Congratulations, Emily.  We are so proud of your achievements and your  grades.  Your positive attitude will carry you far through life. We love you!

Rio Strada teammate Derek Novaes snapped some great pic’s at this weekend’s races in El Dorado Hills. (I thought I saw his camera jammed into the hay bails.) See the rest of the set at his SmugMug Site. Now I’m going out shopping for a gut filter to give Derek as a gift.

Though I dropped out of the race with only about 10 minutes left due to the extreme heat (I actually don’t remember pulling out) I felt fantastic right up to that point.

Something’s up… It’s April Fools Day and the day is nearly over and no one has even made a feeble attempt to pass off a gag or practical joke. I don’t trust my family. Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not planning something.

This morning we did the continental breakfast again before heading back to Universal for a few hours. We did, after all, have two-day for the price of one tickets. Mostly we just had to go on the studio tour to see King Kong one more time and perhaps another trip on the Mummy for good measure. We had to leave by one in the afternoon to get to our rental around 4. [Read more →]

Okay, really, why don’t the kids get up this easily on school days? For most of us it was the excitement of hitting Universal Studios for the day, but for Patrick it seemed it was the pancake machine in the hotel lobby.

After fueling up on every form of carbohydrates known to man, we made it to the park right at opening and headed straight to the tram tour. Emily, having visited Universal the most recently of us was impressed with [Read more →]

On any other day, you can’t get the kids up and moving to save your life, but this morning at 3:30 am, Patrick sprang out of bed and even the normally slow-to-rise Emily was up with a minimal amount of cajoling. They were excited beyond belief.

It was the beginning of a 10-day vacation with Lisa’s family to a beach-front rental house in San Diego. We would leave early to swing by Universal Studios in LA and then meet up with the others in San Diego on Sunday. [Read more →]

I raced for more than a decade in the 80’s and 90’s and never got a photo as good as this one in my first race back in more than 21 years.  And yes, that’s a Rio Strada jersey, the club that I helped found 30 years ago.
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They didn’t conquer the world in 2011, but they got away enough times to avoid bordeom. A week in Mazatlan at Pueblo Bonito resort offered winter warmth. They did a week in Carlsbad by the Sea again.  Other than a major power outage, it was relaxing. On the way home they did an overnight at Kathy Brown’s in [Read more →]

We’ve been hard at work creating our largest, longest, and scariest haunted house since we started in 2003. We are asking for a donation of canned food this year to benefit the Elk Grove Food Bank. Bring multiple food-stuffs to enter multiple times. We’ll be scaring guests, young and old, on 4 nights from Friday, October 28 through Halloween night from 6-10 pm. We can’t wait to see every body… and every head… and every limb… [Read more →]

Tuesday, Aug. 30—A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to the Sun City Ukulele session today. I had the golf cart packed with my uke and song book, started to leave the garage. I stopped at the door to pick up some trash which I would drop in the big garbage container out front. Stupidly, I left the cart in reverse, failed to put the brake on, and started walking the two little bit of trash to curbside. The cart got moving, quietly, picked up momentum on our slanted driveway—and crashed into me. [Read more →]

Sometimes I wonder,
What’s in the sky.
Sometimes I whish,
that I could fly.

–Emily Lynn