Bike Pics & An Unfair Hill

Today I went out and spent a little "Me" time riding into Knoxville to a spa & yarn shop. I took the long way home to avoid a lot of Interstate riding & rush-hour traffic.

Shhh! Don't tell anyone, but also because I LOVE those curvy East-Tennessee back roads.

My first stop was to drop off my son's sneakers at Kroger. I parked in the same place as this bike (it's not mine), which had, of all things, a bag of chicken feed strapped on the back. Funniest thing is, I've hauled home chicken feed on my bike too!

Once a bike is moving and in the gear you need for a while (no approaching stops, etc), you really only need the throttle hand, so I got my phone out of my pocket & snapped some sexy action pics. Yes I really did.

In a couple pics you can see the gear (5th, which is the top gear) and speed (the one pic that shows speed, I was going 40MPH). Enjoy!!








This last one doesn't look that bad maybe, but it's about a 30degree downhill grade involving 3 curves and is less than 2 lanes wide. Very fun & kinda scary to ride!


These next two pics I took on our local greenway. I start at about the 1.6 mile marker and walk the trail down to .3 miles and back. At the 1.4 mile marker there is a hill. From my end approaching it, it's a small rise, about 10degrees and maybe 30 feet. But this is the view from the top...


And what's particularly unfair about this hill, is that on the way BACK, after powerwalking over 2 miles, and *almost* when the end is in sight, you're confronted with the UP side of the hill. It's what keeps me from skating the trail. I could see getting 1/2way up and rolling backward at a high rate of speed, missing the curve at the bottom and ending up in the river 20 feet away. Not a happy thought. LOL


One last pic! The honeysuckle is blooming now! I stuck this sprig of it in my (sloppy from riding) braid & took the pic with my phone!

WAY Far Behind

We've been up to a LOT and I haven't been chronicling it here like I probably should. So today's post is a lot of pics, each with a caption or a little blurb per group. Hopefully if I'm caught up, I won't feel overwhelmed at the thought of writing in my blog. LOL

We'll start with some B's Eye View photography. Betsy LOVES to take pics of our aquarium, for some reason. And even though there are like 15 fish in it, she always snaps a pic of this Kissing Gourami. Also in the mornings when it's asleep down behind something, she worries if it's dead.












We've had some really nice weather, in the 80s during the day and 60s at night. So of course nice weather and Friday night equal "Can we put up a tent & sleep in it?" I told the kids yeah, sure... so Diantha, Veronica, and Amy from next door took like an hour setting this up, played in it about another half an hour, and then the winds kicked up and there were storm warnings issued.

[Here on the Right are Diantha, 3 yo Beverly ("Betsy") and my beautiful and handsome 9yo son, Josiah.] Down came the tent & in came the kids. Who knew?

Below, I also caught a good front & back shot of Princess Beverly (with leaves caught in the back of her skirt, LOL).




We took the tank off the 650 and painted it metallic gunmetal gray. Here is the tank. Also the bike, reassembled.

I am going to paint green-into-silver-into-purple ghost flames on it & clear coat it yet.

We also painted my son's Icon helmet, which we were blessed to find pawned for 1/3 the retail price. It was flat black but now it's AWESOME. It actually took me a minute or two to figure out how he got the helmet to look bigger than a bathtub. See if you get it. LOL

So Diantha, Des and I were in the TwitKAL (Twitter Knit-a-long).

A bunch of Twitter knitters voted on 5 different categories of patterns (shawl, shrug, hat, gloves, sweater) and then voted again on the top winner from each category.

The winner was the Traveling Woman shawl from Ravelry. I blogged my finished shawl already, here.

This is Diantha's, which was knitted in Jojoland Melody superwash merino wool sock yarn on size 7 needles. Beautiful!

My Kids Are Sicker Than Your Kids

Today Des came down to help me clean out/organize our bedroom and put stuff from it into summer storage, etc. Pretty soon we have to take B's crib down so I wanted to get a little more organized.

We came across a box of styrofoam wig heads we used last season for craft shows, to display knitted hats & the like. They looked a little worse for wear, especially since B got to them with a green sharpie. So we were going to throw them out, but the kids decided to have a little "fun" first...

The pics are fairly self-explanatory so they only have a caption/title below...


Des proudly displaying the dug-out styrofoam "eyeball"...


This gives "blank-eyed stare" a whole new meaning...


Diantha said, "We have to color the eye sockets! I have a brown marker!"
Artemas said, "But ocular fluid is BLACK!" LoL, homeschool...


So I guess the next logical step was bloody sockets & the head on a pike...


Drunk driving kills...


Apparently we're growing our own supply of Soylent Green...


Ok, so now you know... my kids are SICK, dude! This should serve as a warning to everybody... except...


the cat, who was totally unconcerned.

The End.