This will be my first Christmas without Dad. He passed away on election day, quite unexpectedly. I still remember the Lionel train set he got for my brother and I when we were one. Yes, we were one but he really wanted the trains for himself. We kept those trains running, around the base of the Christmas tree, for more than twenty years. Dad loved Christmas.

It's funny how you get used to something, and it somehow seems important even though you got along just fine without it for 80% of your life. Get over it, people. If Tribe goes away, there's only going to be a dozen or more social networking sites there to take over. It's a business like any other, subject to good or bad management, current economic conditions, the personal life of its owners/managers, etc.

You'll get over it. Here, hold my hand.

I don't blog much, as I feel funny about tooting my own horn in a public forum. But I'm about to have a birthday, it's a big one, one that ends in a *zero*, and I can't say I'm excited about it. But I cleaned Birthday Hill yesterday.

Birthday Hill is a name I gave to a section of the Fullerton Loop, an off-road trail that I bicycle on pretty often. This particular hill is very steep, often rutted, and very difficult to negotiate, requiring equal amounts of strength and finesse to keep mov... read more

I recently became interested in customizing a few of my bicycles. Thanks to my friend Flash, who inspired me with the story of his playa bike.
One of my projects started out as a Felt beach cruiser- single speed, coaster brake. The bike had full fenders on it, as well as upright handlebars, but it was the frame, with faux gas tank, that made me buy it in the first place, because I thought it looked like a 1915 Harley-Davidson Silent Gray Fellow (Google it). I stripped the stock decals off i... read more

Let's see if I have this right...Now that I am on Facebook, I can send virtual "drinks" to my friends. Not a real drink of course, but a note thru the internet. And I can actually PAY REAL MONEY to send my friends a virtual "gift", which again is just a note via internet. Why would anyone do this? Other useless things I can now do on Facebook: attack someone as a Zombie or a Vampire; invite people to be my "Top Friends"; find out how popular I am (I feel sorry for the impressionable teenagers... read more