Trying to lose my clydesdale status

I have never had some one come up to me and say, "You are big fatty!" or even gently said, "You know, you would probably feel better if you lost a few pounds".  In fact, most of my life, if I had said to someone that I was overweight, they probably would have accused me of having some sort of eating disorder or weight loss fetish.  Even now when I tell people I am over 200 lbs some of them look at me and are like "what?!? no way".  But it is true, I currently weigh about 207 lbs.  According to BMI tables (which really are not that useful) I am overweight.  According to my questionably reliable body fat measuring scale, I have 20% body fat, which puts me on the high end of what is considered healthy.  Now most people, if they were to see me would say, "You are not overweight, you don't even have a gut", but there has been more than one person who hadn't seen me for years who said, "Wow, I didn't recognize you, you are so big".  Now, I like to think these people didn't mean that as an insult, I think they meant it more as "you are not a scrawny little stick anymore".  But even if they did mean it as an insult, and even if the BMI says I am fat, and my scale says my body fat percentage is a little high, I still think I am pretty healthy and don't have any weird weight self esteem issues.

Me as a stick. I have no plans to return to that state

Except for one.

I hate getting my $@%#$ kicked when I ride uphills on a bike.  It drives me crazy.  People who having only biked for a short time will leave me in the dust on a hill.  I remember once when I thought I was in good shape, I was puffing up a long hill and this old white haired man in his street clothes on a granny bike passed me and I was like "What the #%@&#^$?!?!?!?".

So this year I have done something to force myself to change that.  I have signed up for the Park City Point to Point mountain bike race (http://thepcpp.com/).  78 miles of single track with 14,000 feet of vertical gain.  That is freaking 2.5 miles of vertical gain.  If it was on the road it would kill me.  Being on single track, it will completely and utterly obliterate me.  And I don't want to be obliterated.  So since climbing is all about your power-to-weight ratio, I am fixing to lose me a little weight.  Not a lot.  But enough to no longer be in the Clydesdale category (In most races, the Clydesdale category is anyone 200+ lbs).

So here is my crazy weight loss plan:  Quit eating so much.

I still have to work out some of the details.  Like overcoming the fact that I really like eating food and I eat  even when I am not hungry but I just want to taste something good.  And the fact that I don't really know how much food I eat now, because it too much trouble to keep track of it, so I don't really have any way knowing if I am eating less.
So I think how I am going to overcome these obstacles is weigh myself everyday and that that constant reminder will help me have second thoughts about eating when I am not really hungry.  I know that this "plan" probably won't work for most people, but I know myself I and I know if I have a constant reminder of what I want to do, and where I am relative to that goal, I can self flagellate  myself to get it done.
So my weight today is 207.  Tune in soon to see if my willy nilly weight loss plan has been effective.

A Christmas Poem For Our Neighbors

Every Christmas season, as is the custom in our land, we try to give a little gift to all our neighbors.  Most people give cookies or treats of some kind, but we have tried to avoid that because you can only eat some many treats before you get sick of them and have to start throwing them away and then you feel bad you are throwing away your neighbors treats. So we have tried to do different ideas.

One year we we worked with a neighbor and made like 200 decorative white paper bags with sand and little candles and gave 4 to each neighbor, with a note about putting them out on Christmas Eve so we could make our whole neighborhood look really cool.  It was a great idea, and would have been really cool if there hadn't been a huge snow storm that dumped two feet of snow on Christmas Eve.

Another year we bought tons of Martinelli's sparkling cider (you know that stuff comes in champagne type bottles).  That actually worked out pretty well, but after seeing the final cost, we decided in the future, we don't love our neighbors that much.

This year, Connie came up a great idea.  I have had somewhat of a sour throat and cough, and so she has been making me hot lemonade with honey.   Then she thought, "why don't we give lemons and honey to the neighbors, because everyone gets colds this time of year".  Then she wrote a great poem to go with it.  We wanted to publish this poem here, so that in a few years from now, when lots of people have copied Connie's awesome poem and spread it all over the country, we can prove that, yup, it all started here.

With out further ado, here is the poem:

T’was the start of the Christmas Season  and all through the town,
Every throat  was a’scratchin, every sick face a frown.
For cold weather was bringing more than just holiday spirit,
It was bringing flu bugs, sick germs, and other nasty things with it.

Dear Santa is no help with this holiday plight.
His sleigh full of presents is not what we need on this night.
Dear Grandma is one who can come save the day,
With wisdom, not magic, tucked snug in her sleigh.
For what more could save our noses from being so runny,
But a home remedy of hot lemon with honey.

Juice a half lemon , then add a tablespoon of honey.
Mix in a mug of hot water, and here is a remedy, quite yummy.
For extra nutrition and more flavor I think,
Shave a little of the lemon zest  and add to the drink.
Now sit back and relax, drink the hot brew quite slow,
Feel all the holiday stress and sickness just go.

Have a Merry Christmas and we hope it will be,
Full of laughter and fun and 100%  sick free!

Was dat?

There is quite a bit of variety in when children say their first word and in what that word it is.  Sometimes it is hard to tell what a child's first word is because sometimes they say stuff that kind of sounds like a word, but it is hard to tell if they actually know what they are saying.  Sam's first word was "ball" and "Mama" was close behind.  I think Gracie's first word was "Dada" but it didn't necessarily mean "Daddy" it meant "adult person who can help me" without regard to gender.  Another one of her first words was "lellow" which meant .... "I want water".  I am not totally sure how that came about, but I think it come from "bottle", though I don't know how she would have learned that because she hardly ever used a bottle.
For Jonah, it is really hard to say what his first word was or even if he has really said one.  He babbles all the time and he seems to be saying something, but it is really hard to tell exactly what he is saying.  He certainly understands language pretty well.  The other day Sam and Grace came in from playing outside, and as is too often the case, left the front door wide open.  I was downstairs and yelled upstairs at them to come close the door.  They "didn't hear me", but little Jonah did and he went over and shut the door and then looked over at me like "look I did it".   While I say it hard to really say what was Jonah's first word, he does have a clear first "phrase", which is "Was dat?" or "What's that?".  Anytime he doesn't know what something is, he points and says "Was dat?" and is usually quite pleased when you tell him the answer.  It is a little hard to catch on film, because as soon as you pull the camera out, he wants to look at it, but I caught a little bit of it while reading him stories tonight (At the end of it is a good example of him almost saying words but not quite.  He says "Was dat?.. A doggy! (though it is really a mommy otter, but it does kind of look like a dog):

The beginning of keco productions

It was a sunny day in May of the year 2000 in Zion's National Park. I had just started along the trail to Angel's Landing. I was there as part of the annual camping trip my church group made to Zion's. It had already been a pretty fun trip so far. I had gone on my first canyoneering hike down a slot canyon called Pine Creek that had involved nine rappels and swim through water holes where the canyon was only a few feet wide. It had been a blast. And now a bunch of us were headed up to the top of Angel's Landing.

There were seven or eight of us, most who I knew, a few who a didn't. One who I didn't know was this chit chatty red head girl. She had never done Angel's Landing before and was like "What is it like at the top", and I was like "It's like a 1000 foot drops all around you, and to get there you have to walk on these narrow ledges and they have chain you have to hold onto" and she in her mind was like "Is he trying to be funny or scare me or what?".

Well we all kept walking up the steep switch backs and talking and trying to guess were different people we came across came from (because there are always a lot of foreign tourists at Zion's) and eventually this girl is like "My name is blah blah blah" and I am like I'm like "I'm Kevin, and I think I have been trying to get a hold of you". Now you might think that sounds like some kind of weird pick-up line and if you did, you be totally wrong, because I don't think I ever used a pick-up line in my life, except to someone I already know and who would know I was just saying it to be stupid. In addition, I had specifically decided before coming on this trip that I wasn't going to try to meet any new girls, because I was a little tired of the whole dating process and didn't want to ruin a good trip with stress and frustration. So anyway, the reason I said "I have been trying to get a hold of you", is because I actually had. I was the executive secretary for the Bishop of our church group and so was in charge of making appointments for him and he had been trying to make appointment with her. So then red head girl was like, "Yeah, I go home a lot on the weekends" and so on a so forth and we talked about where she was from and such.

After a little while we finally go to the top part of Angel's landing and she was like "Hey, there really are chains here!, I thought you were kidding!" and I was like "nope". So then we are hanging out at the top of Angel's Landing and she starts feeding some of the squirrels that are running around. And I, using my super suave womanizing skills am like "Dude, didn't you read the sign, you not supposed to feed the squirrels, people food makes them sick". She was a little embarrassed and I felt bad, but someone had to speak of for those poor neglected lazy fat squirrels.

So then, we are hiking back down and some people in our group are like, "Who want to go to the bottom of the Narrows and hike up for a ways?" and I was like "I do, that sounds cool" and red head girl was like "I want to too" and I was like in my mind "I wouldn't mind that"

So we hike up the Narrows for a few miles and get to the bottom of Orderville Canyon and decide to hike up it for a ways. There is a lot little waterfalls and ledges you have to hike up in Orderville and red head girl is keeping up with all the guys and I am starting to think "red head girl is kind of cool". Well after a few hours we all decide to turn around.

For those of you who never done Orderville Canyon or the Narrows, you are basically walking in a river running through a narrow canyon. The river at this time was about knee deep and there are lots of slippery rocks. So anyway as we all are hiking back down, one of red head girl's Teva's straps breaks. This makes it very hard for her to walk through the river. So we all consult together and someone comes up with the idea to give her one of their socks and put it all the way over the teva to help hold it on. This works pretty well, but it is still pretty hard for her to walk on the slippery rocks and she starts to fall behind. Well, noble gentleman that I am, I stayed back to help her along. Sometimes, just to make sure she didn't fall, I held her hand for a little bit, you know, just to give her some extra stability. She seemed to appreciate the help.

Eventually, we made it to the bottom. It was getting late and some of us had to work the next day, so we all piled into some cars, and somehow me and red girl ended up in the same car sitting next to each. As we were driving home the driver cranked the radio up to help him stay awake. A Ben Folds Five song came on and I was like "I like this song" and red head girl's like "I like this song too, did you know it was about blah blah diddie blah da blah?" And I was like, well chalk up another cool point for red head girl. We got home sometime late late at night and we all went our separate ways. But I said to myself, "Self we should hang out with red head girl again sometime".

And I did.

So that was day that Ke(vin) and Co(nnie) that would some day make the world renowned keco productions blog met.

Toddling Along

Little Jo' has been crawling for months. He started crawling months ahead of both Sam and Grace. In some ways I think this made him take longer to learn to walk, because he is so proficient a crawling that he could get around quite fast and thus had no motivation to walk. Or maybe he didn't want us to know that he was a zombie. I was watching him walk and thought "I have seen something like this before". Stiff legs, funny arm movements, strange sounds coming out of the mouth... that's when I realized the uncanny resemblance to a zombie(though if Jonah is a zombie, he is the cutest darn zombie that every existed). Check him out:


Also as a bonus extra feature here is re-release of Gracie's first time walking, we were at a wedding reception, and Gracie wanted to be part of the action. She had taken a few steps before, but here she finally figured out how to put all together. Unfortunately, we have no footage of when Sam first started to walk.

Sam's First Mountain Bike Race

So Sam, without any prompting from Mom and Dad, decided that this summer he wants to train and bike a marathon (26.2 miles). This last Saturday, I was doing a mt. bike race and there was a kids race and we asked Sam if he wanted to do it as some training. He totally wanted to try it and he did great (got 5th place and had lots of fun). They let parents come along and so I got some great action highlights.

I Said A Bad Word Today

Friday evening there was  lovely weather.  In fact it was it had been a lovely morning too and so I had decided to ride my bike to work. And now work was over I was on my bike headed home.
Just a half mile from my work, there was some construction going on and the workers had used barrels to narrow the road from 5 total lanes to 2 very narrow lanes.  I had ridden through this construction area before and had found it was safer to actual ride on the right side of the barrels in the construct area.  I don't know if this was technically legal, but there was plenty of room there and no active construction.  Plus when I had gone in the official lanes before, sometimes cars would try to squeeze past me or if I took the whole lane, they would drive right up on my tail.

So I road through the construction area.  As I neared the end of it, I looked back to see if any cars where coming, because usually as soon as cars got to the end of the construction area, some of them would try to move over into the lane that had been blocked off and I wanted to see if I need to get over.  There were no cars and so I look forward again.

This is the point where I said a bad word.

If you know me, you know that I hardly ever cuss.  I think in general it doesn't contribute much to conversations and is mostly unpleasant.  But there are some occasions when you find yourself in a really bad situation, when I think it is forgivable to describe that said situation with a word that accurately reflects the current state of affairs.  I think this was one such situation.

Now maybe if I had time to think about it, it would have been better to say something more descriptive, like - "Wow, I think this going to hurt like the dickens".  Or maybe I could have said something totally devoid of emotion that just relayed the facts - "This is an unsafe situation, there is a high probability that I will receive bodily harm".  Or maybe I shouldn't have said anything at all, because there wasn't anyone there to here me anyway.  But I cannot change the past, so now I will just relay in words what prompted my unseemly outburst.

So I was looking back for cars and then turned forward.  At which point I saw about three feet in front of me, that since the last time I had ridden here, someone had tied a thin nylon rope from the last barrel all the way across the lane to another barrel.

I was going about 17 mph, which if you do that math is about 25 feet per second.  So since I was three feet away from the rope, I had about 1/8 of a second to try to do something before I got clothes lined.
So if you do further calculations, you can see that really I didn't have time to do anything.  Except maybe say a bad word.

My brakes hit the rope first and I desperately slid my hands back on the handlebars so that my fingers would not get ripped off by being caught between the handle bars and the rope. The rope popped over the brake hoods, hit my arms and slammed them to my sides as it wrapped around my body.  As I was wretched backwards, I somehow managed to keep my bike more or less under me, so that as I slammed into the ground, the bike took most of the fall and the all the bodily harm I got from the actual fall was a nice scrape on my right knee.  Now the bodily harm from the rope was another story.   As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.  So here is two thousands words worth of pictures:

Left Arm

Right Arm

If you are wondering if rope burn across your arms hurts, the answer is yes, it hurts like the dickens.  On the pain scale of 0-10 I would put it at about an 8-9 when it first happened, probably a 3-4 when just standing around and a 20-21 when water is poured on it.  That being said,  I feel very fortunate that in spite of the painfulness, the wounds are actually pretty superficial and will probably only leave small permanent scars.  And I feel very very fortunate and blessed that I was able to stay up long enough so that the rope didn't hit my neck or face and that I was able to move my hands out of the way so that my fingers didn't get ripped off. 

And finally, in regards to the most important question: "How is the bike?", Big Mac received a couple of scuffs on the brake hoods, a little tear on the bar tape, but other than that it seemed to be unharmed and I was able to ride it home.

Update:
I found this video on youtube that kind of gives you an idea of what happened: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OM1zD7Ipc8