Chapman Family and Friends

No More Updates Here... This page is just a sample of the OLD Format that I used for the Chapman Family and Friends pages for quite a few years and before I converted the site to a more mobile friendly format.

We had a nice Christmas and I managed to take quite a few photos once again (this time I checked the auto-focus button fairly often!) I just went through the photos and selected a batch to post here. I'm not the best photographer but with a good camera, a little effort and some touchup in the lab I can at least get average pictures.

I was looking for the name of the hat the Rick got (in the photos) and I knew it was from REI and found this video on it. I thought that the video was interesting so here's a link if you're interested. Rick's Hat Video at REI.

OK, no need for more yakin. I've added my usual comments to the batch of photos so here they are:

12/19/12 - Wisconsin (out of focus) Trip, Choppin Updates, iPhones to All!

Finally another update! Sorry for the delay. I had a nice trip to Wisconsin earlier this month and had a chance to visit with everyone once again (post-Thanksgiving that is). It was really nice seeing everyone for no particular occasion this time and to see Jasson and Vals new home and Steve and Audis new home. At least I had more time this trip since I stayed 2 nights.

I took quite a few pictures on my trip but unfortunately I had a technical problems with the photos. I was so disappointed that I almost didn't even post them here but I decided that, even though the photo quality is not very good, I still wanted to post them to at least capture the feel of the trip.

What happened was that at some point, before the trip, I accidentally hit the Manual Focus button on the camera lens. then I took most of the pictures on the trip before I realized what happened. My eyesight isn't that great anymore so I really depend on auto-focus and just glance and the photos in the viewer occasionally. It wasn't until just before I left (the Xmas Town pictures at Andi and Brads house) that I discovered the problem. So most of the pictures are out of focus. :-(

OK, in other news... (actually this is out of order chronologically) my bike site had really nice Black Friday and Cyber Monday Choppin Days. I had a 1 day record profit on Cyber Monday. Of course, this does not mean that my websites have recovered from the Google Bashing because they haven't. This is just the peak time of the year for my sales. Overall sales are still way down :-( but I am surviving.

Corinne is home from Miami for xmas break now. We have been pretty desperate for new cell phones and are finally clear of the T-Mobile contracts so after considering the move for quite a while and looking into the options out there we finally switched our cell phone service from T-Mobils to Verizon and we all got New iPhones! iPaid!

If you had seen our old cell phones you would know how badly we needed the upgrades (except Corinne still had a fairly new phone before the change). Later, after buying the iPhones, KC sent me the photo on the right, which I thought was really funny! I don't have permission to post this so I hope I don't get busted. I'm sure it's already been around the internet by now anyway.

Anyway, even though KC and Corinne were really into getting new iPhones, my main reason for this change was to get better phone reception in our house. I wasn't all that excited about getting a new phone although I thought that it might be nice.

Now that we have the iPhones (3 iPhone 4Ss and 1 iPhone 4) I am discovering just how cool this thing is!!! It is just incredible what these things do and how they do it (like the human interface)! Now I see why these things are so popular. I am also even more disappointed that Steve Jobs has left this world (maybe he was from another world to begin with!). I could ramble on a lot about all the cool stuff it does but this is already getting pretty long so I'll spare you the details (for now anyway... :-) )

OK, I had a few other things but this post it getting way too long so until next time... And if I don't manage another update until after the holidays Merry Christmas to All and Happy New Year!

Whoa! I just saw that I haven't updated this page since last month! Well my main reason for commin out here now is for the Thanksgiving Pictures that I just uploaded! Corinne is home for Thanksgiving now and her friend and roommate, Lexus, came with her and is staying with us for the break. Corinne, Lexus, Casey and I all went to Brad and Andi's house (in Cashton, Wisconsin) for Thanksgiving (Our dog sitter was unavailable so Dara had to stay back with the dogs this time).

There is not too much else real new at the moment so I'm just gonna get right to the Thanksgiving Pictures. I took quite a few photos when I was up there but I ended up taking most of them outside (it was a really nice day). I got a few photos inside but then got a little distracted with everything else that was going on and never got all that many traditional Thanksgiving day shots (like the table, people at the table, the food, etc). In retrospect I wish I had taken more later inside too.

Still I did get some good shots. Since I got so many of the kids I decided to post 2 photo pages. The first one has the main/best TG photos that selected (and touched up a little here and there). The second page is the Runner-Ups that didn't make the first cut but if you just need more cowbell pictures, you can check them out too.

Just some quick updates. I took some photos of KC as he was walkin the dogs a few days ago and I also just took a couple of photos of KCs new big screen TV so I loaded them into my webpage photo program and just uploaded then here. So here are the photos of KC walkin the dogs on the trail behind our house and his new TV.

KC's tv is probably gonna be obsolete soon so I guess he'll just have to give it to me when he gets a new one. :-)

I also just uploaded a few of the fall photos that I took recently to my Facebook page but I see that a lot of people have already seen them since I have comments on them. I think a lot of people must use Facebook. Maybe even more than I get to this site. Can you believe that! :-)

These photos were already out on my bike site (and linked to below) but I wanted to use one for my FB cover photo which is mostly why I uploaded them there too. I heard that people who are active on FB change their FB cover and profile photos once in a while. :-)

Dara and her mom are currently in Miami for their "Family weekend". KC and I are chillin here (with all the critters).

In website news, things are still tuff after my Google Bashing. I'm still makin more than I would as a Wal-Mart greeter :-) (mostly from exercise bikes) but that Google update sure hurt. I've done quite a bit of analysis of my traffic and income and I am still optimistic (well hopeful anyway) that I can get the income back up to at least a reasonable level again and I have some new things to try in addition to just adding more content and reviews.

I've still been getting in some good bike ridin and, as a matter of fact, it looks like a good time to ride right now!

I guess it's been a while since I posted an update here again and there has been a lot going on as usual. Corinne is Home right

now but it's a limited time deal. She will be heading back to Miami (Ohio) on Monday. Also, as you may have noticed above I passed my usual 1,000 bike miles mark this year (as usual) between updates here.

Just this week I decided that I had to get out and get some photos of the fall colors while I had a chance. The Fall color window is not vey long. So I did some Fall Color Bike Rides , took a lot of photos, posted the best ones on my bike site and blogged about it on my Bike Blog Page Here. If you would rather skip the bike blog post and just check out the photos they are on the DPRT Fall Color Pages starting here (3 pages) and NBT Fall Color Pages here (2 pages)

There are not that many photos so you can check em out pretty quick. I think that they're perdy. Plus you'll want to see the suprise mushroom photos! :-) They are here if you missed them.

I also have a bike ride planned with Dale for next week. We are going to continue the I&M Canal bike trail ride that we started in 2003 when we rode from Chanahon west to Marseilles. I guess we'll start in Marseilles this time. I am not at all familiar with this area so this will be totally new for me.

And finally, the bad news (I also wrote about this is my bike blog so you may have already seen it there). My bike site took a major Google Bashing recently. Basically my bike site traffic (and consequently my income) has been cut in half by the latest Google update. This is something that I always feared and knew could happen at any time. It really sucks! I'm not gonna get into all of the details here (I summarized it a little in the bike blog).

Fortunately, I had built up the site and it was doing pretty well before the Google disaster hit but losing 1/2 my traffic and income is going to be very difficult if I can't get it built up again. Well, I'm not out of bidness yet, but this is sure a major blow to the bidness. :-(

OK, one more follow-up on the race track stuff and some other good information. I did so much work on the race track photos that I wanted to get some additional "miles" out of it so I photochopped one of the photos and used it in a multi-topic blog on my bike site!

Yea, this is a little goofy and a Stretch for the Race Track Photos but I managed to tie it into cycling and post the photo on my blog. Actually, I see goofy photos and videos that get really popular on the internet all the time so why not post something goofy out there. After all I am so good at that! :-) Maybe I'll even get a few links out of it (then I can call it "work"!)

Anyway see my Bike Blog Entry Here for my combination bike race/horse race photo (you can click on it to enlarge it too).

The other (non bike related) thing that I stuck into this blog entry is some helpful information on your Social Security Statement that I just recently discovered and wanted to pass along. Basically, I just put a link to where you can get the Social Security Statement with work history and estimated SS retirements at the end of the article.

The place that you want to go to is: www.ssa.gov/mystatement. I'm gonna post this in my credit card blog soon too since it applies better to that site.

Last week when we did our spontaneous trip to the track (Arlington Park) I was thinking how I really wished that I had my camera with me since there were so many good photo ops there. Well, since it was another nice, sunny fall day yesterday, I decided to make another trip to the track for photos this time.

Here are the photos that selected from the ones that I took at the track yesterday (with my usual comments with each photo).

I made the blowup versions of the photos a little larger in order to see them better.

I only went there for the photos but Dara came with me and she bet on a few races. Amazingly, we broke even on our bets again this trip too ~ except Dara did not find any change on the ground this time (no change is not gonna change me this week either! :-) )

Dara and I went to a movie for our anniversary today and on the way back we decided to go to the track (Arlington Park) on the spur of the moment. You can actually get into Arlington Park for free after the 7th race and it was about that time so we checked it out and got in for free.

Unfortunately, there was only one race left (the 9th) but being the high-rollers that we are we decided to go all out on 2 horses that looked good to us. Dara put $2 on Zip-a-dee-do-hah and I put $4 on some other hag. The excitement was mounting (along with the (disk) jockeys) as we went out to the stands. They're off!!! (they yelled :-) ). Zip-a-dee-do-hah was in second place for the 1st half of the race and my guy was in the back. Then coming around the last turn my guy kicks in the overdrive and pulls up to the front. It was a photo-finish and my guy came in second (and I bet for him to show $$$).

So as it ended up Dara lost her $2 and I won $6 ($2 profit after my initial $4 investment) but we got into the track for free and Dara found a penny in the parking lot so at the end of the day we came out 1¢ ahead!

Yea, we're not sure what we're gonna do with our winnings yet but I'm not gonna quit my website job and I promise that it is not going to change me a bit!

Wow, where did the summer go! Why do they call it Labor Day when most people don't have to work? Well, I'm takin the day off too (mostly anyway). Wow, I have really been bad at my updates here I see. It's been over a month since I did an update! Sorry about that.

Well, we dropped Corinne off at Miami (in Oxford Ohio) on the 18th. So she has been back at school for a couple of weeks now already. I think that she is enjoying being back at school. I think Casey would like to be back at school too! He actually was just back at Western again this weekend but only as a visitor (alumni I guess you could say). KC still has another month of mosquito killing left. Not sure what the plan is after that.

As for myself, I have been really busy both at work and at home. Wait a minute, I work at home so that must be the same thing! :-) No actually I mean I've been really busy with my website work and with some chores around the house.

In the Website News, the conversion to the Mobile Friendly format has taken me a lot longer than I expected and I have been obsessed with getting it done. I decided to convert 2 of my smaller websites before doing the conversion on my bike site. I wanted to be sure that there were no unexpected problems before making these major changes to my big daddy, cash cow website. So far everything looks good. I converted my credit card website and the chiropractor website that I did to the liquid/mobile format and I also converted the credit card blog and the bike site blog.

You can see how these websites are formatted on mobile devices by accessing them on a mobile device (of course) or if you resize your browser window. When you shrink the width of your browser window (on the sites or blogs listed above) you will see how the text and photos wrap to fit the smaller format. When you make your browser very narrow (about 500 pixels) on one of the websites above you'll see how the links on the side are converted to buttons and moved to the top. Everything else is rearranged to fit into one column for vertical scrolling only (with a few exceptions on the credit card site (too much to explain here)).

Anyway, I have only been doing minimal updates to the bike site while working on these conversions. It's a good thing that it can run on auto-pilot for a while. I really need to get back to more significant updates on the bike site though.

OK, as for the work around the house, I just spent 4 days trimming our trees and bushes and stuff!!! I ended up with 17 large bundles of branches! This was a lot of work and even though I tried to pick some cooler days, it ended up being really hot anyway.

After all these years (of owning homes) I finally realized that you can't let junk trees (like buckthorn trees) take over and trim them like hedges, which is what I have done for years. That's why my trimming has always been a ridiculous task while other people just have a few small bushes to trim. Last year and especially this year, I got much more aggressive with removing the buckthorn and other junk trees. I've been taking them out completely (sawing them down from the bottom) instead of just trimming them like a hedge. I hope this will make my job much easier next year (or the year after since I still have more to remove).

Wow, this was a long update. I didn't mean to make up to not doing updates for a month but I guess I just did. Shorter updates are probably better. Well if you made it this far you should be completely up-to-date on what is happening around here. :-)

OK, maybe I exaggerated the heading above a tinsy little bit to grab your attention (and for entertainment value :-) ). I had one visitor to this website tell me that I needed to do an update since it is August now (and he wasn't really angry (at least I don't think so). So I updated the month photo above (That one is from Florida a few years back. I don't have any new August photos to use yet).

As long as I am here I should do a quick update on what is going on. Corinne has finished her classes at Harper, is still working her 2 jobs and is getting ready to go back to Miami already (it's still over 2 weeks away but she is packing and seems anxious to get back) Sheesh!

Casey is hangin around this year (still workin at the mosquito abatement job and playin basketball at the Y quite a bit) since he finished up college last semester :-). Casey just went out and bought a new iPad and then Corinne saw his and decided that she needed one too so both of them have new iPads now!

They got the iPads just in time. I am working on a new "Responsive Web Design" to make my website much more mobile friendly (which I mentioned below) and now I can test the new design on iPads (in addition to our iPod touches (which is basically the same as an iPhone), Corinnes Samsung Galaxy smart phone and all of the browsers that I have. Sheesh!

So this has taken me a few weeks so far and I feel like I am getting way behind on my regular website work. Oh well, I still think it is important. More on this later, I gotta get back to work now.

7/8/12 - 4th of July Stuff, Michigan Lake House Boating and Jet Skis!, The Signature Room

Wow, it's been a busy month so far. I've been pretty busy with my website work and as usual, there has been a lot going on with the 4th of July Stuff. Karen, Daryoosh and Nadia were in town most of 4th of July week and I hung out in Glenview on the 4th. I finally got a chance to use my new camera for some people shots and some good action shots. I still need practice and sometimes it takes some good luck (for good photos) but I do have a new batch uploaded (see the link below).

The action shots were from Thursday (the 5th) when we went to Kurt and Robin's house in Berrien Springs, Michigan (which is only a little over 2 hours from us) and did a lot of Boating and Jet Skiing. First we cruised the lake and river on a really nice, comfortable pontoon boat (and took a swim in the lake on the way back). Next I took a little kayak ride and most of us got a chance to take the jet skis out for a spin too!

The photos below are from Glenview on the 4th and the lake house in Michigan on the 5th. I didn't have my camera with me on the pontoon boat because I was nervous about bringing it on the boat. It turns out it would have been fine and I took a bunch of photos with dara's mom's point-and-shoot camera (I do not have those photos yet though). OK, as for the photos that I do have, here they are:

Unfortunately, Corinne had to work on the 5th and was not able to come with us. One of us would probably have had to stay with the dogs anyway so since Corinne had to work she drew the short straw on this one. :-(

On Saturday we had lunch at the Signature Room on the 95th floor of the John Hancock building in Chicago which was also really nice. Sorry, I didn't bring my camera to this even so there are no photos (except for the ones that we took the last time we were there if you missed these). Casey wanted to go there for his birthday and this was partially for that. Casey's roommate, Charlie, from his first year at WIU, also is working at the Signature Room as part of an intern program for school so we also had a chance to see him while we were there.

<shoptalk> For work, I've been trying to ride, photograph and write up more trail pages and also to blog about le Tour de France which is going on now.

Plus I am trying to get my site more compliant to the latest CSS stuff so it will be much more mobile user friendly. I discovered that over 1/3rd of my traffic now is from mobile users (and my site is primitive looking on mobile devices).

My website sales slowed down in June but they have picked up a little in July so far (partially with the help of some TDF sales) </shoptalk>

Well, I guess June has been pretty good to me. First there was my birthday weekend then this past weekend was Father's Day. Both were very nice. Yesterday (Father's Day) I was able to just hang out for a while, play with my new camera and take a bunch of photos. I rode my bike over to Harper College since there always seems to be interesting photo-ops over there.

Most of this stuff is just experiments and playing with my camera but I selected the best of my experiments (from 2 trips actually) and decided to post them here. I also threw in a cat photo and a photo of KC out on the bike path behind our house but I have not really worked on any people or pets photos. I'll try that the next time a good people photo-op presents itself.

6/11/12 - How Time Flies (the Pencil Story)! Camera Breakage and Millennium Trail Ride and Photos

Well, Casey and I drove to Macomb to pickup his FINAL LOAD of stuff from his apartment on Saturday (his lease (like his time at WIU) ends this week). I brought an envelope for his key and parking pass which he had to drop off at the rental office drop box. We put the key and pass in the envelope but needed to write KCs name and apartment info on the envelope. Everything was packed so he didn't have a pencil or pen so I went out to my van and grabbed a pencil from the door pocket where I keep some pencils and pads of paper. After he filled out the envelope info both of us noticed something nostalgic about the pencil. CLICK Here to See What We Saw on the Pencil. Man, How Time Flies!!!

In the bike trails and camera news, I chose the Millennium Bike Trail (around Mundelein) for my next ride and grabbed my new camera to photograph the trail for my website. I packed up my bike, camera, gps and all the stuff I needed for my ride. After I got to the trail I took my camera out of the case and this is what I found! Don't worry, it was just the lens filter and not the lens (which is the main reason that I use a lens filter). I have no idea how that happened.

So anyway I did ride the trail but without my camera (I didn't want to take it on a crushed stone trail with no lens filter for protection). Then I bought a new filter, packed everything up again the next day and ended up riding this trail 2 days in a row. Everything was fine on my second ride and I got a ton of photos. So I finally selected the photos and finished the Millennium Bile Trail Pages (here). I still haven't added the trail to my trail page template or blogged about it (on my bike site) but I hope to get to that tomorrow.

And finally, Thank You All for the nice cards and Facebook posts for my birthday!

For those of you who may have missed my bike site blog post and the cooresponding Facebook update, I just wanted to mention that Dale and I did the Bike the Drive ride on LSD (Lake Shore Drive, of course) in Chicago last weekend. They shut down 30 miles of LSD to automotive traffic and only allow bikes for 5 hours in the morning.

It was really a nice ride and a pretty nice day. It was also work since I brought my new camera and photographed a lot of the event. It actually is a lot more work to stop all the time for photos but someones got to do it! Right?

As for the photos, it was an overcast day which did not help and I am still learning how to use my camera so that doesn't help much either. I was not too excited about the composition of my photos (the camera can't correct plain old bad shots) but between Dales photos (from his Cannon DSLR) and mine I managed to at least capture the event pretty well I think.

I think, in time, I'll become a better photographer. It may take a while though! :-)

I actually thought that the "Bike the Drive" event that I am going to tomorrow (actually later tonight since I need to get up at 2:30am!) was going to be the first photos from the new camera that I would upload. Well, I have been fooling around with it a lot and trying to get familiar with the camera settings and stuff and took quite a few photos as Experiments.

While experimenting I accidently got a few 1/2 way decent photos and managed to catch some wildlife scenes from out by the lake behind our house. So check out the

Don't miss the blow-up of the animated blue-hard-of-heron that I put together towards the end. :-) OK, I could have lined it up better and put more work into it but I just don't have all night for this stuff you know...

For those of you who may have missed my Facebook comment on Casey's wall, Casey graduated from WIU on 5/12/12 and now has B.S. in Psychology. Congratulations KC!!! Sorry for the delay on this but our photos did not come out all that great so I had to get a few from Dara's mom too. I don't have a lot of photos but here are the ones that I did select:

In a related story, the fact that our old 2005 digital camera just did not get that great of photos of the graduation and also since I needed a better camera for the bike trail pages that I am planning on doing now, I decided to put some money back into the website bidness and finally got a new Digital SLR camera!

My new camera is a Nikon D5100 with a 18-200m zoom lens! I only have one photo of the new camera (taken with the old camera, of course :-) ) at the moment and it's no work of art but it does show my actual camera (not just the same model online or something like that) on top of my printer.

...and finally, I am signed up to Bike The Drive on Sunday so I should have some good new photos from the new camera next!

5/5/12 - Corinne's New Dorm, The Miami Trip & Mentally Challenged in Liberty Indiana

I just picked up Corinne from Miami (Ohio) yesterday. We managed to fit all of her stuff into my van (I was worried about that). I brought my camera (just in case) but didn't take any pics until just before we left when I stopped by to see Corinne's New Dorm for next year - Flower Hall. She will share 2 rooms and a bathroom with 3 other girls (4 total) so it's a little different arrangement next year. Anyway, here are the photos ~ including a panoramic view ~ of her dorm for next year.

I also brought my bike GPS with me to record The Miami Trip. The bike GPS is not real good at routes and navigation for a car but it was nice to see where I was and to upload the trip info after the trip. I thought it was pretty interesting. Here is a link to our Miami trip to pickup Corinne.

I think the GPS data for the trip is pretty cool. You can see my speed for every stage of the trip (don't tell the cops please), a couple of wrong turns that I took the elevations along the way. The trip data above is for the round trip so if you go to the "Player" option and press play you will see me go there and back! You can place the mouse arrow over the graph for any part of the trip (in the Player tab) and see my speed and the elevation, etc. at any time. If you press play it will show where I was at at that time.

I have to admit that my first wrong turn was not completely my fault. I have to blame the Retards in Liberty Indiana for that one! (oops not PC. Oh well). You go through this town on Route 27. They are doing construction there and there are absolutely no detour signs. You just go into town and see that you can't get through.

After trying one way (that was wrong) I went back to town and asked how to get through. They admitted that there is no detour signs and told me how to do it (a left, a right, past a few stop signs and then another right and drive around the "Road Closed" sign).

So if you hit this detour and you are not from the town you are supposed to be able to guess where to go and then there are no "Detour" signs but you need to drive around the "Road Closed" sign to take the detour!!! Arrrhgggg!!!! I just can't believe that one!

On the way back, it was my own stupid fault. I just cheezed out and accidentally went south on 355 instead of north. I was able to turn around pretty quickly at Army Trail Road though.

And finally, in other news... I got some good ridin in before my leg injury (had over 300 miles by mid-April). Now, nothing and my leg is still a problem. :-(

I probably have more news but I have other stuff to do today. I'll have to post stuff more often so I don't have to try and write everything at once.

<heavyAlert> I was just thinkin the other day about how our lives are like books with many Chapters. Some are good of course and others not so good. Well I've had quite a few of both really (probably like most people). I've had some pretty bad chapters and I've also had some good ones. We carry the memories of our previous chapters into the current chapter but we are still living in the current chapter.

I would have to say that in many ways my current chapter is pretty good. There are still some crappy things left over from some of the previous chapters but in many ways it's actually pretty good. Specifically, I have 2 beautiful and healthy kids that are both in college and doing pretty well with one of them about to graduate with a Bachelor's degree. The other thing that I enjoy for the moment is that I have successfully created and built up my website business and it is doing well right now and gives me quite a bit of flexibility in my life.

OK, there are of course way more goods and bads but I just wanted to hit on the highlights at the moment and not write an entire "book" here.

It's another nice spring day here in Chicagoland. Maybe that is why I am in this kind of a mood. OK, I still got stuff to do. Back to The Book! </heavyAlert>

Hopefully this won't seem to shocking to all of you out there but I've Been Experimenting with Facebook. Yea, I just put up a bidness page for my bike site which you can find here: http://www.facebook.com/AboutBicycles and now I need some "LIKES" on Facebook.

So for any of you that has a Facebook account (like who doesn't), I would appreciate if you could go out to my Facebook bidness page and give me a "Like".

I will add a Facebook post begging for "Likes" soon too, but I am just putting it out here for now.

As many of you know, I am not totally Facebook proficient but I think that my posts to the bidness page will show up in your Facebook area if you "Like" my page but it looks like you can "Like" the page then click on the "Like" button you can also uncheck the "Show in News Feeds" to not see the posts that I do to this page. (I'm not sure why anyone would not want to see all of the exciting stuff that I write about bikes and stuff, :-) but just in case you do want to filter it out, I think this is how to do it)

The next thing I am going to attempt is to link my bike blog to my new Facebook Bidness page. My SEO place (Planet Ocean) sent me some links for good Facebook Apps and one of them allows you to link your blog to the Facebook page.

"Does anyone know how to add a Bidness to Facebook" - that is so 10 seconds ago!

3/10/12 - The hour that wasn't there, Been Walkin, KC and Corrine are Here, Livin the Dream!, Da Bulls

Wow, how time flies. I didn't realize how long it has been since I did an update here (my month photo was still on February!) Plus time is really going to fly later tonight when we zip through an hour like it wasn't even there!

Well, I've just been workin and trying to get healthier (lose some weight, drop my blood pressure some, etc.) Aside from trying to eat better (which I have a hard time with but am getting a little better), I have been walking quite a bit and we have had great weather for it! Next up, Riding Season!

This is the weekend that both KC and Corrine are here although we have not seen Corinne much the last few days. :-( Corinne heads back to Miami (Ohio) tomorrow but KC will still be here next week (the dogs are really happy about that (he walks em a lot)).

My website profits have been great for the last 4 months or so but I'm afraid that peak season (for fitness equipment) is reaching an end. I am starting to see sales drop off now and I haven't seen the bike stuff pickup just yet. Still it just occurred to me that, in a way I am Livin the Dream! (as they said in Wedding Crashers ~ "Mom where's that hash!").

I always worry about sales and my website profits droppin off (even when it was really great over the last few months) but when I think about it, I have actually achieved one of my life goals. To startup and run a successful business where I can work from home and have a very flexible schedule. Even if this does not last forever, it has been very successful for at least a pretty good amount of time and, if I can stop worrying about the profits dropping all the time, I need to try and appreciate how fortunate I am in this way. Da Bulls!

Anyway, I hope the outdoor bike sales pickup before the fitness equipment season drops off!

Oh yea, the other thing that I have been into is watchin da Bulls kickin all the other teams asses! We will definitely be in the playoffs and we actually have a shot at winning the Championship (if we can get by Miami).

OK, so we are a little beind on this but we just got Corinne's HS Graduation Photos. We have quite a few prints and I got the images that I posted below off of the CD that we also purchased. I don't know what else to say except that she is beautiful. Oh yea, do you see how see looks like me?!? (OK, well maybe her nose just a little :-) )

There are actually some more photos but these were the ones that we thought were the best and that we had printed. The other ones are similar to these, like there are no props or other poses or anything.

The one thing that I feel really bad about is that we had some problems with Casey's graduation pics and we never even got copies of the ones that they took. We tried to get Casey to the photo studio that we have used in the past so that we would at least have a late HS Grad photo but that did not work out. Hopefully we can get a studio photo of him for his college graduation.

Well, I just spent most of last week up in Sparta, Wisconsin and just got back yesterday. I was helping my brother to organize his websites and to put together his new website 1-Remodeling.com. This is only a start so far but stay tuned I think that my bro will be building this site up into a nice resource soon.

Most of my trip involved working on the website (we worked a lot of hard, long days) and fine dining! I did manage to get some down time and visit a little too. Besides for Larry and Patty, I was able to stop by my great nephew Nick's new place where he lives with Lori and Ezra (Nick is the ex-marine) and my nieces house in Cashton.

I stayed and Andi and Brad's house (my niece and nephew) on Thursday and had a great visit there with some excellent potatoe soup and sour dough bread (along with other assorted treats and things). I also got to see my great niece, Ari and her girlfriend Nicole there. Then for a finale, I stopped by my brother's house on the way back and saw my other great nephew Steve (the ex-sailor), his girlfriend Aude and a friend Josh.

OK, it looks like it will take thousands of words to describe my trip so I better use some pictures to cut down on the typing! So...

Like I said, most of my trip involved helping my brother to get his new website up and his other websites organized. I think that I may have picked up some Good Karma by helping out like that since I had one record breaking profit day on my website and a recording breaking week while I was up there! Or maybe it was just the full moon. :-). Well, whatever it was, that was nice and now that I am back in Illinois the profits were not nearly as good for today. I gotta make another trip up there. and soon!

I had to update the monthly photo above to January (2012!) so I'm just doing a quick update. Actually the January photo above is from a previous year, we do not have any snow on the ground at this point and I believe that it got up to 50 today! (but the photo looks a lot more like a regular January around here).

Anyway, KC has a pretty long Xmas vacation and he took off for Las Vegas right after New Years. I haven't heard much about the trip yet (he is still there until tomorrow) but I heard that he lost a little money so far. :-(

I am hoping that KC will have some Vegas photos that I can post here when he gets back. That is assuming that he has photos that can be published on a PG-13 website and that the only photos that he has are not of things that should stay in Vegas. :-)

Also on Tuesday, I took Corinne back to Miami (her school in Oxford, Ohio, of course). Corinne actually went back almost a week early since they are doing a sorority rush that she is going to. I didn't even know what that was about until this week but it is a very busy and hectic time. Corinnes roommate is not getting back until next week (when school actually starts up again) so I ended up staying with Corinne in her dorm (it's co-ed so it's OK).

The trip was nice and it was nice to spend a little extra time with Corinne and to see what all this stuff was about and to visit Miami again.

Well, I guess Christmas, 2011 is mostly over now but it is still the holiday season, the kids are still home and there is still a lot of family stuff goin on. We had a very nice Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We had some good food and we all got some nice gifts. Unfortunately, I did not have my camera handy and I really don't have any photos from Xmas eve or Xmas day.

Today, we did a little spontaneous trip to the city for lunch! Dara, Casey, Corinne, Nadia and I all headed to the Signature Room, on the 95th floor of the Hancock Building for lunch. And this time Dara and I both brought our cameras with us. So we got some pretty nice photos of our family lunch with some nice city scenes in the background.

Well, I pulled a "Monk" yesterday. It was a pretty nice day here (high around 50) and my bike odometer miles for this season were at 1,192. Not a very even number! So like Adrian Monk I decided to ride another 8 miles so I would have a nice even 1,200 for the year. There that's better!

Then I remembered that it was my dad's birthday today and that he would have been 90 years old today (OK, it wasn't 90 degrees in December but I thought that that would get your attention :-) )

I was going to just post a little picture then I was thinking that I would make a little animated gif with multiple photos then I decided to check out how Photochop does slide show so I decided to do that. That was really pretty easy and did not take any real time but the output format was limited. eventually I imported the Photochop Slide Show into Premiere Elements and created a Flash video from that.

Anyway, this was never intended to be a big project so it is pretty short and I just used some old photos that I already had on my PC so here is a little:

12/5/11 - Paying it Forward, The Last Minute Roommate, Pimping His Ride! A Few Thanksgiving Photos

Well, I have quite a bit of news so I was thinkin that I better to do an update to the old website.

First off, I have the story of how an accident and almost a big problem turned into a nice early Christmas story with a Paying it Forward theme (I think that is the right term for this story). Last weekend when KC was home he accidentally spilled a little water on his iPod Touch. Well, it stopped working! We decided to give it some time and it started working again for his ride back to school. Then, it died again :-( It didn't work while he was at school, and KC (being 21) could not live without an iPod (which goes without saying :-) ). So KC went out and bought a new iPod Touch (which was only around $200).

KC came home this weekend to pickup his new (pimped out (more on that later)) car. He brought both iPod Touchs with him. He had the old iPod on a charger here for a while and all of a sudden it started working again! Yippie! Well, KC still liked the newer iPod Touch so to show his gratitude to me for helping him to buy his first car, he gave me his old (16GB) iPod Touch and it is still working!

OK, it was a long story but I was impressed with how grateful KC was and I also have a new iPod that will now hold ALL of my music (so I no longer have to pick and choose what goes on it and what does not).

My next story is The Last Minute Roommate. Most of you probably already know that at the beginning of the school year, the girl that signed up to be Corinne's roommate at Miami, decided to drop out a week or so before school started and Corinned ended up with a room to herself. Corinne has made a lot of friends and has some very good friends at Miami so the single room was not a problem. It was actually very nice to have all that extra space.

Well, the powers that be, at Miami just decided to move a girl in with Corinne today (just before finals!). I hear from Corinne that her new roommate is nice but I thought that it was bad the way that Miami would move someone in with very little notice and just before finals. I hope it all works out well and that the adjustment period is OK.

Next, KC left his car here when he went back to school to have a mechanic check it out (before the Honda bumper-to-bumper warranty expired) and to do a few other things. I found out later that he had also decided to Pimp Out His Ride! (btw, I like to say that it is pimping not pimpin (emphasizing the second P and clearly articulating the word (it drives the kids crazy! :-) )).

Anyway, what they did was to tint all the windows (except the front) and to tint (or blacken) the tail light covers so it looks like a knight-rider car or something. I must admit that the window tint looks kind of cool but I still do not like the tail light tinting. Aside from them not being as bright red, I am also concerned that this could become a cop magnet. Well, we will see. It does look cool though (there are a few photos in the photo link below).

As for some Misc News... My bike site has been doing really well. As a matter of fact today was a record breaking profit day! Black Friday and Cyber Monday were also very good. I am still very concerned that this may not last and could go away over night or at anytime. But, I will just keep working away at it and hope that it lasts as long as possible.

And finally, here are some Thanksgiving Photos. Of course, I save the photos for the end so you have to read all of my boring text before you get to them (OK, I know you can still skip the text, but at least I try to make you read it).

Anyway, I did not actually take any photos at Thanksgiving this year but Dara did take some. There are really not all that many but there are a few so I gotta put them out there. I am also including a few photos of KCs new pimped out car at the end.

Wow, the holidays are starting, KC and Corinne are home for Thanksgiving now and man has it been busy around here! First of all I have been busy trying to keep my website all up to date for the holidays (and I still have a lot to do. Sales have been picking up pretty good on the website). Then I got my bike fixed and I also did a fitness club visit and had a personal trainer workout which I blogged about on my bike site, and then the big news of course, helping KC to buy his new car!!!

Here are some photos of KCs new 2010 Honda Accord which we just picked up tonight (the photos are from the dealers website).

Just had to take a break and thought that I would do a quick update here since I still had October at the top of the page!

It's November and sales on the Bike Site are picking up (as I would expect for the xmas season). I am still getting a lot of Proform Tour de France exercise bike sales but the other products that I've been working on are picking up too.

KC was home last weekend and will be back home again next weekend for Thanksgiving break. :-) I talk to Corinne a lot when she is walking to and from classes. She said it was in the 70s and hot today! (This is November. Right?) Corinne does not get as long of a Thanksgiving break as KC :-( but she will be back soon too!

As you can see by my bike mileage at the top of the page, I have still been getting some riding in. I'm nowhere near a 2k mile season but 1174 is fairly decent. Actually, I hope that I can get some more riding in this year but I Wore My Bike Out! On my last ride (yesterday) my gear shift cable broke. :-( I was stuck in the highest gear going against a heavy wind (25 to 40mph at times I think). I hope I can get it fixed in time to put in at least a few more miles this year.

The first story of the day is that we are Insured again! Health Insurance, that is. For those of you who have regular jobs and insurance (technically, I have not had a job since around January of 2003!), you may not be familiar with having to go out and get your own health insurance.

Well, since I have been a Free Lance Programmer and Internet Entrepreneur (I thought I'd try out some fancy-dancy titles! :-) ) for almost 10 years now, I have had to get my own health insurance and have only had it on and off at different times. We have been lucky that none of us has had long-term health problems and we've also been lucky that we have not had any major operations, hospital visits or health problems, etc.

Here's how our insurance coverage and costs broke down. We had no insurance from 1/2003-8/2005. We had a Golden Rule HSA policy (high deduct able for major problems only) from 8/2005-3/2010. This insurance started at $291/month and kept going up every year. In the end it was $570/month! When I was out of work from DHL (and before the website bidness was working out) I dropped the insurance again so we had no insurance again from 3/2010-10/2011 (now). Blue Cross Blue Shield

We just signed up for a Blue Cross, Blue Shield HSA policy. This is another high deduct able policy so it is really just for major problems. There is a $10,000 deduct able but after that they pay for just about everything (up to some crazy maximum). This policy is $392/month (at least for now) and it only covers Me and Dara (since the kids now have separate insurance). I'm gonna try to keep this insurance now until I can get Medicare (a ways off but getting closer!)

OK, now was that exciting?! Nothing like talkin insurance to put people to sleep!

In other news, I just made my modest bike mileage goal for this year! I was only shooting for a thousand miles this year since I was not riding as much as previous years. Well, I made that goal a few rides after our 400 State Trail ride. I like having my goals to shoot for even if it is not a major record or anything.

OK, it's time to go watch da Bloody Bears (in England) now! Actually, I hope they don't get too bloody. I think they're playin the London Bulldogs or something :-) .

Well, first off we had a little unplanned Chapman Reunion family this weekend. Corinne has what they call "Fall Break", which meant that she had Friday off and so she came home for the weekend and KC came home to drop off Dara's car that he had borrowed for the previous week.

It was nice to see everyone and we all got together for dinner yesterday at Friday's (nothing like Fridays on Saturdays!) with Dara's mom and even a guest appearance from Aunt Karen who was in town for her class Reunion too! I really liked our little Friday's dinner.

And speakin of Reunions, My 40 year Reunion was a few weeks ago too, but I ditched. :-( I never actually got the details on it but I had heard about it on Facebook. In the end, I just got lazy and didn't make it. I made the 10, 20 and 30 year ones so I am 3 out of 4 so far. I'll have to make the 1/2 century one!

In other news, Dale and I took a trip up to Wisconsin to ride the 400 State Trail! We had this planned for a while but weren't sure of exactly when we would go. We ended up going on a perfect weekend for weather and for Fall Colors! Anyway, the 400 State Trail starts in Reedsburg, Wis and goes to Elroy, Wis. (22 miles).

We did a 45 mile round trip and we both took quite a few photos (I even used one for my October logo above) . Of course, I called it a Business Trip, and wrote about the trail and our ride on my bike site. Check out the photos at the 400 State Trail page on my bike site and the blog rambling in my bike blog (if you dare!)

I did a couple of additional local bike rides after the trip and am up to 994 now so I am only 6 miles away from my goal this year! I am only shooting for 1K miles this year but I should have a little more than that before riding season is over.

I am still working on exercise bikes on the bike site, of course. Profits dropped a little last week but there are always ups and downs. I am doing brand reviews right now and I have discovered that, through the process of doing all the research and reviews, etc., I am getting to know quite a bit about the various fitness companies. There is just so much to know and I still have so much more to do!

Well, Jake & Ashley's Wedding and Reception video has finally been released! A few DVD copies have been "shipped" and will be available to some of the cast members very soon. Until then, I have put together a little Video Trailer (/teaser) to wet your appetite and get people into the major DVD Theaters to see this video!

I'll just let the video speak for itself now. BE SURE TO HAVE YOUR SOUND ON FOR THE VIDEO TRAILER (the sound is a big part of the production!) Jake & Ashley's Wedding and Reception Trailer!

Jake & Ashley's Wedding and Reception Trailer!

Well, right after the Ohio trip, to drop Corinne off at school, I took Casey to WIU (in Ma

(Macomb)). We did the trip to WIU on Saturday and all went well. It was nice listening to our iPods on the trip. We also moved some stuff for one of Corinnes friends (who is now at WIU) and KC helped me to drop that off which was really helpful.

So we are now officially "empty nesters"! One of the biggest things that I have noticed right away is that we now have full access to 2 cars! My car is in the driveway whenever I need to go somewhere. Other than that it is pretty quiet around here which might take a little getting used to.

Well, I stretched my college move in time off to include one extra day off to take a bike ride with Dale on Monday. We rode some somewhat new bike trails (some new, some old) and I wrote up some bike trail pages to keep that part of my site a little more current. The bike trail article that I just wrote up is the River Bend Trail.

Google must have known that I had a few days off because my sales for the last 3 days dropped off quite a bit (although today was OK).

We just spent the last 2 days helping move Corinne move in to her dorm at Miami University in Oxford Ohio (KC's move in is next). All went well and Corinne has a really nice room and dorm in a very nice area. Moving was a little hectic, of course, but we had a pretty good time too.

For those of you who don't already know this story: Corinne had signed up to be roommates with a girl that she met online and had been communicating with her for months. They were both signed up at Miami and both went to orientation. Then, about a week or so before classes were to begin Corinne's roommate (and her parents) decided that she was not ready for college! What this means, of course, is that Corinne no longer has a roommate and has the dorm room to herself (at least for now). They may, eventually, move someone in as Corinne's roomate, but for now, she has the room to herself.

Anyway, I took quite a few photos of her dorm and her dorm room (and even some video) so here are the photos:

In other news, my bike website is doing much better than I had anticipated at this point. My profits are up over 400% and I am making 5.5 times what I was before my latest rounds of website updates! Still selling Tour de France bikes along with a good amount of Nordic Track fitness bikes, other exercise and spin bikes and regular bikes and accessories! I am also #1 in Google for the term "Exercise Bike Reviews"! (which is an excellent search term to be in the #1 position for).

I actually felt a little guilty about taking time off to move Casey and Corinne in to their colleges, but I talked my boss into it! :-) And I even got paid time off!

I have also managed to do some bike rides too but I haven't really had much extra time for riding. I should still clear 1,000 miles for the season, hopefully.

Well, since it's August already, I figured that I better do an update. I have still got way too much to do but I am mostly working on the wedding video (in my off work hours) and working on my bike site the rest of the time.

I am making some progress on the wedding video but it is going very slowly. I had some technical difficulties to get around and the video editing program crashes my PC sometimes but I am making progress.

I am making progress cranking out exercise bike reviews, but that takes a while too. I am trying to write more meaningful pages with quality content so it takes a little longer than just bashing out any kind of crap just to get more pages out there. So far I am up to a total of 40 exercise bike and indoor cycle pages! Some of those are obsolete unfortunately (but I counted them) and 2 of them are Livestrong bikes that have not yet been released so I can not post the pages until that happens.

I am hoping that this all pays off when peak fitness equipment season kicks in (or hopefully even before then)!

The Tour de France bike sold like crazy last month and I have even kept selling some of them this month so July is now my best month ever for bike site sales!

Today was 94 degrees and humid and I did a 26 mile bike ride! Not sure why I did that but it is nice to be inside again.

OK, I just have to add another blog post today with the latest news on le Tour de France. In case you missed it below, I mentioned how I was really enjoying le Tour this year. Well, I am REALLY enjoying it now. I also mentioned below how I put the Proform TDF Exercise Bike page on my bike site. Well, I just checked my stats for this exercise bike today and found that I just sold 4 of these exercise bikes in the last 24 hours! I'm not going to say what I made on these :-) but the bike sells for $1,300 and I get 12% comission on this one. Can you say: Viva le Tour de France!!!?

Man has it been hard keeping up on stuff!!! Sorry for the delay in updates. I have a Ton of News! OK, I know that some of you are going to be jumping ahead and going right to the Wedding Photos so I will just get right to that first!

I just filtered through what I thought were the best 80 or so photos from our collection of over 400! Dara took almost all of these. Some are really good and some are a very different perspective.

As most of you probably already know, I was the videographer for the wedding. My trip to Wisconsin was really nice and it was great to visit with the family in addition to going to the wedding and reception. The wedding and reception was very busy for me since I was doing the video and I still have a ton of work to do on the video which I should be working on after I finish this update.

Well, the wedding and video has certainly kept me busy but let me back up to some of the other stuff that's been going on.

First of all, at the beginning of July we had KCs 21st Birthday celebrations! (he did more heavy celebrating than the rest of us, I think) and Karen and Nadia came down for the forth of July visit and we had a nice time for the holidays.

Next, a little over a week before the wedding, I made my first trip up to Wisconsin (this summer) for meetings that I had at Johnson Fitness in Cottage Grove Wis (around Madison). My friend, Fred, had the connection at Johnson and initially setup this trip for me and the experience was invaluable for my website business. They rolled out the red carpet for me and I learned a huge amount of valuable information. After my business meetings, I continued up further to visit with the family. That was also really nice!

Next, we had plumbing problems and the drain for the kitchen sink and washing machine was clogged! This was around the time of the big storms and the plumber that I use (and really like) had truck problems, in addition to power outages and could not make it out for about a week (he suggested calling another plumber but I wanted to wait for him because he is good and reliable). Our plumbing has been fixed now.

While we had the drain problems, we had another little issue. Dara's car broke down on the road when Corinne was driving home. There was an issue with the car not having enough oil! :-( Well, after we had it towed in we found that it did indeed have major engine damage! We could not get an exact cost to rebuild the engine until they started doing the work but we also had the option of putting in a whole new (junkyard) engine. The junkyard engine cost was a little more than the lowest possible cost on the engine rebuild but the rebuild had potential to go much higher so I opted for the junkyard engine. We are still waiting to get our car back.

OK, well with all of the stuff above going on, I have still been trying to get some good website work done. I have all of this good information from Johnson fitness and I am still trying to really build up the website and profits, of course. Well, I have been getting some work done in this area (mostly in the exercise bike part of the site) and doing some reviews but I would really like to be getting more done than I am.

One of the exercise bike places (Icon fitness the maker of Proform) told me about this new exercise bike that they are advertising on the Tour de France and said that they were selling like crazy so I put up a page on the Tour de France Bike here. I have gotten a ton of website traffic to this page and just sold one today! ($155 comission!)

The last thing that I wanted to mention (I need to get some other stuff done!) is that I wanted to see the TV commercials for this exercise bike so I started watching the le Tour de France and I started REALLY getting into it! I just never really watched it before but, as a biker, it is really cool!

Here's a little blurb from Wikapedia on le Tour that I thought was interesting: "“The New York Times said the "Tour de France is arguably the most physiologically demanding of athletic events." The effort was compared to "running a marathon several days a week for nearly three weeks", while the total elevation of the climbs was compared to "climbing three Everests.””. "

The Tour is over 3,000 miles and they average about 30mph or so in the flat parts! Then when they are coming down the mountains they do like 50 to 60mph! On a bike with skinny tires and nothing but riding cloths and a helmet!!!

OK, as you can see I am getting into the "Tour" this year.. and now I gotta get going and get some more stuff done!!! (at least I got the family and friends page blog done!)

I just thought that I would drop a line here on the latest stuff going on (no photos this time (just yappin)). Well, my last day at DHL was Monday, so Tuesday was my first day on the new job (my

website bike product marketing job). I have actually been quite busy already (my new boss is a real slave driver!).

With the help of my friend Fred, I have setup a trip to Johnson Fitness (an exercise bike place) in the Madison area and will be meeting with them next week to learn all about their products. I have also found a retail store that sold Elliptigo Elliptical Bikes and have done a couple of Elliptical Bike Reviews and I have been out reviewing bikes and exercise bikes (which is necessary but not my favorite part of the job).

As I was updating my website prices and stuff I found that I have a lot of maintenance to do on my existing pages (discontinued models, etc) before I even get to the new review and content pages. Like I said, I have been really busy and there is a lot of work to be done.

I have not even had much of a chance to get out for bike rides due to my schedule and the crappy weather that we have had. I had one pretty nice bike ride and one ride that I had to cut short (to 10 miles) because the weather took a bad turn on me.

Another thing that happened this week is that my iPod stopped working! This is not good for me because I just love having my entire collection of music in my car and playing it in shuffle mode whenever I am on the road (especially for long trips, like I have coming up).

I bought the iPod through a 3rd party company through Amazon. I got a good price $210 for a 60GB ipod classic because it was an OLDER model. Not a USED model but an older model that is no longer being manufactured. So I get this brand new ipod about 6 months ago and all of a sudden it stops working. Well, I called Apple and they told me that the warranty expired in 2008! I told them I just got it new (in the original packaging) in January. Basically they said "too bad" contact the seller. I contacted Amazon and they said the same thing. I contacted CMTRADERS (the actual seller) and they said that since it was an older model it did not come with the warranty. I said "yea thanks m***** f*****s!)

Anyway, as I was trying to figure out how I would resolve this (my Ipod is an essential piece of equipment for me), it turns out that Dara had a brand new iPod Nano (still in the package) that she bought a long time ago, intended to return and never returned (until it was past the return date)!

Well, I like that the nano uses flash memory instead of a disk (I am sure that is much more durable) but since it is only 8GB and my current music selection is about 12GB I had to chop out some of my music collection for this model. I don't really like that but I still have about 2/3s of all of my music (about 1600 songs) and a lot of the stuff on the cutting room floor was junk anyway. I did have to cut some albums that I would like to have kept though so I may need to upgrade again at some point.

Well, it has been really busy around here but I finally got my act together and went through all of the photos that we have been taking lately and picked out the best ones to post here for you all.

First we had Corinnes senior prom pictures, then her graduation photos and then our trip to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio this weekend. I really enjoyed our Ohio trip and the campus is really beautiful. I was there on my birthday but I still really enjoyed my birthday too and it was fun to get all of my messages (Facebook, texts, voicemails, emails, cards, etc.) when I got back (or while I was still there or on the road in some cases).

OK, I guess it's time to get to it! I have my usual comments with the photos so no need to keep rambling on!

I had a real nice trip to Wisconsin this weekend and visited with the family and went to Ari's graduation ceremony and party! Her class has like 30 or so people so it is a lot different than the graduations around here!

Well, I will get to the photos right away since I just downloaded, selected and formatted them. I did not get real good photos in the gym but some of the others were pretty good. I also liked the camera video that I got of Demi and dancing in Larrys garage (she really had some great moves!) so I included that here too.

Well, here we go again. I just found out on Friday that my contract at DHL will not be extended past the June 17th end date. I can not complain though. My original contract, last June, was only supposed to be 3 months and I have made it until now. I am very grateful for that. Besides, now I'll get some summer vacation! (actually it will just be more like a more flexible schedule)

As for my next step, I have decided to totally dedicate myself to my website work. This may sound a little crazy, and it is a little, but not totally. The affiliate website model that I use does actually work and it seems to work very well for my bike site.

If I can improve the site at the same levels that I did last year (and I do believe that this is possible) then with my 6 months of DHL work this year, plus the website profits, 2011 will be OK. Then I have estimated that 2012 will be a little lower (assuming no DHL work at all) and 2013 should be up to a normal living level with the websites alone.

There is a big risk with this but it is a calculated risk and I do think that the reward is worth it. In the past I would just be guessing at the business profits but now it is more of an analysis based on past experience.

Of course, I did consider riding to the west coast over the summer, for the bike site PR, but I think that may need to wait until next summer or summer of 2013 for that (unfortunately, I keep getting older and it keeps getting harder to stay in shape! :-) )

5/7/11 - Misc Updates, Robmark Update, Another Magazine Photo and My Mag Portfolio.

Just some quick updates. Badminton season is over and Corinne did really well (she has various ribbons and medals that she won). KC is having a "riot" out at Western (literally! See his Facebook for more info).

I have not done nearly as much riding this year as I usually do. I checked my stats (I keep stats on everything!) and for the last 2 years, I had over 300 miles by the end of April. This year, I don't even have 100. I gotta get off my lazy a** and start riding!

Oh yea, please be advised that the Robmark Factory is currently out of service. I was unable to get to my card making machine and got totally behind at the beginning of the year so I just put the Robmark business on hold for now anyway. Now, I am starting to feel bad about it and may have to get er going again (and do some retro-cards!) So don't feel left our or forgotten if you did not get your usual Robmark this year (yet). You (all) are not forgotten!

I found that a few of you basketball fans out there kind of liked my Bulls Quiz below. That was actually kind of fun and Da Bulls are still kickin a** in the playoffs. I think they have a shot at winning the whole enchilada this year!

Well, I got my website bidness moved to Wyoming and I am still getting my commissions from Amazon (and everywhere else) so that's good. I just did some updates to my site over the last few days but I also feel bad that I haven't been able to keep up on that as much as I would like to.

And finally, I wanted to mention that I had another one of my photos (from my bike site trail pages) published in another hardcopy magazine. The magazine is called Competitor and looks like a pretty major publication but we had a real hard time finding a copy out in the "brick and mortar" world.

Dara did just pickup some copies at a running store so I will have a hard copy now. They actually wanted higher resolution photos than I had available and they only published a LITTLE TINY copy of one of my photos and they got the link to my website wrong on their webpage (!!! oh well).

Well anyway, my little tiny photo is on here on page 68 of the magazine. You will need to enlarge the image and look at the little circular photo with the red background in the center of the page. It is a photo on the Busse Woods trail and I get credit with some horizontal writing to the right of the little paragraph. get out your magnification glasses for this one! :-)

I was losing track of what magazines that I had photos or articles in so I just did a little list on my pc so I could remember (this is getting real important these days, at my age!). It's good to put them here on our website too so here's the list of hardcopy magazines that I have had photos and/or articles in:

I am so behind on everything! I just now updated the monthly logo above! It's taken a while to get my new LLC setup (for my website business) but I think that I am done with that now. Now I can do some actual work on my bike site, which I just did today. See the Bike Blog if you're interested in that.

One thing that I've been into lately is The Bulls. For those of you who know me as the old music guy that never watched sports or knew anything about sports this is probably a suprise! Well, I've been into the Bulls all year and now they end the season as #1 in the NBA!!! This is great for a fair weather fan like myself.

So the one thing that I wanted to do was to test you fellow Bulls fans out there. I think that the Bulls announcer, Stacey King has some interesting nick names for a lot of the Bulls players so here are your Bulls Nickname Questions:

OK, how many did you get right? No fair looking ahead... Here are the answers. Bulls Nickname Answers.

Just a quick update. First of all, Corinne is well into goodminton season now and she just got a Medal at the meet this weekend for her performance. Congrats Corinne!

And the other big news is that it looks like I'l be Moving to Wyoming soon... ♫ (not gonna be a dental floss tycoon!) ♪ ♫ (that's an infamous Frank Zappa song for those who don't get that one :-) (OK so it was Montana in the song)).

OK, well, I'm not physically moving there, but part of my website business will be moving there. This is all because of Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn and his idiotic, business unfriendly tax laws! (don't get me started on that one). Anyway, Illinois just passed the so called "Amazon Tax" in order to try and charge Amazon and other online merchants state taxes. Amazons answer was just to drop all affiliates (associations) with Illinois so my website is getting dropped as of 4/15/11. I've also been dropped from Overstock.com and JensonUSA (a popular online mtn bike merchant). All because I live in Illinois.

Anyway, my solution is to move my business (part of it anyway) to Wyoming. I believe that this is totally or at least mostly legal thing to do (there are gray areas sometimes). I was looking at S-corporations and LLCs (Limited Liability Companies) and LLCs looked like the best option for me.

I still have some work to do to finish setting this up and I'll let ya all know if it works as expected and is not too overbearing. I had to pickout a company name and I wanted it to be specific to websites but not too specific (like for the bike site alone) and the name is mostly for the checks to and from the company and for my tax forms.

Well, I just had to do some updates tonight! First of all, Corinne just made the Fremd Varsity Badminton Team!!! Tryouts were tough and it wasn't looking good in the beginning but Corinne hung in there and played some tough games and made the Fremd varsity team! Congratulations once again Corinne!

Corinne also just turned 18 on Tuesday. So Happy Birthday Corinne. I might have a better chance of her seeing my web page update than actually seeing her! :-( (just kidding (sort of) I just talked to her a little tonight).

...and I was just thinking about 1966... Let's see, I was 13 years old... the average cost of new house was $14,200.00, the average income per year was $6,900.00, gas was 32 cents a gallon and the average cost of a new car $2,650.00... and Larry and Patty got married on March 4th of that year making this their 45th anniversary! Happy Anniversary yous guys!

Just a quick update to let you know that Corinne has been accepted to Miami University in Oxford Ohio! Although Corinne was accepted at all of the other colleges that she applied to (OK, she didn't apply to Harvard) this is the school that she really wanted to go to. Congratulations Corinne!

So that city in Florida did steal the name from Miami university in Ohio (after they stole the name from the redskins (Miamis original mascot) oh wait I can't say that... the Indians no wait the native americans).

Here's my second update for today. Although I usually have the latest on top, I wanted to leave the Miami news on top for now.

I am so sore from shoveling!!! Anyway, I took a few snow storm photos. I'm sure there are some great photo ops out there but I did not get real artsy. These are just a few photos mostly of our driveway and house...

On a technical note, I made the blow up pages smaller on this batch of photos so the whole photo and caption will fit on the screen at the same time. The trade off is that the blow up photos are not as large as what I normally would do. What do you think? Better or worse?

OK, I had a chance for an update and my prediction (below) was off I guess :-( I hate to repeat the old Chicago sportsfan saying but "there's always next year"

Da Bulls are doing really good though! Derek is fun to watch.

1/22/11 - Bears Beat Packers! (just in case I don't get a chance for another update)

Just a quick update since I had to update my month photo above to January. It's been "hectic" here as most of you all ready know so I haven't had a chance for many website updates. My Bike Site really did pretty well for 2010 and I really wish that I had more time to keep up on it or maybe improve it right now but I am having a hard time keeping up and everything else :-(. I just did some minor updates yesterday but have not had a chance to really add or improve the content. Fortunately, I have a 6 month extention at DHL and that has been excellent.

Casey is still home from WIU but will probably head back next weekend. I may end up driving him back but the plans have not been finalized yet.

Obviously bike riding season is over, and although I haven't been into a real regular walk/run routine this year I have been able to get out on the weekends a little now that the first round of snow (from December) is gone. I am not walking as often as before but since I was getting in a little better shape from riding over the summer I have been able to do some decent running this year.

Well I finally got some photos downloaded from my camera. Most are from Thanksgiving (at Brad and Andis house in Cashton Wis.) but there are a few others that I threw in for extra credit too.

We had an excellent feast at Brad and Andis. I didn't get a huge amount of photos so sorry if I missed people in the photos but at least I got a some. I also stole one photo (of me) from Aris Facebook photos. I hope I don't get sued for a copyright violation! I also threw in a few photos that I took of Corinne at Halloween and some photos of the squirrels frying to break into my attic again! They are really persistent but I think that we have them blocked off now.

In other news (before I post the link to the photos)... It looks like my bike riding season is over now. I officially ended the season at 1400 miles on my odometer. I also got in better shape by speeding up my rides this year.

And for some good news, my contract at DHL is being extended for 6 more months!!! Also, being Christmas season, my websites are doing pretty good at the moment too.

As for some bummer news, our brand new microwave that we just bought bite the dust! That sucked, but on the positive side I was able to uninstall it, return and replace it at Sears and reinstall it yesterday! I could not get that song "Money for Nothin" out of my head as I was delivering and installing the microwave oven (no refrigerators or color TVs though).

We have been getting a lot done with the house. Some things planned, others not. The siding and stuff is almost done now. They also painted the garage door, did the gutters and gables and stuff, fixed a few screens... lots of stuff and it is almost done now. The actual siding was done in a few days but all of these other odd jobs are being done at different times.

The only problem so far is that there was a place where a squirrel or squirrels got in the attic (through a break in the old wood facia) and even though we blocked off access, they started eating away at the new (vinal) siding to get back in!!! The siding people put a temporary piece of aluminim siding up to block where they are tyying to get in and they said that they would replace the siding that the squirrels ate once they give up.

So far the little **** are still tyying to get in! They are not making any progress anymore though. I also had some trees that were too close to the house trimmed back to so that might help also.

Well our new dishwasher has been great! Except when I couldn't use it since our water heater went out! Yea, I wasn't expecting that one but there are always unexpected house and car repairs to deal with. That set me back a little but like that old 60s song goes "you don't know what you got till it's gone". I think that song might have been about water heaters!

I am trying to get another 12 miles on my bike just to crack the 1400 bike mile marker this year, but the weather has just not been cooperating. I haven't given up yet. Next up, walking and running season!

Good sports weekend. Bears win, Bulls win! I'm especially likin da Bulls this year.

Corinne and Steven went to Palatine's Homecoming dance a few weeks ago and I just got around to going through all of the photos to put together a homecoming dance photo page! Sorry for the delay...

Dara took a lot of photos and I think some of them came out really well. There were so many though that it took a while to pick out the best... and then I added my little captions to the photo page :-)

BTW: Corinnes boyfriend, Steven, also installed our new above-the-oven microwave that we just got with the Sears and Illinois stimulus discounts. That was a really nice surprise!

That just reminded me that I didn't mention our new appliances yet. The State of Illinois was offering 15% discounts (stimulus incentives) on appliances and the stores were offering sales to go along with that in order to get people in the store (for both). Well, we were in desperate need of new appliances so we ended up getting a new fridge, new above-the-oven microwave, new dishwasher and garbage disposal.

We got about 40% off of the price of this stuff so it ended up being a really good deal. Also, out of all of the appliances that we got, the only one that we had that still worked was the fridge (and our old one had broken shelves, broken drawers, broken water dispenser, etc.) Like I said, we really needed this stuff. (Now if we could just get new kitchen cabinets, we would be doin a lot better).

They also took down our basketball net :-(. I was sad to see that go but it did cause a lot of damage where it was. I'll be mounting that back on it's stand (which I still have) if I can find all of the additional parts (I think that I still have everything for that).

They have a crew of at least 1/2 dozen guys here and expect to finish most of it today (they started late yesterday). The gutters will be done a week or so later.

I was going to do some before and after photos but I missed the opportunity for the before (except for the before shots that I took before! :-) ) I thought that the construction shots might be more interesting anyway. I'll probably do some "after shots" after all is done.

Well, the insurance company (Travelers) is paying for all of this (mostly). The whole job will be paid for by the insurance but I will lose my "no claim" deduction of $400 for a few years so it will end up costing me a little in the long run but still WAY less than the actual cost of this project.

A few days ago, Dara went to the Botanic Gardens and got all artsy-fartsy with her camera and took a shitload bunch of photos. For some reason (?) I found this batch of photos to be pretty good (in an artsy way) so I went through them and picked some of myfavorites to add to a little photo page so see Daras Botanic Art HERE

Well, it's Saturday 10/9/10 and Karen just reminded me that it's John Lennon's 70th birthday! I was just doing a quick check of John

some stuff on the confuser but had to take a moment to remember John and I watched a few of the videos and happy birthday messages that they put on YouTube for John .

In my opinion John was THE original and main Beatle. OK, we needed all of them to change the world and music as they did but I believe that it really started with John (sorry Paul and gang). Well, the Beatles inspired me as much (or more) than anyone else in our generation (and many to follow) so I have to say Happy Birthday John!

Please forget the name of the guy that shot him! :-( He has shamed all of us but I really wish he had a different last name! Wow, John would have been 70!

Finally a webpage update! Sorry for the delay again (I'm sure that Facebook gives a lot of you enough to keep up on).

Anyway, I do have one thing that I wanted to post for everyone to check out. Way back in the end of July a lady that is starting up a new magazine asked if I would contribute a biking article (on the Fox River Trail) to the magazine for an article that we would co-write. Well, that seemed like a cool thing to do and I figured that I could get a little extra PR (and hopefully a link) from the project so I wrote an article and sent it to her (with a few photos too).

I was never notified that the magazine was published but I guess it was! I need to see if I can find a hardcopy somewhere now. It's supposed to be available at Forest Preserves, Park Districts, Health Clubs, etc.

Anyway, even though I don't know where to get a hardcopy, they did post the Autumn 2010 Issue online (it is supposed to be a quarterly magazine). My (our) article is on Page 9 and there is a link to my bike site but I don't know if the link will count

(for Google) since it's embedded in a PDF file.

So check out "our" article on Page 9 of Autumn Issue of Way of the Wilds Magazine. Hint: you may want to reduce the display size of the PDF just above the picture and you can also just jump to page 9 right away there too. NOTE: They changed the pages that I linked to to the current issue so I had to add my own PDF file (with just my article) so it would not disappear. Here's a link to the current Way of the Wilds Magazine site. (updated 5/7/11)

The article says that it's by Rob Chapman, but it was heavily edited and includes a lot of other stuff that I didn't write. For example: I didn't even know what "riotously" meant in the first paragraph (until I thought about it a little).

So if you want to compare my article to the magazine article, here is a copy of my original article. There are pieces of what I wrote but it was definitely edited a lot.

Another little benefit of writing this article is that we were invited to this thing at Bill Curtis's house this weekend (He's a news reporter for CBS in the Chicago area). Dara wants to go but I'm not that excited about it.

It's been really busy the last few weeks and I'm too tired to do any real work right now so I thought that this is a good time for a website update. I also put together a page of the latest photos (below) with pictures of KCs new apartment at WIU and some other misc photos from the last few weeks.

Well, I took KC Back to School yesterday and Corinne starts her senior year on Wednesday. KCs apartment is nice and I took some photos when I was helping to move him in yesterday. The biggest news on moving him in was the bed that we bought (and had delivered to the Macomb WalMart) for his apartment. I had no idea what a huge project assembling this bed would be! It took me and KC over 3 hours to put this thing together! So that actually took a majority of the limited time that I had in Macomb (WIU) yesterday.

The photos of KCs apartment that I got were right after he moved in (and after we assembled the bed and desk chair) so not much was really setup or cleaned up yet, but I wanted to get a few photos anyway. Also it was dark by the time I took the photos so you could not see the view out the window. I also got a few photos of KC and his roommate, Tyler.

OK the other photos had to do with the projects that robbed my last 2 or 3 weekends. Trimmin and getting our new dryer. The photos of the trimming were not that great and didn't even show how massive this project was but since I took the photos, I thought that I would add them to the photo page as part of the ongoing story of our lives... :-) I also took a few shots of our dogs (Kitty and Shadow) while I was out doing the pictures in the backyard.

Also, in the latest Bike News, I have cracked the 1,000 mile mark for this season. Yippie! I don't think that I'll make 2,000 this year, but my job scene (at DHL) is totally up in the air so you never know... Also I have been working on getting a better workout while riding and have a new average high mph for an 11 mile ride. I averaged 15.6 for 11 miles. That's not a top speed but an average for the whole ride. It was quite a workout for me (and felt good).

It's been a pretty grueling weekend for me. First we were scheduled to get our new dryer on Saturday and I had to clean out our laundry room (which was a little worse than a "normal" laundry room) to make room for it. Then I had to trim my forest which has been getting totally out of control. I am totally physically exhausted! Thank god tomorrow is Monday! :-)

It was pretty hot and humid this weekend also so that made the forest trimming even more exhausting. I did the trimming yesterday and left the branches all over the yard to bundle and bag today (it was about 8 to 10 bundles for this round (and there is more left (maybe next weekend)).

Anyway, for bundling the branches today, I tried to work in the shade but I was getting eaten alive by skeeters!!! So then I would work in the sun which was incredibly hot and uncomfortable (it was also really humid today). So that was when the famous "what's worse - the heat or the skeeters?" question hit me.

Well, both were bad but I still wanted to get the job done so I rode my bike up to Walgreens (both of our cars were gone) and picked up some Deep Woods Off. I got the non-aerosol spray bottle which worked really well (just short bursts of skeeter repellent in a fine mist). In the old days I probably would have been more concerned about spraying "poison chemicals" all over myself, but these days I just don't ~~give a sh~~ care. :-) The stuff worked pretty well and I was able to work in the shade (mostly) and get the job done. I had to take a shower after that anyway, so let's hear it for bug spray! Yea!

Oh and the New Dryer works great too, especially since our old one just wasn't working anymore. Like that old Joni Mitchell song goes "don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got till it's gone". Ah, nice warm dryer heat and laundry done in a short amount of time without cloths hangin all over the place.

I took a few photos of the forest trimming and the dryer but I'm just too tired to post them right now. I guess you'll just have to settle for the story. Sorry. :-(

Well, here we are in late summer and we've had some really nice days recently. I've updated the logo on the top of the page to August already. I liked that photo which was from our Daytona Florida trip in 2008 (August of course).

Casey and Corinne have both finished summer school now but both are still working. KC will be quitting Wally World soon to have a little break before heading up to Western for his junior year. Corinne should still be able to work, part time, at Hair Cuttery even after she goes back to school (for her last year at Fremd). She makes really good money for a part time job. I guess that beauty school is paying off already. :-)

KC has moved a few things into his new apartment at WIU for next year. His roommate already had a lot of furniture from the apartment that he was in last year so KC didn't need a lot other than his bedrooms stuff. The apt. is on the first floor (a little lower than ground level) and they have a nice couch, big screen TV and washer and dryer! Hey, I never had anything like that in college! - Dara has some pictures of the apartment but can't find the camera right now. I'll try to post some soon.

As for me, I'm still workin away at DHL (which is good). My website profits dropped off some in July (which is bad). I am hoping that DHL goes on for a while and if not, I'm hoping to get those website profits up again.

On the bike scene, as you can see from my mileage above, I am getting close to 1,000 bike miles for this year already. If I continue working (at DHL) it may be hard to crack 2,000 miles but not impossible. Tonight was an excellent night for a ride and I ended up doing 30 miles. I was wanting to get a good workout too so I started pushing myself (for speed).

I ended up doing 30 miles at an average of 14.2 mph for the ride! My usual rides are anywhere from 11 to 20 miles so I went further tonight and I usually average more like 12 mph or so. This was really hard (for an old dude in his upper 50s!) and the last 10 miles sucked because I was pushing myself so hard that I wasn't really enjoying the ride as much as I usually do. I was glad to get a good workout but I can see why those racing bike riders are never smiling!

Just a quick update since it's July already! We had a nice 4th of July weekend and there was a ton of stuff going on. The 'kids" were out doing lots of stuff and I was over to Daras moms house a few times and also had a nice bike ride around Kenosha.

I also became aware that one of my Robmark Cards got lost or stolen in the mail! They say not to include cash in letters but I've sent my Robmark birthdat gift packs for years now without a problem. Well Blairs card did not make it to her and I did send it! She just turned 19 so that would have been a good amount and I think it got ripped off by someone at the post office.

So anyway, if anyone is missing a card (I have not missed a family birthday in years) please call our hot line immediately! Missing Robmark Hotline: 1-847-991-OurHouse!

Just a quick update on a magazine article that I interviewed for a while back that just got published for a local freebie magazine. The author of the article "Bicycling, Just You and Your Family", on Page 20 , asked me if I would share my vast expertise and knowledge of biking and bike trails with her for the article a while back and they just published the article. Unfortunately, they did not publish the article online (which has a lot of references to my bike site) even though they have a website. Here's the page on the June Edition of Family Time Magazine.

I'm going to call them and see if I can an electronic copy of the article and permission to post it on my bike site. In the mean time, all I have is a scanned copy of the article which I don't mind posting on this site, but not on my bike site.

The article has 2 of my photos and my part of the article starts in the second column of the second page. Click on My Magazine Article and blow up the photo with the little plus sign so you can read it. Don't forget to check out the Section in orange at the bottom of the article. That is mostly all my input too.

6/24/2010 - Wisconsin Trip and Pics! Racing Odyssey, Corinne and Hair Cuttery

We had a GREAT (but short) trip to Wisconsin last weekend. Jake and Ashley had a really nice engagement party and bon fire and Steve was home from the Navy and Nick was home from the Marine Corps. I had a camcorder and camera but didn't get all that many photos (and I haven't seen the camcorder tape yet).

Here are just a few photos from Jake and Ashleys party and a group of pictures of the entire Oium Family (Brads chapter, that is. not the whole family (of course)).

There's been some major stuff goin on here so I'm thinkin that it's time for an update. First off, for those of you who have not heard yet, I am Back at DHL for another round! They called me back (for 60 to 90 days) and I started yesterday, so that was my first birthday present. My guess would be that this will go at least 90 days and if I get lucky it could go a little longer.

Well, I tried to keep a low profile on my Birthday as I usually do, but it seems that a lot of people tracked me down this year! I tried to write more out on Facebook, but it told me that I had too much on my first pass (over 800 words or characters or something) and I had to chop it down. Well, one of the nice things about the good old RobAndDara.com page is that I can type as much junk as I want to! So thanks to all of you for my cards, facebook greetings, texts and phone calls!

And in other news... My Bike Site is really starting to pick up some decent sales after all of my work and reviews. I think that I am really moving in the right direction with the bike site but unfortunately (for the website business anyway), my DHL job will make it very difficult to keep up on the bike site.

I will, of course, try to keep improving and maintaining the bike site but I know it will be much harder now. I have a fairly good tolerance for risk but the web site business is still quite unpredictable and although the DHL consulting business is not real predictable either, it is much more predictable than the website. So I'll just have to do the best that I can in both areas... and try to keep up with everything else going on too! Sheesh!

First of all we had a great time at Bryan's graduation party last weekend. I really enjoyed jammin with Bryan and his friends in the garage. It was cool that they liked a lot of Grateful Dead songs and some of the other old songs from the 60s and 70s that I know. Unfortunately, I didn't have all that many photos and the ones that I took weren't all that great so I did not put together a photo page (sorry). I guess that my contribution (if you could call it that) was more audio than visual this time. :-)

Other than that, I've just been doing more bike reviews and bike riding. I just finished my 27th bike review, which is an old person comfort bike that you can see with the link. The bike site is generating pretty good sales now but not good enough to break my current poverty status :-(. I made $114 last Monday and $190 on Wednesday (mostly on bikes, exercise bikes, kid trailers, trainers and GPS units) but the last 3 days have sucked.

I took a break from reviews and played Bike Trail Flower Photographer on Thursday and even wrote a blog entry and added a bike trail daisy page! What a Pansy I must be! :-)

Wow, I see it's been a while since my last update already! For those of you who don't already know, I drove down to Macomb to pickup Casey from WIU a little over a week ago now (on 5/13) so he is back home for the summer. I enjoyed the trip and it was nice to talk with KC on the way back.

KC is signed up for one summer school class at Harper and also applied for some jobs online. Well, I haven't been able to find a job but KC got a job right away at Wally World! OK, I just heard that term myself as I was writing up bike reviews for some bikes at Wal-Mart (aka Wally World). Anyway, KC will be working the graveyard shift. 10pm to 7am! That would not be good for me, but KC already has a partially shifted schedule anyway. It still might be hard though. His Harper class is during the day so he is still planning on taking that too. I guess he is going to be busy this summer!

As for myself, I've been working quite a bit on the bike site and sales are starting to pick up a little now. The jury is still out as to whether the bike site will generate enough profit to live on but it has potential and I don't seem to have a lot of other options jumping out at me these days anyway (no programming day jobs to be found). I guess my MS certifications and VBA training has not been enough to get me in the door anywhere (yet?)

As for my bike site, I've changed the overall look with a new template and created a separate template for Exercise Bikes and Bike Sales. So if you are shopping for bikes or looking for bike reviews you will see all the bike reviews and related pages in the right, left and upper columns and the same for exercise bikes.

The Bike and Exercise Bike reviews are time consuming but I now have 17 bike sale pages and 24 exercise bike pages and it seems to be starting to work a little. I am only getting a small trickle of bike sales but, as I mentioned, there is potential, which is why I need to get a LOT MORE reviews done.

Anyway, today was a good day and I sold an $1,800 bike and some other stuff and made $120. I have a long way to go but when I sell stuff that I am working on, it's great for the morale! For May, I've sold 4 bikes (I just finished the bike sale template on 5/9) and 7 exercise bikes.

So far I am still struggling with this stuff, but the keyword at this point is Potential!

OK, I'm not gonna realize the potential until I get back to work! So catch cha all later!!!

Happy Cinco de Mayo all... I don't really have any big news today but I wanted to update the month logo and bike miles... more later...

First off, Dara had a nice Birthday last Tuesday. She got taken out to lunch, dinner and lunch again the next day and got lots of cards, calls and Facebook greetings. There was one problem that leads to the Public Service Announcement below. She lost her cell phone some time after her birthday dinner.

Public Sevice Announcement: Dara has been borrowing my cell phone until hers is found (hopefully) or replaced. So if you need to call her you may want to call my cell phone and also if you call me you may get her... We have to share for now. What a hardship! How did we ever survive in the olden days! :-)

Other than that I've juz been Ridin and Writin. The websites (bike site mostly) are still on track for my projected income this year, but it is still not close to what I would like it (or need it) to be. There is absolutely no news on the regular day job front. We have had some pretty nice bike riding days last week though!

OK, It's been a long time and I just had to see what it might look like. So check out the Before and After Shots! Well, now that I know, I will be going back to the "Before" mode again soon (in maybe about a month). At least I can get a little sun tan before I go back to the original look! :-)

Well, Corinne finally did it! As I said in our announcement "After years of hard work and hundreds of beautifying services". Corinne thought that the "years of hard work" made her sound old. OK, so it was 2 years of hard work. It was still quite an effort and quite an accomplishment (while still in HS too!)

Yea it was 25 degrees and snowing here in Chicago today. OK, April fools! It was a warm and beautiful Aprils fools day today. I think that it reached 80. I took a nice 22 mile bike ride!

<website shoptalk> I've been doing a lot of updates to the exercise bike page on my bike site (even though the peak season for fitness equipment is over) but I just Sold One (indirectly, via Amazon) today and that really helped my confidence and to keep me motivated. I also did a year to year comparison and if the current trend continues, I should at least have a 5 figure income from the website(s) this year. OK, I think it's still poverty level, but if I could make this kind of thing work, it would still be my dream job... Still lookin for the real world day job too...</website shoptalk>

And finally, So Much for the Photo Tip from my last entry (below). I printed a couple of the badminton photos (below also) at Walgreens and they came out pretty grainy. I think there were a couple of problems with those specific pictures and also, as I mentioned below, my camera is only 5mp. I still think it's a valid technique but it would definitely work better in better conditions and with a better camera.

The 2010 badminton season has begun and I just "developed a roll of film" from Corinnes last 2 meets. There's not a lot of pictures but I think that I finally got the hang of doing fast action photos in dimly lit gyms. Unfortunately, the gym that we were in today (Hersey HS) had a really weird yellowish light (that's not just the photos, it was actually like that).

The fast action photo trick that I used is mostly just to not zoom in at all until I load the photos on to my PC and then use cropping to do the zoom. This reduces fast action blurring and allows you to frame the action shots better too. It would be better if there were a little more light and if my camera had a higher pixel setting (it's old and only got to 5mp).

There isn't a real lot of big news at the moment and I've mostly been workin on my bike site and getting in some nice early season bike rides. March has been very on and off as far as the weather goes (what a surprise, right?) but there have been some days that I've been out riding in shorts and a t-shirt! :-)

I had a real nice day on the bike site on Saturday. I checked my commissions and I made $258! Yikes! I thought it was a mistake but looked into it and it looks legit. Someone passed through my site and bought a $3000 mountain bike at Performance bike. Alright! I don't know why the cheapskate didn't get the 2010 model for $6000 though. :-). Then I also got $100 for a credit card approval.

Unfortunately, I think Saturdays profits were just a fluke. But I did redo the home page and all of the links on the bike site so it would be more focused and to drive traffic to where I want them to go. I also added another photo of Corinne to the home page. Check it out at www.About-Bicycles.com So maybe Corinnes picture helped with the big sales or maybe it was all my work on the site. But like Steve Martin used to say on SNL... "but Naahh!"

Mostly I have been workin on the Exercise Bike pages because there is good potential for profit in that area. Unfortunately, it's the off season for exercise bikes so I won't see the results of my work for another 6 months or so now :-(.

I still may buy a Bike GPS unit so I can improve my bike GPS pages. Bike GPS is the next most profitable item after bikes and exercise bikes.

OK, sorry for all the shop talk but I just felt like yakin about it a little bit. Later...

Well, the insurance company totaled our old 1998 Honda :-( but they did give us a real good compensation for it (more than I think we could have gotten by selling it). So, of course we needed a new car... I am not in a position to buy a real "new" car at the moment so we decided to kick in a little extra cash and upgrade a few years anwyway.

OK, just kidding on that. That was our loaner car from the insurance company. It's a Chevy HHR and I think it's really ugly and I did not like that car at all! We were embarrassed to drive it.

What we actually really did get was another black Honda Accord (just like we had!). The difference is our new one is 7 years newer (a 2005 instead of a 1998), has 46k miles, is a 2 door (the 98 was a 4 door), and has black interior (the 98 had gray interior). We got it at CarMax and I think it was a good price. We had to use the insurance money and then kick in the upgrade money ourselves, but in the long run I think it should be a good deal.

Daras old Accord was also totally stripped and did not even have A/C. Well this one has A/C and some other stuff so I think that this pretty much insures that neither of the kids (ages 17 and 19) will want to borrow my mini-van anymore!!! :-) :-(

...and in other news, It's 52 degrees here in Chicagoland and I just did my first bike ride of the year!!! So, I've updated my bike odometer running total at the top of the page as usual. And the season begins!

Well, there's lots of news to report so I better get to it. First of all, Corinne got into a Car Accident last night. Don't worry, she's OK (mostly) and it was not her fault. Corinne just turned on to Palatine road (from NW Hwy) heading west and this 78 year old guy in a Mercedes pulled out from the Walgreens right in front of her. The cops and witnesses all agreed that it was the other guys fault and he did get a ticket.

As for the accident, both airbags worked and Corinne had her seat belt on. She is sore. Her knee is the worst but also her neck and chest were sore in addition to just being sore all over. She was in Daras (98) Honda Accord and that had to be towed away. All in all, it's a bad thing, of course, but it could have been much worse. We are just glad that Corinne (and the other guy) are OK.

Oh yea, as for the Mercedes guy. Don't worry about him. After talking to the insurance company, we found out that he has 2 other Mercedes at home! But this was the 2010 model that he just got last week! I think it was about an $80,000 car!

OK, well on to the second page stories... Ralph

I might be driving a bus for pace soon! To the moon Alice!!! Well, OK eventually I might be driving a bus, but for now there is a programming job at Paces's corporate office, in Arlington Heights that is for my very specific programming skill set (Powerhouse) and that I fit very well. I have an interview setup for next week. I know that I can't take anything for granite (except counter tops) so we'll just have to see how that one goes. At least there is some good potential!

As for other news (not even in the headlines (above), I just completed my final project for my VBA class. About 3 months early!!! It's a pretty cool calendar project that I did in Excel. I create a calendar (to hang on the wall), for a specified year, that adds recurring dates (like birthdays, etc.), from a list (within the spreadsheet), to the calendar grid and also calculates the major holidays and prints them. It also allows space for personalized photos at the top of each month and prints on regular 8.5 x 11 paper (in portrait mode). If anyone wants a copy, just let me know and I'll send ya one.

First of all, I am now Bi Bi-Monitored that is (or double monitored). When I was in Wisco last week, I saw that Larry and Brad both had 2 monitors hooked up to their PCs and found out from them that it's a pretty simple process to setup. I was wondering where I

could find another monitor so I opened my eyes! and duh, there is one right in front of me on my desk! My ol98 monitor. I also had 2 monitor jacks in the back of my PC. My ol98 monitor was a vga connection and my new PC uses dvi so I had to go get a converter. They were normally $13 at Best Buy but I got one that had been opened and returned and marked down to $4!

It's really nice to have the extra screen space! My ol98 monitor is not as nice as the new one (and is huge too) but it's nice to keep extra windows available on the screen. I can also open a TV window and drag it to the right monitor and watch while surfin, or workin or whatever. Not bad for a $4 investment!

I also learned a little bit about Favicons this week and put one on this page and on my bike site page (sort of, one more step on that one but it should show up in most browsers).

For those who don't know what favicons are, they are the little tiny images that display in the address bar of your browser and in your farorites or bookmarks in your browser. Like the "Y!" for Yahoo or the Star for Mapquest, the "W" for Wikipedia, etc.

I originally had a blue dog foot print (on this page) but changed it to a Blue C and a Redish dog print. The About-Bicycles site has an "AB" type of image. IE (Internet Explorer) is the worst for showing the favicons so even though the new one is out there you might still see the old one (good going Microsoft!). You need to delete your temp internet files and cookies to clear the old one out and there still could be problems in some cases. The other browsers (like Firefox) seem to work better.

The images can only be 16x16 pixels so they are tiny and you can't add much detail. I tried to make the "B" in the About-Bicycles image look like bike wheels but it doesn't even show up at 16 pixels.

Here are the Favicons that I created for the 2 pages that I just described. I am including the 64x64 images so you can see them a little better:

<This is the one that should show up now (at the very top of this page and on the tabs above).

< This is the www.About-Bicycles.com favicon, but you can't tell that the "B" has spokes at 16x16.

I am also learning a ton of good ~~crap~~ stuff in my VBA Class! I have a solid A going and am about 8 weeks ahead so I should finish the class next week. :-) It would be nice if I could actually use what I am learning on a job but who knows what will happen there. Even if I don't use this stuff on a job, I am learning stuff that could come in handy at times anyway.

I just had to get away from all the stress of my VBA class :-) so I took a nice little vacation to the scenic winter wonderland of Wisconsin (to see my family). I stayed at my brothers and nieces house and had a very nice trip.

In some other News, this breaking news is just in (today). I just got a call for a possible interview for an Access job in Long Grove. What is interesting is that all my devious plotting and planning (getting my MS Certifications) is paying off. The guy that I just talked to said that this place is very big on the MS certifications even though I am light in the Access experience area. It looks like I may have squeaked by with my minimal Access experience but if I do get the interview (and/or job) then it will be the certification that got me in the door! Maybe it will not go anywhere but if it does, you know you'll hear about it here.

Well I just wanted to post a copy of the New Resume. No, it's not mine! That would be boring. It's Corinnes! Corinne is about to graduate from beauty school and she put together a resume to pass out at the solons that they visited on Friday. She still needs to graduate (which will be real soon) and get her license but I was really impressed with the resume that she put together. I never even had a "resume" in high school (or even in college)! OK, well here's Corinnes RESUME (as a web page). (I changed her actual personal info (phone#s and address).

Also, I have been trying to use a collection of my own photos for the month logo that I keep at the top of this page and discovered that I never even had one for February. I used to use the real heart photo with the arrow through it but I didn't feel like using that one this year so I put together a new one. It seems like I don't have many pictures in February. Even when I checked back a few years. I guess it's just not a real inspirational month for photos (for me anyway). The one that I used above isn't all that great but it is from February and current since I just took it one of the last times that I was out on the bike trail behind our house. I'll try to get a better February photo some time this month.

I am currently taking the VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) Class at Harper. I love the online format because you can work at your own pace and you don't have to drive over to the college and sit through classes. I am about 7 weeks ahead right now and will probably finish the class in February (instead of May when it actually ends). I am learning a lot of helpful stuff about all of the MS Office products and in an organized way (rather than just trial and error as I often do).

Wow, it was in the forties today, a lot of the snow has melted and you can even see the grass in many places! Of course that means that it is real wet and sloppy outside, but at least the Heat Wave is nice.

Well, I was wanting to monitor my Blood Pressure so we went out and got a BP monitor. The second reading that I took yesterday was really high so I was pretty disappointed about that but the idea is to be aware and make changes if necessary.

Well, I've been trying to do as good as I can with diet and exercise and I am trying to get better, but it is a constant job. I know that I'm not the only one out there that is trying to improve on that stuff. :-) I also just completed a really cool spreadsheet to keep track of and monitor my BP (isn't that cool? ...and how do you spell geek?)

Well, I finally finished my Microsoft Certifications and I've already put them on my resume. They are not that big of a deal, but it's just one more thing that might help these days. Of course, I liked the classes too. I am currently in a VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) class at Harper. Not much happening in the job market at the moment.

I got an email about the logo for my certifications and Microsoft has all sorts of rules on how you can use the logos and stuff. Shit I hope I am not breaking any of their "Rules" but this is what I got:

(I was gonna put a naked lady next to the logo to emphasise my point about the rules, but I guess I'll keep this update PG rated :-) )

On a technical note, I just converted this page to the New Dreamweaver Format and achieved from 3/5/20009 back... I hope there are no problems with the new format. If so, call our help line in India at 1-800-555-1234. It was a pain to convert this old page format, but in the end it should be easier.

OK now on to the fun stuff! I just converted some old 1960s Family Movies, that I just found on a VCR tape to DVD disks and to a digital format for the internet and burning to DVDs (for archival). I really wanted to get this stuff into a digital format before it degraded even further than it already has. I wish I could find the original 8mm movies (I have no idea where they are).

Anyway, the video that I just made is from an old VCR tape (that has degraded already) which was made from camcording an old 8mm film as it was being played. These movies are from the 50s and 60s and there is no sound so I added a sound track. The sound track is mostly from original songs that were popular at that time (to try and keep it real (compared to what! (that's a song))).

Well, first of all Happy New Year to you all! I hope you all had a nice New Years Eve and Day. Mine was nice and pleasantly boring. We (Dara and I) did not do anything on New Years eve although Casey and Corinne were out all night. We knew where there were though. Corinne was at an all night thing with her church group and Casey went to NIU, in Dekalb (not with a church group, I think... :-) ) Then I went over to Dales on New Years Day Eve and had pizza and watched some movies.

As for today, I just did a pretty Hard Walk in the snow. No snow shoes this time, but I did walk on the bike path which had quite a bit of snow on it and was pretty rugged. I think that walkin in the snow can be almost as hard as walkin in sand (depending on the conditions of each). Actually, even though it was hard, part of my goal is to get a good workout so it's OK for that.

The other factor is that it is about 9 degrees with a brutal wind chill today. The cold did not bother me too much except anything that was exposed (parts of my face) and having to wear so many layers of cloths! Anyway it was a nice 3 mile walk/workout and it reminded me of one of the movies that I saw last night: Walk Hard - The Dewey Cox Story. How appropriate to have a nice Hard Walk after watchin Walk Hard! :-)

As for the Walk Hard movie, it was a really stupid/funny movie (my kind of show). It's kind of along the same line as the Airplane movie but it is a spoof on all of the superstar musician movies where the musicians make it big, get hooked on drugs, lose it all and go to rehab and make a come back. I think it spoofs the Johnny Cash movie, the Temptations one and the Ray Charles movie (and probably others with a similar theme too). Anyway, I liked it, but keep in mind it was as stupid as it was funny. :-)

Well, we had a real nice traditional Christmas. Daras sisters family came in from Minnesota, we had a nice xmas eve dinner at Daras brothers house and xmas day at Daras moms house. I was actually trying to get some more camcorder video, since I really haven't taken a lot recently so I was concentrating on that and did not get a lot of photos to post this year :-( Sorry.

I have been wanting to try Snow Shoeing this year and Dale was nice enough to let me borrow his snow shoes to try it today. We brought our cameras and we did manage to get quite a few photos today as we were out snow shoeing and xctry skiing at some forest preserves by the Des Plaines River. Well, without a lot more yaking about it, here are the:

Sorry for the delay but the Thanksgiving 2009 photos are in! I didn't really think that I did my best photography work this year, but I picked a selection that I think should capture the feel of Thanksgiving this year. We had an excellent time (except maybe for Larry since he ended up getting very sick). Anyway, here are the photos!

And, I guess that the biking season is officially over for me now since I made my goal of over 2,000 miles for the year. OK, I worked it out so it came out to exactly to 2009 so I could remember it very easily! :-) Of course I've already blogged about my bike mile goals here on my bike site blog (scroll down to the last reply), so no use rewriting all of that here too.

Well, I gotta go see how Da Bears are doing now. I don't see how they could be doing any worse then most of the rest of the season.

I just uploaded some Chicago photos that I took from the Chicago Lakefront Path Ride that Dale and I took yesterday. We have been trying to do this ride for about 2 months now and yesterday was the first nice Friday that we were able to go. We strayed from the main path quite a bit and I was able see some places and get some photos from places that I had not bean to before. :-)

In other news... It looks like I will be Workin real soon now. They say when it rains it pours. Well, just as I was about to do my interview for the Rhode Island job I got a call from DHL and they have some temporary work for me now too. It looks like I got the Rhode Island job but there are some things that still need to be worked out. I am hoping that I can put off Rhode Island until January and work at DHL until then but all these things still need to be worked out. More later as I find out what the deal is.

In the meantime, I have also been working on my Access and Excel certification Classes at Harper. I am just about done with the Excel class and will need to setup the practice and real certification exam. If I go to RI, I want to get this done before I go. I am only a week or so ahead in the Access class because it took a couple of weeks to get the book for the class. This stuff does take a little time and is keeping me busy on top of everything else.

And finally, I've Ridden quite a few bike miles in order to make my 2k bike miles goal for this year and I would probably not have a problem doing the additional miles if I was still out of work, but I will probably be working as soon as next week and that will really limit my late season miles since there is not much daylight left after working hours and there may not be enough time on the weekends. So close, but still so far! :-)

Well, I wasn't originally going for any major bike mile distance goals this year but it is starting to look like I could possible make the 2000 mile mark this year so I have started pushing myself a little just to see if I can do it. Right now I need 250 more miles in November (and possibly December) to make that goal. It's gonna take some good weather and some work for me but we'll see how it goes...

There has been a job opening in Rhode Island that I qualify pretty well for but have resisted applying to because they are not willing to allow a work from home (telecommuting) option and I didn't really want to work out of state. Well, as time goes by and money starts to run low, I have gone ahead and applied to this job. The pay is pretty good but the working out of state expenses will eat up quite a bit of the pay. Well, if this happens, I'll be sure to let ya'all know!

The big news for this week was that Casey was back in town for his friends Tony and Denae's wedding. Casey came back Friday and just left to go back to WIU (after that terrible Bears game!). We were all invited but I hung back (home) for various reasons. So Dara, Casey, Corinne and Casey's friend Nick went to the wedding together.

The wedding was downtown and the wedding gang (mentioned above) went to the Signature Room, at the top of the John Hancock building for lunch before the wedding. I thought that was a nice idea for a special occasion like this and it sounds like they had fun and a good meal. You will see the sights in the photos below.

So here are the wedding pictures (that Dara took mostly) of Casey and Nick (in coats and ties!), the lunch at the Hancock building and the wedding.

I also wanted to take the VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) class, but unfortunately, that is a regular 3 hour lecture/lab and will only be available at the start of the next semester (spring). I may also take the Visual C# class in the spring.

I talked to some people at Harper and was referred to the computer department coordinator, and to my surprise, it is my next door neighbor!!! I knew he worked at Harper and was knowledgeable about computers but never really had an in depth conversation with him (until today). He really knows his shit and was very helpful!

The costs for the classes add up but my neighbor also explained how I can get some great software products as a benefit to being signed up as a Harper student and taking the classes. Like Office Ultimate for $60 and Visual Studio for free (student versions "intended" to be used for classes only).

9/23/2009 - Maybe the Drive up Window at MickyDs, New Bike Site Gift Items (via Zazzle), KC This Weekend

Well, I thought that I better do an update since it's been a while and I haven't updated everyone on the MickyD thing. I originally thought that I pretty much had that job wrapped up but it turns out that there were 2 of us that made it to the final interviews. That was still pretty good odds but I guess that I drew the short straw and they took the other guy. So, I guess I may be on my way to a position at the drive up window after all! :-(

Well, it doesn't look like I'll get rich (or even make a living) with the bike site profits, but I still enjoy trying different things and I have been wanting to put Bike Site Gift Items (like t-shirts, hats, coffee mugs, etc.) out on the site for quite a while now, but have not had the time or resources to set that type of thing up. Well, I just discovered the Zazzle.com site which allows me to design and sell these types of things very easily (with most of the profit going to them, of course).

I'll probably be adding quite a few more items in time, but this is at least a start. I also posted an entry to the About-Bicycles Bike Blog if you are interested in that.

And finally, KC will be coming home this weekend This is his first weekend back since school started so we will be looking forward to seeing him and hearing all of the details of his first weeks back at WIU. OK, well, maybe a summary of how it's going (if we are lucky) :-).

9/6/2009 - More Bike Trail Videos, Exercise Bike pages, Workin at MickyDs!

Wow, I guess I got behind on my updates again. I put a link on Facebook for the last bike trail video that I did but I never added it here. So in case you missed the FB link here's the Chicago Lakerfront Pics and Chicago Lakefront Video that I did a few weeks ago. I went on a really beautiful and and it was a really nice ride, although it was a lot of work doing the pics and video.

I also rode the Des Plaines River Trail (DPRT) last week from Lincolnshire / Half Day to just before the Wisconsin border and back (58 miles) and video taped that trail. I have not had a chance to edit and upload that video yet. The DPRT is the last major bike trail video that I had intended to do this year. There are still plenty more trails to do but this will give me 9 good bike trail videos out on the bike site to see how they do for popularity and links.

Right now I am working on some Exercise Bike pages or Stationary Bike pages on my bike site. This is for the commercial side of the site, of course, which is not nearly as much fun as doing the bike trail pics and videos but if it brings in some cash, I could use it. I hope to have these pages posted later today or tomorrow and that will be in plenty of time to get them listed in Google for peak season. Only time will tell how these pages will do.

It is looking like I may have to resort to workin at a McDonalds!!! I don't know if I'll be flippin burgers, makin fries or workin the drive-up window but I've done 3 phone interviews for a job at the McDonalds corporate headquarters in Oakbrook. OK, so it's the corporate headquarters and I don't think that they have a drive thru (although, I think that the office cafeteria is a... well, what else... a McDonalds)!

I interviewed with one of the main consulting companies that does most of McDonalds IT outsourcing and made it past the first 3 phone interviews. The funny thing is that I did 2 of these phone interviews on my cell phone while I was out on the DPRT bike trail! This job is for a 6 month contract doing MS Excel and MS Access work mostly and does not pay nearly as well as my previous programming jobs but it will bring in some income and could be a good opportunity. I still have one interview left, but it sounds like it's pretty likely that I got it unless I have some problem on this last interview.

Well we drove Casey Back to School (Western, WIU in Macomb), helped him to move in on Friday (then drove back) and Corinne goes back to school on Wednesday. Caseys new dorm seems pretty nice and he seems to like his new roommate that he just met yesterday too.

I just finished The McHenry County Prairie Trail Video which completes the Fox River and Prairie Trail video set. I had a new idea to upgrade the music for the videos. I am going to find some good musicians on CDBaby.com and email them for permission to use their music in exchange for the exposure that it will get on my website. My current 6 videos average 500 to 600 visitors a month with an average viewing time of about 4 minutes each. That is pretty decent exposure and it may improve over time also. Knowing musicians egos (from first hand experience) I’m sure many of them will allow the use of their music for good free internet exposure. Then I will get much better quality music for the videos for free!

And on to the next video. I have been wanting to ride the Chicago Lakefront Path and get photos and videos all summer now. Well, tomorrow is supposed to be in the 80s and looks like the day! If all goes as planned, I will be driving into the city (to the lakefront) tomorrow and ride the 20 mile (1 way) Chicago Lakefront Path and record video in one direction and take photos in the other direction. That should be an interesting ride and great video and photo pages for the bike site!

8/13/2009 - Back from Our Colorado Vacation and the Photos and Video are in!

We got back from Our Colorado trip yesterday (early am) and I just finished filtering down our 717 photos (from 3 cameras) to about 170 for your viewing pleasure! :-)

We flew into Denver and made a loop through a lot of cool mountain areas in Colorado and flew back out from Denver. The photo pages are in order but here's a summary of our trip also:

Wow, I guess that's a summary of most of it anyway! OK, enough yappin, here's the photos that you've all been waiting for!

I also put together a video from the camcorder and misc camera videos and have uploaded the video to YouTube. It starts a little slow but it gets pretty cool once you get to the ATV part! It's a little less than 6 minutes total, but at least check out the ATV part (that Corinne took on her camera) at about 2 minutes into the video. I added some Joe Satriani music to the background (I hop I don't get in copyright trouble!).

I don't have a real lot to report right now because I have been so wrapped up in recording and uploading new Bike Trail Videos to the bike site. Riding the trails is great but recording while you ride is still quite a bit of work and takes some of the fun out of the ride.

Based on my website stats, I see that people are watching these bike trail videos and I have a fairly unique thing out there that will add some more value to my bike site. I wish that I could do a little higher quality but this is the best that I can do with the equipment that I have and the background music that I already have available. If this were my main job or a significant project I would take the time and spend the money to upgrade the things that I could upgrade.

I tried real hard to get the FRT videos to come out good because it is such a popular trail but I’m not sure if it came out that great or if I am just getting more particular. I still kind of think that my Busse Woods one is the best so far. There are a lot of things involved in getting a video to come out good and I think that you need a lot of luck (or maybe some talent) to get them to come out good. If my videos are like my photos then I will need to videotape the FRT about 10 times to get 1 really good video! Let’s see I did about 65 miles one way from Oswego to Wisc, so 10 trips both ways would be 1,300 bike miles to get a really good video of the FRT! I guess I’ll just go with what I already have.

Nothin new on the day job front. I never heard back about the Rhode Island thing, so I don't think that will happen. I've had some other people talk to me about some Misc Odd Jobs but nothing significant has come from that. For example, I got a call for a 1 week Excel and macro job job with PepsiCo in Barrington and I have had a couple of requests for websites and website work but nothing significant in that area. Speakin of websites and website traffic, I had 22,188 visitors to my bike site in July!

We had a great time at Demi and Tristins birthday party in Aurora yesterday! It was an excellent day, the food was great, the location was nice (we could be inside or outside) and I think everyone (especially the kids) had a great time!

Why waste more time yappin? If a picture is worth 1,000 words, here's about 48,000 words worth:

7/25/2009 - Busse Woods Trail, Wisconsin and Back, Facebook Photos, Rhode Island?

I see by my last update below that I haven't mentioned the Busse Woods Trail. Well I have completed this video and I think that it is possibly my best one yet. You can see it at The Busse Woods Bike Trail Video. Based on my website stats, I see that people have viewed the 4 bike trail videos 274 times and average about 3 to 4 minutes each visit watching them. I think that's pretty decent for people to voluntarily watch these videos for that long when they are not even porn, news or celebrity stuff!

The other news that I have is that Casey and I did another bike trip from Dundee Illinois to Genoa City Wisconsin on the Fox River and Prairie Trails last week (a 64 mile round trip!). We had a nice time and made it back way before dark this time.

I also posted a handful of photos in my Facebook area. I still like doing my updates here but I do surf Facebook occasionally now too.

...and finally it looks like the Kewill job is not going to happen in the short term but I did get a call for a company that needs someone with my exact skill sets in Rhode Island. It's only been one phone call so far but I was trying to see if I could work out a telecommuting setup. That may not work so I might consider working in R.I. for a few months. Interesting, but I'm not sure if that is really going to happen or if I want to deal with the travel hassle. We will see what the future brings...

As you can tell by my (evil) bike mileage number above (666), I have been getting in some good rides recently. I just finished the Bike Trail Videos for these two bike trails

Now that I have a few videos done I also put together a page for all the Bike Trail Videos on the website. Also, notice that I now have Corinne as the bike rider on the about-bicycles logo at the top of each page! Also it looks like I am seeing at least a small improvement on my bike site profits from all of the work I did in April and May. My bike site sales have doubled! Of course, it's such a small amount doubling isn't that great. I still need it to double about 4 more times to be significant.

Here's a return of the Cubs game sine I just got the photos downloaded and also did some photo shopping of one of them. Cubs Game Photos.

Well, Happy 4th everyone! It's been a pretty busy week and weekend. First of all my DHL project is completed and I am off work (or out of work or whatever) again. It was nice to be back and felt like I never left. Now I am hoping for the Kewill job to come through although it would be best if I had a little time in between. I will follow-up with them but maybe next week.

I had a last minute chance to go to a Cubs Game on Thursday (my last day at DHL) and I decided to go. The trip had been planned by Daras family for months now and I originally opted out but had a second chance to go and took it. That was a great decision! What a game! If your not a Cubs fan you may not know about it but the Cubs won and there were some really exciting moments. It was also a beautiful night for a baseball game! I am so glad that I went!

Dara's sister, Karen, and her family are in town from Minnesota and there has been a lot going on with the family and in Glenview. Another event that has been planned for a while was to have a family Portrait of Daras side of the family done. We went to a place in "The Glenn" called "Portrait Innovations". It was a pretty good deal and we got quite a few photos. I randomly picked a selection of some of the photos from the samples that we got on disk. There are a ton more but these photos should give you a good idea of how they came out. Enjoy and catch ya all later!

6/13/2009 - Bye bye House, Hello DHL again, and Kewill too... Family News, First Bike Trail Video

Man it's getting hard to keep up on everything! Now I have this page, my bike site blog and Facebook to keep up with. I just realized how out of date I am on everything! OK, well let's get to the news!

First of all bye bye to the "other house" (and good riddance). I started to get a little sick right when we were almost out of there but had to keep moving stuff anyway. Then, right after the move I got called back to DHL again! It was for a short one week project but it has already been extended to almost a month. I am glad to be back at DHL even for a short amount of time.

Then, on top of that, the company that provides the core (brokerage) software to DHL called me for a possible job with them (thank to the referral from my boss at DHL). They still need to finalize some stuff and I will need to interview and work things out but I am a very good fit for that position so I think that job will most likely work out.

All of this after not seeing any improvement on my websites, which I was really hoping for. So basically, things are looking pretty good right now.

I guess those last few paragraphs could have fallen under the <shop talk> tag :-)

My birthday was pretty nice except that I was really sick by then and am still recovering now. We had a nice family dinner at home (which I wanted) a steak and lobster dinner and choco cake! Yumm!

In the Family News, Casey is taking 2 summer classes at Harper (Speech and Philosophy) and Corinne is ramping up again at beauty school. They both have their drivers licenses this year and are enjoying summer and mostly try to borrow Daras car (the Honda Accord) cause it is supposed to be cooler than a mini-van or something :-) but they will take the mini-van if they have to so there are times when Dara and I get stuck at home with no car.

And I finally finished and posted my first bike trail video. I wasn't real happy with the quality of the video itself and may redo it at some point but I wanted to get it completed so I could use the same format and background music on other bike trail videos. I had hoped to do quite a few bike trail videos this summer but with my new work opportunities I may not get that many done. Anyway, this is the bike trail that starts from behind our house. It goes quite a long way now!

Check out the
Algonquin Bike Trail Video
and don't forget to turn on your speakers for the original music!

5/25/2009 - A beautiful Memorial Day weekend, Almost out of the other place.

Well, it's been a really nice Memorial Day weekend here. I've taken a few bike rides but have been a little burned out from clearing out the other house. I'll really be glad when June 1st (closing day) is over.

No change on the job scene or the website traffic scene. I wrote a blog entry about the bike trail videos that I am working on (Here at the Bike Blog).

We have moved a bunch of crap stuff from the other place to a storage unit (not the right solution to the problem, but a quick and workable solution), donated a bunch of stuff and have moved some stuff here. The people that we donated stuff to were really grateful for it which is a total win/win situation! We got rid of stuff and other people got stuff that they needed.

For example (I just checked and my for sale by owner site is still up) on THIS PAGE we donated the bunk bed in the top picture (bedroom #1) and the 5 piece furniture set in the bottom picture (bedroom #3). We have a place coming for the furniture in bedroom #2 next week.

We moved the orange couch and light colored chair from THIS PAGE to our house. Here's a picture of the couch in our basement and the chair in the master bedroom. So as you see I've been pretty busy "moving".

5/19/2009 - Another day another dollar (literally - bike site updates), Other House, Misc News

Well, I've been doing some misc stuff lately so I thought that I would do a quick family and friends update. I am actually very disappointed with the lack of results that I've seen from all of my SEO updates on the bike site. I've put in a couple of months worth of work and my website traffic has only increased a very minor amount which would be normal for the better weather anyway.

There is still a possibility that I'll get a big jump in traffic when the SEs catch up to my updates but it's not enough to depend on right now so I'm not sure how much more effort I'll be putting into this project. I will, however, be doing a lot of bike trail photo and video updates though. This way I'll be improving the site by doing things that I enjoy and would pretty much do anyway (although the photos and videos get to be a fair amount of work too). If worse comes to worse the bike site will end up being more of a "hobby" site that generates a little spare cash.

In the mean time, I have applied to some regular grown up jobs too but no nibbles in that area (yet).

As for this month I have mostly been working on getting the other house emptied out and ready for closing (on 6/1). We have our storage unit and it is almost 1/2 full. I don't see any problems with having enough space but I'm a little concerned with getting rid of the remaining furniture. Well, we're working on that stuff.

And finally in the Misc News category, We picked up Casey from Western last week so he's back now (I wrote a little story about sawing his bike lock of on the Bike Blog). Corinne still has a week or so left to go (to finish her sophomore year).

Well, it looks like another beautiful spring day today so I'm heading out for a ride!

Just a real quick Mothers Day update. I mostly wanted to update the month logo and my bike mileage above. I just got some new bike pedal clips Which I wrote about on my bike blog of course) with my (not trying to change the subject) Fathers Day gift (money) from last year! (yes, I saved the envelope and actual cash that I got from Casey).

Not a lot of other real interesting news right at the moment. We'll be goin to Daras moms for Mothers Day. That's it for now.

I guess you've noticed the new Family & Friends web page format now. After doing on the bike site updates and improvements this page started looking kind of out of date. I'll probably be doing some improvements in my spare time and I may just trash the basic format here and start with something completely different.

Don't worry I'll still have all of the same goofy stories and pictures and all but hopefully it will start evolving into a little better format. Well, that's it for this little mini-update.

4/25/2009 - Summer Home is Sold! Corinnes Out... Driving! KCs Back, Blog and Bike Site Makeover

Lots of BIG news this week. First of all, our Summer Home is Sold! Yep, our "extra" house (summer home, mistake, accident (or other stronger terms that I've used) just sold yesterday. Hopefully everything will go through without any problems. We lost a ****load of money, but in the end, we probably would have lost as much or more if we left the money in the stock market.

Also, Corinne got her Drivers License last week. We haven't seen much of her since then... :-(

KCs Back, just for a quick visit (the weekend). He has a few weeks left now then he'll be back for the summer.

The next few updates have to do with my websites so I guess they would fall under the <shoptalk> category. First of all, I've started a "formal" bike blog page on the bike site. Technically, this page/site is a "blog" that I have been doing for over 10 years now and I have done bike blog entries on the bike site before too but this blog format uses a server side database for the blog entries and allows for people to subscribe to the RSS feed, for the blog, and/or to make blog comments also. I don't have many entries and I'm not sure how it is going to evolve but check out the new Bike Site Blog Here (and sign up for updates with the RSS feed, if you like!)

The other more noticeable changes to the bike site is the Bike Site Makeover. I have made a lot of cosmetic changes (logo, photos, backgrounds, etc.) to the bike site. I wanted a photo of a bike rider with a cool background and didn't have anything in my own photo collection so I had to get a little creative to get one. I had Dara take some photos of me on my bike and then I photo shopped them on to some nice mountain scenes. Now, I'm probably not good looking enough (OK, it's debatable :-) ) to be a "model" for stock photos but I just used my profile and I am off in the distance so it's OK for now. Anyway check out the New Bike Site Look Here.

What I will be doing next is getting some photos of Corinne on/with my bike and with a bike helmet for some good attractive young person photos. I think she'll make a better model than me. Also, with summer coming, I'll try to get some other biker photos when I am out at biking stuff occasionally. I have kept the logo at the top of the site flexible so I can swap changes in or out pretty easily now.

In other news, I've also applied for a few "grown up jobs" too, but I only hear silence in that area. Unfortunately, the bike site is just not doing that well as far as profits go so I may be looking around for other stuff if I don't see some kind of results fairly soon.

4/11/2009 - I see BUDS, #1 for "Bike Sales", KCs back! Bulls in the Playoffs

I am seeing some BUDS on the trees around here! and as we know, where there are buds... leaves will follow (of course, weeds and lawnmowing follow too :-( ). I've been getting in some bike miles but it has still been a little chilly and windy.

I have been really busy but "spinning my wheels" a little because I am a little concerned about the bike site generating a significant income, but I do have some fresh ideas that I'll be working on real soon and I am seeing some improvements in my bike site traffic (and sales since the weather is getting better). One thing that I think is pretty amazing is that my humble little bike site (www.about-bicycles.com) is #1 for on Google for the terms "Bike Sales" (and "Bicycle Sales") against 196,000,000 other pages!!! Go ahead try it in Google. It isn't making me that much money (I do sell a few bike indirectly) but it just blows me away that I am in front of Wal-Mart, Target, REI, Sports Authority, etc.

Yep, KC is back from Western this weekend. He's going to steal Daras car and bring it to Macomb for a week then I am probably going to go there next weekend and retrieve it (or what is left of it :-)) the next weekend.

I have been a pretty big Bulls fan this year (even when they were sucking (beyond my usual "fair weather fan" status) and I just found out that they are in the Playoffs. I'm sure they can't beat the best teams, but it will be fun to see how far they actually get. Well, I gotta go get back to "the game"!

3/15/2009 - Gettin Lamby, Wisco Pics are in!, FaceBook!, Dreamweaver and CSS

Wow, what a beautiful day today!!! I think we have turned the corner and are getting to the lamby part of March! It's in the 50s and I just got out for a nice bike ride in Inverness. Tomorrow is supposed to be real nice again and I am hoping to do the new trail by us.

As some of you know, I just took a solo trip up to Wisconsin last week. It was kind of a quick trip but I really enjoyed my time up there! It was just me and since it was pretty cold we didn't do anything outside, but I really enjoyed the time with the family. Well, rather than yakin about it, here are a few photos:

Also, I just got myself setup on FaceBook (or was it spacebook or myface!). When I was up in Wisconsin, I found that a lot of the family has Facebook pages and photos that I am missing out on, so I set myself up so I can stay up to date on this stuff. I'll probably be looking for "friends" soon :-( so if any of you are out there, let me know or hook me up as a friend! I still plan on doing all of my ramblings and family stuff on this site, but I'll be out on the Face too!

<shoptalk> Before I update my bike site with a bunch of new changes (I am going to do a gradual redesign), I wanted to get Dreamweaver (which is a web site editing tool) and learn Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver Templates and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This involves a learning curve, but in the long run will make my job of updating the web sites much easier.

Well, I got a discounted student version of Dreamweaver at Harper (after a few little problems, but I don't want to write all of that here) and I have learned all of the stuff that I wanted to (Dreamweaver, Templates and basic CSS in order to be able to convert the pages (that took me almost 2 days or marathon studying and testing!). I hope to get the bike site changes done pretty soon.

I also finished pasting all of my old bike stories and comments, from this site (for the last 9 years) to my casual Bike Blog on the bike site. I have decided to to a "casual" bike blog including the biking stuff that I write here (I'll paste bike related stuff from this site to the bike site also (in addition to bike only stuff)) but I am not currently using any official blog software or tools at this time. If your interested the here's the About-Bicycles Bike Blog Link. </shoptalk>

I am NO LONGER the SONGPUPPY and the PAGEMOUSE!!! but here are the links to these pages:

I lost these domain names from a clerical error... I was getting tired of the names anyway... The sites are still there though!

Bike Mileage:	Season Records	2006 Season 2(Final)
RC:	2005 - 2,182* *Corrected for odometer error	732
Dale:	2006 - 2700 (recumbent miles)	2700... OK, so I lost the record this year...

Bike Mileage:	Season Records	This Season
Me 2011		1200
Me 2010		1400
Me 2009		2009
Me 2008		1104
Me 2007		1001
Dale 2006	2700		New Record
Me 2006		732
Me 2005	2182!	2182	New Record
Me 2004:		759
Dale 2004:	2,008	2,008	New Record
Mine 2003:	1,048	1,307	New Record
Daras:	330	53
Corinnes:	187	43
Caseys:	402	82

Tip-o-the-year: If it moves and it shouldn't... Use Duct Tape. If it doesn't move and it should... Use WD40.

New philosophy from a bumper sticker that I just saw:
Government Policy:
"If it aint broke... Fix it until it is..."