Going North

I am starting my second and last 7-week session at UND in Grand Forks (and Winnipeg on the weekends). I leave for GF tomorrow and start my first three days of classes at the ND School for the Blind which is affiliated with UND.

Naturally, I'm a big blob of emotions, knowing that I have to leave Ben for so long... and yet very excited for what lies ahead.

Here are some pictures that I recently took.
1. My favorite snack lately.
2. & 3. Some curriculum modifications I made this year--also part of my internship project.
4. The love of my life. See you soon, Ben!

The New Bike

So I've been biking as my primary mode of transportation for close to seven years now. For the past five of these years, I've been riding a single speed bike that a friend helped me put together, mostly from used parts.

If you are a biker who uses a bike mostly for in-town commuting and just getting around, and you live in a place without too many hills, single speeds are great bikes. They're durable, efficient, and usually people don't want to steal them (though this is changing as they are suddenly becoming "cool"). They are workhorses, they're fun to ride, and they're easy on the pocketbook.

I've put over 10,000 miles on my single speed in the time I've been riding it, but this past April convinced me that it was time to have a decent bike with gears. A combination of very high winds and muddy conditions made me start to worry about what riding a single-speed in those conditions might be doing to my knees.

So I put up some cash and bought a 1998 Trek 5000 off of Ebay. I'm still keeping the single-speed for getting around town, but when I take longer rides, it will be nice to have something that can handle the Kansas winds a little better.

Here's a picture.



For those of you who like looking at pictures of bikes, there are more pictures here.

I also shaved my beard this weekend.

MASSIVE UPDATE!!!!1!1!!

It's time for a massive update. There are three things that we need to let you know about.

Update #1

Ingrid and Sonja just visited us from Winnipeg. They stayed with us for a week and we had a great time with them. We even got to walk them through their first experience with a tornado warning. The first day they were here, there was a line of thunderstorms that was pounding us pretty much all day. We did have to go down to the basement for about half an hour when a funnel cloud was sighted about a mile away from us. It did not touch down.

We also had a sushi night.As you can see, along with the sushi we had a huge bowl of delicious barbecued meat. Thanks, Ingrid.

Sonja, Ben, Andrea, Ingrid, Kate and Nick.

Update #2

Andrea and I had a little bit of time to work on the garden today before it started raining.

These will be green beans.

Lettuce and Spinach - the only things we had already planted.

Update # 3

It's a cute-off. A cute-off is not a competition, but just a situation where there are two cute things. Everyone wins a cute-off because everyone gets to see two cute things.

First we have our nephew Luke, and second is our nephew Airo.

Congratulations. You just won the cute-off.