I saw that our overnight low reached 9 degrees BELOW zero. Brrrrr.

Anyhow, here’s a milestone. I just made the 12th payment for the farm. One year later, and what have we done?

Well, most of that is here on the site. Have you been paying attention? We’ll here’s quick summary:

We cleaned up the farm and the barns. Created a large compost pile. Drew up plans for the corn crib conversion. Replaced a good deal of sill plates in the crib. Treated any rotted wood with epoxy. MOWED! Re-attached the front of the barn before it fell off. We tried to grow corn and failed. Pumpkins grew fine. Replaced some of the siding on the barn. Replaced the barn windows.

Oh yes, we also bought a house in nearby Jefferson and have been remodeling that. The bedrooms were re-textured and painted. We updated a few outlets and ran network/phone/cable runs everywhere. We just finished the hallway. The bathroom has all new sink, vanity and toilet. We put in a new medicine cabinet and textured the walls. We just finished the painting. We also got a wall of the living room done and some curtains hung up.

We will be pulling out the plastic tub walls and tiling them along with new shower fixtures. The living room should be finished soon, then we will finally gut the kitchen. Finally, all the new cabinets will leave the garage.

The basement is still semi-finished. We have not done much down there, except make it livable. The floors were sealed and painted, so we added some rugs. One day the paneling will be replaced. Right now, we have some nice new couches, the home theater, and an Xbox down there along with the home office. I’ve been finding holes to seal and missing insulation down there. I’ve brought up scrap foam board from the farm and used it around all the sills. It’s much warmer now.

Warm enough to wait out this sub freezing weather that is…. Bike fever is already here. The training has begun, new bikes are being built and my friends and I are talking all geeky about new parts.

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Work on our pinewood derby cars! Here’s mine. The only things missing are the wheels. I got a pocketknife and one trip to the emergency room later. . .

I took these on my laptop camera, so the lighting isn’t very good, but you get the idea.

I first took the basic rectangle of wood and whittled it down to the basic dog shape. Then I added sculpey clay, baked and painted it. Who knows how it will do in the race, but it sure looks good!

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It looks official, although the card has not shown up in the mail.

For once, I have a certification other than I.T. related. Yep, I apparently passed everything to become a USA Cycling Coach.  It’s only a level 3 coach, so I won’t have people knocking down my door, yet.
I did put together a training plan for Reagan last year, when everyone knows that you’re better off not telling her what to do. But it worked! Her PR at the Olympic distance triathlon went down another 30 minutes! I even got her hooked on some bike racing. Of course, she wants a ‘cross bike next.

I had a good plan for myself as well, and the training logs showed improvement. However, I needed to show up to races. This year I got to put the money where the mouth is. There are so many great events around here. No more pneumonia, no more moving across the country (twice!), no traveling out to get a tractor. I’m aiming for the Lincoln Spring Classic again. After that, I’ll look into the Iowa Cup series.

Anyone need their rear-end kicked into shape? I’m available.

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I saw that rating for the pictures could be turned on…..so I did.  You can click on 5 stars if you love the picture.  Less stars for, you know.

Why?  I have no idea.

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Look in our Photo gallery to see how we spent the holidays. Yep, Christmas at the Moon Base. You might be able to catch a few of our presents in there.
We’ll be posting a year end/year beginning message here shortly. Check back in a day or two.

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