Don’t you just love the weekends where there isn’t much to do and you just lay around and get caught up on Tivo!? We stayed in town this weekend instead of heading down to Claxton. We spent Friday night doing a little restaurant hopping downtown with our friends that live off of Howell Mill. We went to this one burger place called Flip. Great burgers! A little small on the portions but great tasting food. The place is located at the end of the street that Craig, Eric and Christian lived while at Tech. We then had desert at Crepe Revolutions. This place had larger than normal crepes for a good price. Wonderful evening!

Saturday I split some wood that we brought up from Claxton. It’s live oak and it should burn well. Then we just did a little house cleaning and caught up on Tivo. Today nothing is planned and we love it that way. For a while we’ve been working our butts off in Claxton and when we stay home its some project around here or I’m in the office on the weekends. This weekend is nice in that it actually feels like a winter weekend!

This coming up week at work I’ve got to head to Knoxville on Tuesday/ Wednesday to meet a driller to drill two 40′ bore holes and install the casing for inclinometers. Later we’ll install the inclinometer sensors in the casing that measure the tilt of the ground and upload the data every 2 hours via cell signal to a website. This area we are observing is behind a department store where a retaining wall has failed and is holding up the store. I’m a little nervous about installing all this stuff because I don’t have the slightest clue what I’m doing. I’ve never seen the equipment or the process to install it, I’ll just have to wing it with the drillers once we get up there. I just hope it all goes well. Beside this project, work has been pretty slow. All the erosion problems brought about by the rain in September have been designed and we really aren’t seeing any more work come in from that event. We just hope that the warmer weather comes quick and people start building again. Historically this is a slow time anyway but I hope it picks up when it gets warm.

We got a bunch of snow yesterday and overnight up here in Canton. I tried to get out to work this morning but it was a no go. I left my driveway and noticed footprints in the middle of the road. I thought was weird since it wasn’t a school day and the kids wouldn’t be at the bus stop. I continued driving and got to the small downhill section in the neighborhood and started sliding. At this point I noticed several cars on the side of the road parked. Sometimes people do that since our driveways aren’t that long but in this case they just didn’t seem normal. I slid for about 10 feet and caught traction. I turned the corner and headed up a slight hill. While going about 5mph I shifted into 4×4 and continued up the hill. This hill was about as steep as the one I came down but about 5 times longer. At the top of the hill I noticed about 5-10 cars parked on the side of the road. I continued up the hill a ways before I started to slip and catch on all four wheels. I was able to hobble along for about 50′ before I just couldn’t go any farther. I slowly backed down into a driveway to turn around and go home. I hit more ice on the way back and I ended up just parking my car on the sidewalk behind 5 other cars.
Luckily I’ve been going to jobsites lately so I changed my shoes from dress shoes into the boots I had in the car. I also had two pair of gloves that I put on. I opened the door and slipped and almost fell. I took a picture of all the cars (unless my boss needed proof) and called into work and told them I’d be late. I started the cold walk back to the house. Now I know where all the footprints came from!
Now I’ve been home watching the news and waiting for it to warm up a bit. I just went back to the Jeep about an hour later and it’s still all iced over and I met other neighbors doing the same thing. So I think I’m going to be stuck at the house today. Luckily I don’t have much to do at the office.
How is everyone else fairing in this snow?

I think it’s been a family tradition for I don’t know how long to drive around and look at all the lights people put up for Christmas. Ever since we bought our own house we’ve put a limited amount of lights outside. Usually I put up 3 strings around our 5 front bushes. This year I decided to decorate our front bradford pear as well. I used 400 lights and wrapped up the trunk and wrapped them around several branches up the tree. I’m not a fan of the multicolored lights so I only use the white lights.

That leads me into a list of several my Christmas light pet peeves:

1. Blue lights. Nothing says Christmas like blue lights, right? WRONG. Blue lights have no place at Christmas. There is a person in our neighborhood that ALL THEY HAVE is one strand of blue rope lights around the trunk of their bradford pear. I mean these people actually took the time to wrap this hideous light strand around their tree and then consciously plug them in everyday!

2. Blinking Icicle Lights: I don’t know about you but do real icicles blink where you live? No? So why do your icicle light representations blink?

3. Net Lights: Now this is one of those things that look great when done right or can make you look lazy. Case in point, in our neighborhood a house’s net light strand is longer than their bush row so what is the most logical solution, just haphazardly throw the net lights over the Pompous Grass that ends their bush row. Classy.

4. More than 2 Blow Ups: Seriously, nothing says lazy/tacky like 21347 blow ups in your yard! And why oh why would have a blow up Manger Scene? That’s the sign of a true Christian, Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus blown over in the wind. Great job.

Please follow these easy rules and I won’t have to vandalize your property!

Last weekend I entered my first adventure race! Two guys from my Sunday School class asked me to join them for a team of three for this race. They asked me about 2 months ago and we’ve been training ever since. With all the rain we didn’t really get enough training which was unfortunate.

The race includes mountain biking and trail running. Some trails are bike only and others are either run or bike. There are 12 checkpoints to reach and they take precedence over your finish time. Each team has 6 hours to complete the race. We estimated this year for our team was about 10 miles biking and 10 miles running.

If you’ve seen Band of Brothers, this race is held at the location of that old base. Part of the race is up 3 miles to top of the mountain.

The race starts with a 1 mile out run to a checkpoint and then run back to 1 mile to the starting line again to get your map. This separates people so we aren’t all right on top of each other. Once we got our map we decided to get checkpoint 1 first which was a 1.5 mile there are back checkpoint on the bikes. Everyone else went up Currahee mountain first. This worked out great for us in that at some checkpoints the team have to complete a small challenge, with all the teams together in the beginning, some had to wait in line to finish the challenges. We headed up Currahee after checkpoint 1 and about 1 mile up the trail I got a bad cramp in my calf. I was able to massage it better in a minute or so but it was aggravating me the rest of the race. We reached the top of the mountain, refilled our water and took a minute break eating energy gels (which are digusting!) and power bars before our long decent. We reached about 30mph on the decent and I was on the brakes pretty hard.

Most of the next checkpoints were mainly running and I wasn’t prepared as well for that I believe. Toward the end of the race we were running out of water and we were getting just plain exhausted. The last checkpoint was just one too many for me. I’ve always been intrigued with pushing my body farther than I thought I could do. I liked to be able to push the physical pain out of my mind and continue running, hiking, biking or whatever the activity is. I was doing that for the last few miles and was working well. That last checkpoint I found that I just couldn’t push myself anymore. By this time we were about 18 miles and 4.5 hours into the race. I would tell my legs to run but I just couldn’t do it. All I could do was walk. We finally got back to our bikes and headed back to the finish line. During the bike ride I was feeling real weird, like nothing I’d felt before. I think I’m pretty in tune with my body with all the hiking and biking I’ve been doing and the signals I was getting weren’t good. I was nauseous and slightly dizzy and my muscles just weren’t listening to me. Luckily the finish line was mostly downhill from where we were.

We finish the race in 5 hours and 20 minutes. It was about 30 minutes faster than those guys did last year. We got our picture taken, then we headed to the car. I put down my bike, grabbed a Gatorade and sat in the grass under a tree. I just felt completely exhausted and I thought a little rest would get this back to normal. I dumped water over my head and drank a full Nalgene and half the Gatorade bottle. Then my hands started going numb, kind of like when they “fall asleep” that tingley feeling you get. Then it started spreading all over. I laid down to rest more and the numbness became more intense. My friend went to grab the medic just to be safe. The other teammate stayed with me to make sure I was okay. It kind of peaked while he was getting the medic. My muscles started flexing and I wasn’t controlling it. My hands for forced open and I couldn’t move them. By the time the EMT came over that was slowly going away but I was starting to shiver all over. My back muscles hurt because I was shivering so much. I was talking to the EMT the whole time and he checked my blood pressure which was fine but he told my friends to feed some more of those energy gels. After about 10 minutes I started getting back to normal. What the EMT thinks is that my blood sugar dropped real low and I probably had a little bit of heat exhaustion. He stayed around for about another 15 minutes to make sure I was fine. On the way home I drank another gallon of water and was extremely hungry! When I got home I fixed myself a HUGE dinner. After a few days they posted the results online and we were 9th out of 14 teams that finished and 4th in the all men teams.

Besides the EMT episode, everything was awesome! I really want to do this again but maybe next time exercise a little more.