the power cord out and dropping the battery when it got into one of those loops where nothing worked.
I'd better get on with my day and off this computer. Be strong and play hard.

Oh to be Young Again

This is a picture of all my nieces in Arkansas at their Annual "Girls Weekend at the Lake". They are visiting the lake home that was built by my grandfather and now is owned by my sister Carol. There is also a picture of them with Styrofoam noses pretending to be the "three or more little pigs". They put on a play years ago for us of the three little pigs and did this re-creation for us. This is the finest things my sisters and brother could have ever done. Love those girls.
From Left they are Janet, Carrie, Jennifer, Rebecca,Kim and Kristy. They are as nice as they're cute
Yesterday I took Mom to the Doctor's office to get the results of the tests she spent all day Friday taking. The test results were on the desk of the doctor and were not available to us. Crap! Spend a couple of hours hauling Mom down there and then not have the results. As I recall they did this to us last time. Not again.
I know what the tests are going to show. She has a bad Mitral valve that doesn't let the blood flow properly (backwash) She has Cardio Myopathy which is basically an old heart that without the three Pacemaker wires wouldn't last the day, and finally Congestive Heart Failure. The CHF means that she doesn't have enough good blood flow to make her systems work well. This causes her Kidneys to not remove enough fluid and she has to have meds to make it all work well. The list is endless. Beta Blockers, warfarin (Rat Poison-Blood Thinners) and Diuretics keep it all balanced. That and a whole pile of vitamins keep her going
Oh well, cold front is coming so I'm going to go ride this AM. I will have to wear jeans and a long sleeved shirt but that's the price one must pay for riding in the fall.
Keep your nose pointed in the right direction and Don't be Petty.

What Happens If...

What would happen if we realize that it takes a guy like Saddam Hussein with all his killing and prison's to keep Iraq from turning into a Theocracy like Iran? Is it possible for anything like a Democracy to exist in a place that they cut off your hand for stealing a piece of bread when you family is starving? Even if we "win" will it all fall apart like Vietnam when we leave? How can they make it work if their own military is more scared of the terrorists than their government. At least they knew how brutal Saddam was and it is said to be, "Better the Devil you know than the Devil you don't know."
I am not sure where this pitiful post came from. Sometimes I have a dark side too... Dennis

Where My Benting Started

This picture of Santa on his bent is really my brother-in-law. He is the guy that made my first bent and the second bent and updated my current bent into a Tour Elite2. Somewhere at the bottom of this blog is a picture of me on the TE2. He is only slightly less mature than I am. He and I will be boys so long as bikes put a smile on our face. The picture ny was taken by Barbara. Yes, his bike as pictured did not have all the brakes and gears and shifters that a new bike has. He would literally take them off his bike to make mine go. When he had mine ready, he took all his stuff and made a bike for his grandson and one for David. I still don't know if he has a complete bike for himself. My hope is that he has got a Carbon Fiber bike ready and is riding it.
A few posts below is a picture of his dog Grissy. She was a puppy mill survivor. I rescued her from the Lawrence Shelter and gave her to him. I can't think of any pair that deserves each other more. They are both special to me.
We are having almost perfect fall weather this week. It is in the 70's in the afternoon. Today I will take Mom to the Doctor's office about 12:30 and ride when I get home.
As I read the paper each day, I always manage to read the obits. I think I am checking to make sure I am not in there. Each time I see lots of older people listed and think what a wonderful age to live to and yes, I would like to reach 80 or so. I don't have any notion of just how long I will live. I am very happy that I don't suffer from the problems that my dad had. He was bi-polar, had diabetes, Parkinsons, a bad heart and near the end I think some hardening of the arteries. Even if I had some of those problems, I think I have lived a great life and wouldn't want anyone to feel I didn't live a full and complete life.
Just so you don't think I am too over inflated, the other day Dave's wife Barb retold a story about Dave. After a few brief cross words, Barb said to Dave, "No one likes an asshole." Dave's reply was, "Oh yea, how come Dad has so many friends." I guess it is my winning smile and that most of my friends are as hard up for friends as I am. Keep your powder dry.

Monday Morning from the Laundry Chair

This is my new outside cat, Tiger, and the Cat House. It is a plywood box with black plastic as an outside cover.
Who would have thought that Mean Uncle Denny would have a cat? Mr "Lives with Dogs" feeding a cat? OK, I am guilty this time.


I think this is the beginning of Ramadan. Does this mean that the Terrorists won't bomb during daytime? Does this mean that the Moslem
world will forgive the Pope for stating that they are unforgiving?
Monday is Laundry Chair Day. I guess the rest of the friends and family will miss out unless they learn how to click on a blog. I will send them a link a couple more times just to see if they take the bait. There will be some people that just won't click and read but their loss.
There is a certain chance you take when you go on to the next blog site. This morning I was sent to a porno site in Brazil. I went back and clicked on a new link and it keep popping up a screen that I sure wouldn't want to come up on my computer at work. I really didn't mind it being here at home but I'm sure that all over the work-a-day world it would get you fired. Ok, I did post a picture of a cat house. Tiger is a guy so it really doesn't count.
My sister-in-law has some new puppies to add to her guard dog population. You know, you have to be on your guard to not step in the dog scat if you have more than one dog. Puppies consume large quantities of food and manage to extract a small amount of good and produce large amounts of poop. Two of them and it can fill a dogfood bag with crap for every bag fed. I have watched puppies grow and understand they seem to grow as you watch them. Barb agrees that a spray bottle filled with hot sauce and a little water can make the plants not chew-able by little pups. (Except for Mexican Chihuahuas they like the stuff) Yes, I know that is a racist comment but when you read blogs, you are likely to get a few comments of this ilk.
This weekend I went riding and Sunday I stopped at Sonic for lunch. Did you know that a bike won't set off the outside order headset? I had to ride up to the window to order. My Sonic order is a Number 1, w/mustard, fries and a coke (for lunch and cherry limeaid for dinner) Mom likes Tater Tots and if I'm going there I will order them and share with her. OK, back to the reason I wrote about sonic. The last time I was there I had Kendra and Katrina with me. This time I sat down in the playground area by a mother and two little girls that reminded me of them. The mother is a teacher at the high school and knows Barbara. (Barbara was on the negotiations team a couple of years back and most of the teachers know her)
As soon as it warms up a little, I'm going to go for another ride. It is just so darned great to ride to the lake, around and back. 14 or 15 miles is just about right. I get a little faster each time and enjoy it a lot.
Write if you get work, see you on the flip flop, or BYE!

Sunday Ride Pics

This is the bike trail at
Lake Shawnee.












This is the Tour Elite 2 I ride. Best Recumbent out there












Kenny & 37th Street














View of Golf Course from trail












About 14 Miles of beautiful riding and great weather.

Oops!

For all those of you out there with a desire to edit misspelled words, I apologize for not running the spell checker on the last post. I was in a hurry and just forgot. Damn!
Dennis

122 Arests for Clifford Mosqua

If until 2004, you ran into the most arrested man in Topeka, his breath smeled good. He was known for drinking mint mouthwash from the dollar store. At 58 his liver just gave out. He spent 908 days in the Shawnee County Jail at a cost of $63,905 to the citizens of this city. the next five on this list are:

#2 Kenneth Riley -90

#3 John Vanderbloom - 87

#4 Gragg Shepard -84

#5 Reginald Forbes -83

Somewhere in our legal system, we just forgot that sometimes people do stupid things and just need locked up. In the 1960's, he would have been committed to the Topeka State Hospital and perhaps kept there sober. Where did we go wrong? I'll bet there is a contingent of eople out there that say so what?

OK, so what. This gus isn't any hiugher on the list of people who do dumb things than a couple that went to a party in the Highland Crest park on Friday night and forgot to take their 2 year old boy home with them. They left him in the park.

My niece, Rebecca DeMauro recommentded a book called "Marley and Me" by John Grogan. It is a cute story about "life and love with the world's worse dog". I bought it yesterday and I laughed my butt off. Combine the energy of a yellow lab with an absolute fear of storms and you can imagine a story about a dog that Woodhouse said in chapter 24 of her book, "Some dogs just need put down". This animal lived in Florida where thunderstorms are a daily occurrence at 4 PM. As soon as Barbara finishes the book, I will send it to her sister Shirley who is right now trying to train two puppies as Guard dogs near Barstow, California.

That's all Folks. Write if you get work!

The Picture is my Pal Grissy getting ready for a walkies.
My wife and I were traveling in the car and she said she was going to ban my blog if I don’t quit telling everyone her age. I reminded her that I told the family and friends her age in an e-mail, but did not put her age in this blog. She doesn’t want me to even mention her let alone put her picture on my site.
She wants my site to be about me! I guess she doesn’t she doesn't have the same understanding of the dynamics of people, especially me. I think I am, from the beginning, what my genes said I would be, molded by my education, what I have read and all the interactions with people I have encountered along the way. To say that I am simply me is way less than I am. (Did that make sense?)
Now, I don’t want to make this sound like a rant or rage. I love my wife but am a pretty typical male and don’t understand a lot about women. I have my share of observations but they are just that and not rules or standards. Comedians have hours of observations about the difference between men and women and you can laugh for hours. In fact, most women almost defy logic just to say they are different. They can be indignant when accused of being so different they have uniformity in those differences. I think this is a little like the chaos theory that things are so different that there is repeating patterns.
Oh well, the main point I would like to make here is that if all I talk about on this blog is me it will be one boring blog. I would like to believe that a lot of what you see is what you get. I don’t think I am very difficult to understand and not a lot devious. Step on me and I will strike back. The strike will be proportionate to the perception of how hard I think you stepped. I do not tolerate fools well and while I love a good story well told hate it when the story is a lie told without humor. Funny Denny stories are encouraged.
I took my mother to the Doctor’s office yesterday and man did that waste a half of the day. I tried to get them to pin down a time they would have the tests done. 10:30 is the end and she can go home. BS! At 11:30 they took her to the last test and it was afternoon when I finally got home. Mom was one tired puppy at the end of all that. We will find out what the results are on Tuesday. Mom thinks she is hanging in there pretty stable. I think she is one pretty sick old woman and has a heart that is beating because of the three-wire pacemaker. Her heart is right in the middle of Congestive Heart Failure and the leaks and flow backs in her heart add to the problems. She is able to get from the bed to the bathroom and to her chair in front of the TV in the living room. Much more than that and she has to sit down and rest up from resting up. It really cracks me up that she claims to not sleep all night and a lot of the time I find her in her chair in front of the TV sound asleep. I guess I wouldn’t sleep well at night if I napped a lot during the day. Wait a minute. Do I need a nap?
I guess I had better get on with the day and find out what is going on in the real world. Or go for a bike ride. Whatever!

Women I love

The picture I chose to go with this edition is of the Girls, Katrina and Kendra at the lake feeding the Canadian Geese. Yes, we are adding to the environmental impact of the geese. The eat bread and then leave goose tootsie rolls all over the bike path. The "Special K's are in Morocco right now with their parents Julie and Gerald. We miss them but are enjoying their blog Reimer Ramblings so it is not entirely like they are gone.
I was up bright and early this AM to take my mother to the Heart Doctor's office for tests. It is the semi annual "stick it to Medicade" set of tests. I'll go back and get her about 10:30. She will insist on having lunch at Long John Silver's. I am glad to see she has her appetite back. She was taking a Sulfa Drug and it always upsets her stomach. She is about over that and ate some chicken and potato salad yesterday.
I was talking with a friend the other day and she described her relationship with her mother as one of many trips. "Mom sent me on so many guilt trips that I should have earned frequent flyer miles". In my case I had a mother that could hug you once and you would stay hugged all day. I am doing my best to help mom enjoy life and remain on her own. She is busy talking to her friends and making up stories about her cat. I just do my best to keep her happy and listen. Mom has a network of friends that she calls and call her. She also watches the TV 24 hours a day and really knows more about current events than I do. She sometimes mixes the stories up a little but that just adds to the fun of visiting.
Barb is home today because of a dental appointment. She is going to have a crown put on today. She has 8 days of medical leave and she is going to use them.
I think I'll go upstairs and see if she would like to got somewhere for breakfast. Love that woman and wouldn't want her to waste away.
The last message ended with the song we sang on Saturday Mornings at the Tower Theater. Hale, hale the gang's all here what the heck do we care, what the heck do we care. Hale, hale the gang's all here, what the heck do we care now!. You know that "Oh well what the hell do we care now" was the way all the guys sang it. Next Time

MUD- Mean Uncle Denny

When I was a teenager working in a gas station, my sister would come by with her girls. Janet was five and Carrie was three (Close enough for a story). I really loved those little girls and could listen to them giggle all day. A game we played was for me to sneak up on them and growl in an open window. They would scream and then giggle. One day Carrie got her feet twisted up in a blanket and she fell against the back of the stationwagon seat. It caused her to break a couple of teeth and I was mortified. After she calmed down she was asked what she wanted. Broken teeth and all she wanted ice cream. (True Petty Trait) As she ate the ice cream she would say, "Mean Uncle Denny" so yes, I came by the name MUD the hard way. By the way, Carrie has grown up into a fine young woman and I treasure her laugh as much as I treasured her giggle.
Yesterday Da'Barbs made pretzels here at Rabbit Run. In true Petty make fashion, my son Dave married a Barbara so between his mother Barbara and his wife he only has to remember one name. He calls his wife "Sugar Whoompis" a name, I can't bring myself to use so I will refer to them as Da'Barbs in the collective and Barbara for my wife and Barb for my daughter-in-law. I never thought of Barbara as a Barb, Barbie or any nick name until I called her school and asked to leave a note for Barbara. The clerk said,"who?, Oh you mean Barb in Special Education." Shows you what being married to someone for almost 40 years will do for your smarts.
It is really funny that Dave's wife and I are a lot alike in many ways. We both have an adventurous attitude about eating. Most of the time there is a check mark in the food column for yes. Dave and Barbara will go to Long John Silver and eat Chicken. They neither one like seafood or shrimp. They will eat tuna from a can and I can't abide the stuff. They would eat it when I traveled. I can eat a tuna casserole once in a blue moon but never a tuna fish sandwich.
Barb and I also have a love of laughter and think most things are funny. Barbara is more serious and left the room three times when Kris DeMauro cracked her up this last weekend. I think it embarrassed her to laugh that hard. The rest of us just joyously laughed at all the "Fire House" humor.
It is a rainy day here in the Heartland. There are 80% chances of 100% rain for most of the day. It really crimps my riding style to go out when the sidewalks are wet. It is also only about 60 degrees and wet makes a bad combination with cold. I really hate to call Kansas the Midwest. For some reason, Ohio and that area coined the name Midwest years before there was a true west. They aren't even the middle, they are at best the western part of the east. The geographical center of the continental US is in Kansas. Not too far from the World's largest ball of bailing string in Cawker City, Kansas. We also have the largest Hand Dug Well, and slope up all the way to the Colorado border. There is an annual bike ride called Bike Across Kansas(BAK). They ride from West to east across the southern part of Kansas. This year they almost had to call it off because of a bad batch of food. The rule was if you threw up or had diarrhea you had to stop riding. Someone also noted that there was a definite shortage of hand washing equipment at the break areas. That is one of my goals is some year to ride in BAK. I haven't heard from Jennifer since she was to complete the MS 150 last weekend. I wonder if she made it OK. I sponsored her ride this year.
The picture at the beginning of this post was supposed to go here but this blog site put it at the top of the page. Oh well, It is Barb and Dave on their last visit to Las Vegas to see her dad. The kids looked up the chapel of the bells where Barbara and I was married in 1968. The kids are going back to Vegas in June of next year and going to have their vows renewed by a Klingon. I'll let you know more as the date gets closer. It is cheap to fly there so I invite all of you to come the first weekend in June to see the kids re-do their thing. I know they really got married because it was here at Rabbit Run this is just a renewal kind of thing. Gotta Run. Wish I could have said ride but oh well, what the hell, what the heck do we care. (More on that next time)

Starting Point

This is the first Blog in my new site. I hope you can read and ride along with me as I journey through the rest of my life. I have no idea where this will go nor do I have a plan. It is a journey not a destination.
You can se my Tour Elite 2 (TE2) recumbent bike in the picture above. Barbara took it as I was riding at Lake Shawnee. The bike was built by my brother-in-law, . The first TE was a good bike but the brakes were in need of help. After 100 miles on that bike I sent it back to him and he rebuilt both the frame and the brakes. It is designed on the Tour Easy main design with several additions. It is about the best thing I have ever ridden. He also built a bike for Dave and I do wish Dave and I could ride more. Dave lives right off the Shunga Trail and has about 8 miles of great riding right outside his door.
Barbara is a "Bent Rider" also but would rather take a camera and look for great photos than ride for miles. It is nice that we share a hobby but our short term goals are different. This difference is probably a lot like or lives. Barb will be here for the long haul and I'll ride hard and die wet. Barb will be one of those little old ladies out in her garden when she is in her 90's. The other day she came to the lunch table and had a piece of a leaf in her ear. She rubbed the ear and found the debris. She asked me why I didn't tell her about the leaf. I told her that I thought it was her life's goal to be the kind of person that goes out in the garden and comes back in with caterpillars and leaf pieces in and on her. She agreed that I had a point and we moved on with lunch.
I have ridden about 700 miles on the TE2 now and try to get in as much riding as I can. Yesterday it was too cool in the AM so I waited until evening to ride. Barb went with me over to the lake and I rode the 8 miles perimeter of the lake in 40 minutes and Barb rode up to the dam and back (4.5 miles) with the camera. I see her downloading pictures from the digital camera so I can only suppose she took some fall pictures.
I am looking at our retirement income and payouts on the investments and pensions. Barb's is pretty straight forward but mine gets wierd because of the Civil Service and Military were both not a part of Social Security. There is something in the law that won't let you draw three pensions from the Government without the "Offset" in Social Security. After paying for the required 40 quarters I can't draw any benefits. If Barbara draws my Civil Service and Military Survivor's benefits (after I am gone) it will cancell her Social Security benefits. I know, whine and cry. I did not intend to start that this early.
I guess I need to stop here and go do some of the things I need to do in my other life as a house husband
Mean Uncle Denny (MUD)