Utah wins!

It shouldn't have even been close. Sorry, Michigan fans, it's going to be a long year. This should have been a blow out. The only thing that kept it close was Utah giving up almost as many penalty yards as Michigan had total offense (157 to 200). I think the Maize is more like a pee yellow these days. I wish I could have made the game. The only Michigan game I went to was with a high school girlfriend to see Michigan throttle Long Beach State. I also had a fever, so it wasn't the most enjoyable. Plus, come on....Long Beach State!!??
Also, BG beat #25 Pitt this weekend. That along with the Lions going 4-0 in the pre season makes it look like a promising season for me.

On the family front, we have been busy. After a promising first day at school, Dekker is now fighting going every morning. Only the promise of hiking after school gets him out of the car. We have been doing a great 1 hr. hiking loop in the neighborhood after work the last 3 or 4 nights. Hiking has quickly gone to the top of Dekker and Haydenne's list of things to do. Here are some photos. If you click on the one with Dekker looking away you will see the moose we came across in the trail.


Today was the last day for inflatable fun at work, so we took the kids up for one last hoorah. Afterwards, we went up to Main Street where they had a Mustang club of America national convention going on. There were 500 vintage mustangs in town. My first car was a 1979 Mustang POS. Dekker looks pretty comfortable in that Mustang. There is definitely some Detroit blood in there (that and the mullet he sported until he was 3). On a completely different topic, I understand that Mormon girls and young downriver girls sport the same hairstyle. I'll have to take some photos and compare. Bad hair styles have no state boundaries! Although, I'm not sure how much credibility you should give a bald guy talking about hair styles.
.

PS: Here is the forecast for Monday. Feels just like yesterday I was bitching about snow! It was 88 degrees today.
Monday Night: A chance of rain and snow showers before midnight. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 32. North northwest wind between 5 and 9 mph. Chance of precipitation is 40%.

First Day of School

Today was Dekker's first day of school. He is going to a brand new Montessori School down the street. We went to the open house yesterday and it was great. Dekker was excited to go back this morning. We can't get him to tell us anything he did today, but he said he had a lot of fun and wants to go back.

Since it was the first weekend in a month, we were together, we crammed alot into it.
We did alot of hiking, some swimming, some golf and the Park Silly Market. Dekker wanted to "go to Daddy's work" on Sunday. So when Haydenne was napping we went up to work and Dekker played on the inflatable fun and then we went up the chairlift and came down the Alpine Slide.
Other than that, not much else to talk about. Here are some photos from the weekend (click on the photos to enlarge).

Real photos of the kids.

Ok, those aren't really the kids.
I posted new photos in the Flickr account. Just click on the photos on the right. I posted some old ones I found on the computer as well.
Anyways, everyone is back home and Dekker keeps asking when it's going to snow. I'll take that as a sign that he prefers the mountains to the beach. He came up to work yesterday because he wanted to see snow and ski lifts. Haydenne will be turning 2 in a couple of months, so we should have her on skis this winter.
I survived the Tour of Utah. Finished 67th overall. There were 115 starters. I felt good but not great. It was a race where I needed to feel great. But 67th isn't bad concerning I'm one of the few racers who work and have a family. The vast majority of racers are paid professionals and about 10 years younger. On Monday, I felt like I was hungover, but I haven't had a drop of alcohol in a few weeks. It's going to take the body awhile to recover from the effort.

Here are a few photos of the kids on their vacation back east. Apparently, no one in Southampton goes to the beach until after noon. So the kids had the beach pretty much all to themselves all morning. It looks like they are on a deserted beach. Check out Dekker's style jumping into the pool. We might have a little jibber on our hands. I might have to buy him some twin tips this winter. (PS: I'm in the process of writing a Detroit/Springfield to Mountain Talk translation book. Coming soon to a bookstore near you. It will have definitions of all the terms only heard in mountain towns: jibber, gaper, twin tip, huck, chillax, zipper line, etc...)

The family is back!

It's been a long three weeks. The kids are back home. It's only been three weeks, but it's amazing how much older the kids look.

Bigger than an 1-75 overpass!!

Today is the first stage of the Tour of Utah. A little 101 mile jaunt around Sanpete County. Here is a link to one of the ongoing reports which will have results and photos: http://www.cyclingnews.com/road.php?id=road/2008/aug08/tourofutah08/default

I wont' have time to take photos during the race, but here are some photos I took during a recon trip to Sundance on Sunday. The diner is a cool new diner in Oakley, Utah. It was really good. They moved an original 1930's roadside diner to the middle of rural Utah. It's popular with the motorcycle touring crowd. I have a thing for neat little diners with good food.

Look ma!

Wow. Two posts in a day. I must be bored. I did a TV interview with ParkCity TV. If you hit the link below and put in the date (Wed., August 6) and click on the Mountain Views with Ori (6:00pm) it will take you to the show. We start around the 29 minute mark, so you don't have to watch the whole thing. My friend Billy and I are being interviewed. Billy has a little more interesting back story than I do. He is a Nordic Combined World Cup winner and Vancouver will be his 4th Olympics. He's only 28! 4 Olympics before your 30 is pretty amazing. When Billy was 16, he was at the Olympics. When I was 16, I was getting chased by the Trenton police out of middle school parking lots with a case of Bud. I wonder if Officer Menna is still sporting that '70's porn star cop 'stash and chasing kids around on Friday nights?

Anyways, I'm just glad I didn't bite my tongue or have a bugger on my nose during the interview. I think you can have a drinking game with the number of times I say "mimic" and "fantastic."

Here is the site. Again, I'm the bald guy with big ears and glasses on the right in case you haven't seen me in a while.

http://parkcity.tv/wp-content/live/

The Tiger's are dead to me!

I hate to only be a fair weather fan, but I can't take this any longer.
The Tiger's are dead to me.
And just to think, I get to go from being disappointed with the Tigers, to being disappointed by the Lions. Oh, to be a Detroit fan... I guess I always have the Wings.
Plus to make matters worse, Colleen is a Boston fan being from Mass. Patriots, Celtics, Red Sox..tough to compete with that.

(I reserve the right to change my mind if they win more than 7 straight, but I doubt that. )

Pancakes at Night

I'm sure my readership (all 3 of you) is dropping with no new kid photos and updates. Just me and some narcissisms. I heard from Colleen today and the kids are having a great time in the ocean. For some reason, the East coast has horrible AT&T cell coverage. She's in the Hampton's for god's sake, how are all the people using their iPhone's? So anyways, our conversations are fuzzy and brief. But Colleen did say playing with the cousins has pushed them a bit. Dekker was always the cautious one. Even in gymnastics, it took awhile for him to be comfortable jumping into the foam pit. He just kinda step into them. Well, apparently that shouldn't be a problem. After a little convincing from his cousin Declan, Dekker jumped off the Lifeguard tower onto a mound of sand. Oh, and my little 20 month old princess jumped off the diving board into the deep end. Don't worry, Colleen was right there and she had floaties (Haydenne, not Colleen).

Here in PC, I'm still getting ready for the race. The training is pretty much over. Have some media things going on this week (and work). You would think I was going to Beijing. The race is a pretty big deal, but it seems alot bigger for the people who aren't racing it. I had a photo shoot today with the team, and I have TV interview's on Tuesday and Wednesday. It was a bit like this two years ago when I did this race. I did multiple radio and TV interviews. Here is a photo from 2 years ago during a Media Day for the race. I think someone forgot to powder my head.
The reminds me of a funny story most of you never heard. For 5 or 6 years, I managed the Headquarters for the Sundance Film Festival. That included taking care of all the publicists/media, whom I got to know pretty well over the years. I have an emergency phone call during the festival to run down to the Entertainment Tonight office located in the hotel. I run down there thinking the walls are falling down. Nothing is wrong. The emergency that had everyone and their mother looking for me was that Anthony Edwards (of ER and Revenge of the Nerds) was late to an interview and they needed my bald head to get the lighting done before he got there. So they put me 5 feet in front of Jan Carl the host. She's pretty much invading my personal space and there we sit, staring at each other for 20 minutes as they fix the lights (and powder my head). This is just when Austin Powers Goldfinger came out, and Jan has that mole. The only thing going through my head (other than "Where the hell is Anthony Edwards?!"), was "moley, moley, moley."

Well, I thought it was funny. I'll have to tell the story one day when I heard "Todd, you have MC Hammer holding for you." or what my female employees thought of me refusing to give Heath Ledger a room.

The photo shoot was in SLC, so of course I went to the Blue Plate and had a big stack of pancakes at 8pm.
It's 9:30pm, time to hit the hay.

The word for today: PAIN

So after a tough 6+ hours on the bike yesterday, Jeff Louder calls me up and wants to know if I'm up for some motorpacing. I said: "Let's do it!" Motorpacing is a way to improve power and speed. It involves getting behind a scooter and having the driver keep it over 30mph. It's much easier as the first guy. I was #2 for most of the day behind a guy who is probably one of the top 10 cyclists in the US right now. Not a whole lot of fun. It was almost a 4 hour ride with 2.5 of those behind the scooter. Our scooter pilot was able to get some video and posting it on his site (bikehusla.blogspot.com).
Here is part of the video. I'm in yellow during one of the few times I was behind the scooter. We were going 40mph. Now is time to take it easy for the next 10 days. I put in 27 hours on the bike in the past 9 days and 2 of those I didn't ride. Time to take a nap.

Boring....

The family is still back East and will be for a couple of more weeks. Dekker and Haydenne are having a great time with their cousins. They leave tomorrow for Southampton and some quality beach time. So really not much to report. I did a little 105 mile training ride with my friends Burke and Jeff, who do this kind of stuff for a living. We left at 8:45am and got back to my house around 3:00pm. The ride included7000 feet of climbing. For you folks back in Michigan, that's the equivalent of climbing 25 times up Boyne Mtn. For the Tour of Utah (www.tourofutah.com) the "easy" stage has 6,000ft of climbing in 100 miles and the hard day has 14,000 feet of climbing in 101 miles. In total, in 5 days we do 336 miles (one day is only like 12 miles) and more than 30,000 feet of climbing. This is no casual tour. This is a full blown professional race. The "easy" day, we will do the 100 miles in under 4 hours. D'oh!!!
It's funny to think that when I lived in Michigan, I used highway overpasses as "hill" training. So I guess the Tour of Utah is the equivalent of 1,000 times up the I-75 overpass. Funny to think..
Sorry to bore you with my bike stuff, but there's not much else going on.

One last thing, the Tigers are starting to piss me off!!!!!

I need a firewire!

Not much going on in Utah, but the family is having a great time back East. Dekker is having a blast with his cousins and the way Haydenne is going, I think she will be in college in a couple of years. I hope to get some photos from them shortly to post. I have some photos I can post, but I have the old camera and I'm missing the firewire. They sell them for $30 at Staples, but I decided $3.99 including shipping from Ebay was the way to go, but I have to wait for it to be mailed. Once I get it, I'll post some more photos.
This is Arts Festival weekend in Park City. It's one of the busiest weekends of the year and one of the biggest festivals in the Rockies.
I've got a big ride set for Saturday. I'm going to crush myself with three of my professional friends and one guy who might join us is a Tour de France stage winner and is about to head to Beijing for the Summer Games. I'm sure I'll get my ass handed to me.
After that, Detroit's own Romantics are playing at the Canyons. Another of the free, bring your own booze concerts we have in town. Should be fun. Speaking of booze, Utah is about to hop into the 20th Century. It looks like those stupid memberships are on their way out as well as they just increased the size of a shot (still no free pour-everything is metered) to 1.5 oz. and now we can buy full strength beer directly from the breweries in town. If you haven't been, Utah is basically like Canada. You have to buy all your alcohol in state liquor/beers stores. I actually don't mind it and really prefer the state stores. It's a pain in the ass, yes. But we don't have all those ugly LIQUOR/LOTTERY stores on every corner like in many parts of the country. I didn't realize what a blight those stores are until you get away from them. Even the bad parts of SLC don't look bad, because you don't have liquor stores on every corner of an intersection.
Anyways... have a great weekend.