ClubJuggler

Ok, so I've been really slack about updating LJ. So, here's a quick synopsis of the last couple of weeks.

jklgoduke and Big-B got back from the in-laws on the 5th. On the 6th, we took Big-B to the annual Take A Kid Mountain Biking Day celebrations down at Harris Lake. While there, the person in charge of the local Mountain Bike Patrol was showing me a move to help get over large logs called "pedal surge". This is where you crank down very hard on the pedals and the torque causes your front wheel to pop up so you can get over the log. Now, normally when I go over logs, I just pull up on the handlebars. Apparently you're not supposed to combine the two! I did and instead of the front wheel just barely popping up like most first timers do, my front wheel went up, and up, and kept going until I fell over onto my back! I was still clipped in and hands frozen to the bars. I don't really remember what happened to the bike, but it didn't land on me, thankfully. I did, however, get my breath knocked out and messed up my back pretty badly. It was then that I discovered my erstwhile teacher was actually an M.D.! He checked me over, decided I hadn't broken anything, and handed me four motrin. He said it would probably hurt for a few weeks. Two weeks on now and it still hurts, but it's been getting better. Tomorrow night will be a real test. The past couple of Monday night orchestra rehearsals have left me in major pain because I hunch down on my stool while playing the string bass. Hopefully I can either get a better posture or things will just feel better tomorrow. We'll see.

Last weekend, we had friend's over. thebroomecloset, ovrclokd, snorklewacker and motley_muse all came and we juggled in the back yard and had dinner. It was quite fun. jklgoduke and I don't juggle nearly enough anymore! It was nice to have a bunch of people around that you could easily walk up to and start throwing things at! :-)

Then, on Sunday of last weekend, it was the last day of the annual Parade of Homes, so we spent all of sunday afternoon going around looking at expensive houses. We're not interested in moving or anything, but it's fun to go look at what builders are building and thinking of how we might use them. Lots of stuff we see we hate and lots of stuff we see we like. One day, eventually, we might move out of our current house and if so things like this will help us figure out what we want in a house. Near the top of the list: a bigger laundry room, with counters!

On Thursday of this week, we went to the NC State Fair. It was "take 4 cans to the fair and get free admission" day so I went over for lunch and tried out the "deep-fried (in funnel cake batter) peanut butter and jelly sandwich". It was surprisingly good. I then went back to work and then met jklgoduke and Big-B there later in the evening. It wasn't that much time at the fair, but it was enough to get a taste of it and not spend too much money!

This weekend was the annual NC Geocacher's Organization "Fall Fling". It was held south of Greensboro this year. We camped for last year's but decided to forgo camping this year and instead just daytrip it. It worked out pretty well, except that we forgot our chairs. Still need to log the geocaches we found. Coming back, just before Chapel Hill I saw a tire bouncing on the side of the road on the opposite side of I-40. While I was in the process of formulating the thought of where did that come from, I saw the sparks shooting over a red pickup truck that had just lost the tire and was now skidding on his exposed brake rotors! Yikes! From what we could tell, it looked like he was just skidding to safety, but it would be interesting to read any news reports about that. Of course, I haven't had any time to look for them!

Today, jklgoduke was fairly sleepy since one of our smoke detector batteries decided to die in the middle of the night, so it started chirping and woke her up. So, Big-B and I went out and hid a cache. It's not going to be just an average cache as the logging requirements will be a bit challenging, but I'll talk more about that later when it gets posted. We then came back and I put up an anemometer on our house. I've now got all 3 parts of our weather station up, but I still need to run the cables for them and connect them to the main box. I then plan on connecting that to a linux box and then hooking it up to an APRS station, but that might take a while. I'm hoping everything still works since the weather station has basically been in storage since we moved from our old house 5 years ago!

Anyway, that pretty well puts me up to date for the last couple of weeks. Next week we'll be in DC with jklgoduke's choir. If you live in the DC area and I haven't e-mailed you with info about her choir and you think you might be interested in hearing them, leave me a comment and I'll post more.

For the past week or so, our cable modem connection at home has been a bit flaky. Today, I finally called tech support and after getting no help at all from the 1st level tech, I asked to speak to a manager. The manager was much more helpful. The upshot is that it looks like our cable modem (which we own) may be dying and so I'm going to go pick up one from Time Warner and replace it. Unfortunately, they're in the middle of a billing system switchover and can't associate the new modem with our account until Tuesday, so tomorrow may be bad connectivity-wise. Unplugging the modem and letting it set for 10 minutes seems to help for a while, but we'll see how that goes.