Walmart vs. Target

I just wanted to comment on my last polls before I change them.

It's pretty obvious that most of you shop at Walmart but nearly all of you would rather shop at Target.

Is it really that much more? Ok, if it's substantially further away, then don't waste the gas. However, if it is equidistant either way, then please lets all do our small part to snuff out the giant.

Phoropter: The Latest in Eye Care Technology

I'm not quite sure how to take this, but since here at the VA I've had at least 4 patients say something along the lines of:

"Wow, is that a new piece of equipment? I've never had that done before!"

For those of you who don't know, the phoropter is the tool we use to "refract" our patients so that we can come up with a suiteble eyeglass prescription. I'm not sure exactly how long it's been around, but I'm guessing about 50-60 years.

Nothing but the newest and best for our veterens.

Flower Mishap

For Valentine’s Day this year I came through like a good husband and bought Ruth some pretty flowers. I don’t think we have a vase or even a cup sturdy enough to hold flowers so I splurged a little and got a nice little arrangement of roses complete with a vase.

It was raining out side and I rushed to get in the car and close the door. I had a bag of things in my right hand and the flowers in the left. I tried to close the door with left hand and bring the flowers in before it closed. I didn’t realize until the door had completely closed that the flowers seemed to be a little too stationary. I was pretty mad at myself. I opened the door to see the damage and luckily only the top central rose had been damaged. I was going to hide the flowers and show them to Ruth the next morning (Valentine’s Day) but considering that one rose would probably be dead by then I opted to reveal the gift as soon as I got home.

Ruth is very practiced at loving imperfect things and so she loved the flowers in spite of their “weakness”.

A New Fork

There are not many things that I’ve owned for more than 10 years that I still use on an almost daily basis. In fact, I can’t think of any except my bike. I built it up piece by piece in 1995. By 1997 I had a new frame and wheels, but the rest is virtually unchanged (except for tires and tubes of course). Over the last 2 years my front suspension fork has been slowly dying. I have been ignoring it due to the fact that 99.9% of my biking has been on the road. I think I’ve been mountain biking about 5 times since I moved out east for school (at least two of those times I used my brother Kent’s bike when we went out to Nevada for a visit).

Shortly after moving out here I noticed my fork had kicked the bucket. Thirteen years of dedicated service; well worth the large percent of my teenage yearly income spent. The type of fork I would like to replace my old one with cost much more than the available funds. Needless to say, I found a decent fork for sale on e-bay last month. It is 4 years old and lightly used, but in good condition. Those of you familiar with bikes know the joys of changing forks – cutting it to the right length, taking off and re-installing the lower headset bearing cone, etc.

I did have to borrow a pipe cutter to get it to right length but other than that all seemed well until I went to put the brakes on. The new fork was obviously set up for disk brakes so it had no posts for mounting my v-brakes. Luckily it did have holes where they could be installed and luckily I had some on my old forks (both are made by Rock Shox). Last Saturday night before going to bed I started to finish my little bike project by putting on the brakes.

The hand-crafted hollow titanium brake posts from my old fork didn’t fit!!

I had to drive the car to work on Monday, which with stop lights and not-so-great parking arrangements at the VA, probably took longer than with my bike.

After work I went to a bike shop to see if they could help me out. He called Rock Shox for me and found out that all forks from 1997 should be the same (mine was born in 1995). The guy there, however, couldn’t help me and told me to leave one of my posts with him to see if he could find a match. I went straight over to another bike shop I knew of and asked if they had the key to any future bike-riding. The guy there said he did and went and grabbed me two of them. “How much?” I asked. “Ah, nothing, I’ve got a whole bucket of them.” Sweet! They weren’t exactly like my old ones; in fact, they looked and felt like they were made from old recycled dump trucks. No matter, they were free and I raced home to see if they would fit.

They did!!

The travel on the new forks are quite a bit more than my old ones which really changes the geometry of my bike. It felt a little weird riding it the first couple of days but now I’m getting used to it. Now I’m saving up my spending money to get some knobby tires so that I can try out some of the trails here before we go.

Pictures to follow shortly….

I made this sign for Cal. The big day of potty-training starts tomorrow after Church. I have Monday off, so we are going to celebrate our freedom and stay at home and help Cal become a big boy.