Senior Olympian Sprinter

We just returned from a few days in Chicago, where we got to hang with the kids and enjoy a white Christmas.  It was great to get together for a few days and visit and check up on everyone.   I think everyone had  a great time  with our Yankee Swap and normal gift exchange.  The Yankee swap is where we basically open gag gifts for a couple of hours, it is a fun event,   Oh, and we also ate pretty well.  I got on my 'official' scale yesterday and managed to add 4 pounds to the darn thing in a week, looks like I had some fun this Christmas.   As I mentioned, it was a white Christmas in Chicago.  A little bit of new snow each of the 3 days we were in town.   Driving was only a challenge on one day.  Otherwise, the usual cloudy, cold winter time weather for the upper Midwest.   I do not miss the cold and snow mess.  I will go visit it and happily leave to the more temperate winters in TN. ...

Buckets, hoes and shovels Last week I was back to work after 6 weeks of Family Medical Leave.   Flying home on Friday I was absolutely exhausted,  it must have gotten travel soft during my time off.   I am traveling again this week for a short two day trip and hopefully I will be in better travel shape and have a little energy left when I get back late Wednesday.  Linda has her big 8 week follow up at the knee surgeon's this week and I have managed my schedule so I can be at the doctor visit.  This is the visit where you can ask the hard questions and hopefully get answers on lingering questions or issues.  She is not happy that she cannot get here new knee to straighten completely and she has been having some problems with hip pain.   Is this stuff all related??  Hopefully the cutter can shed some light on the situation.  Her overall progress is fantastic and she is basically independent now. I have been doing s...

Yep, I have been doing some mining as of late. Our house is build with a very short crawl space and access to some of the HVAC is in this area under the house.    I can only make myself only so thin, and that amount of thin would not fit into what it is needed to fit into.  Only way to get there was to dig.   So in the last couple of weeks I have been mining out dirt from under the house.  I have removed about 7 yards to date and need to get out a few more to really have great access.  Once I got out enough dirt to see all of the duct work, it was clear what had happened in the last couple for years before we bought he house.  The wild animals--foxes, skunks, groundhogs,etc had burrowed under the house and also had managed to destroy the flexible hoses used in the HVAC duct work below the floor.  There is a distribution duct with 7 outlets to various parts of the house and only one was intact.  The remainder had all the flexible hou...