Spring Break

So even with Kyle under the weather and on those darn sulfur based antibiotics that make it so he couldn't spend hardly any time in the sun, we were still able to get a few things in besides bowling.
We went on a tour of the Chandler Police Station with the Bear den (I'm the den leader). We were able to see the holding cells and Tylor and the bears sat in them. The cells are only about 3ft by 3ft with a cement seat in them and that's it! I totally forgot my camera, and missed getting photos of the boys in the holding cells... I should always remember my camera. We also got to see the firing rage (it's under the ramp to their parking garage -they didn't waste any space in building the station). We also saw the mock house they use to practice in. I think all of the boys loved seeing the police station. Kyle and Ryan wore their "badges" (stickers) for the next three days straight.
During the week I did break down and take the boys to McDonald's for lunch once and then back another day just for ice cream so the boys could play inside. And all three got a lest one play date with a friend, during the break so it wasn't all sit at home and stare at the TV... (Thank heavens!)
James and I got to see Les Miserables on Friday evening at The Phoenix Theatre. James surprised me with the tickets for Christmas. We both really enjoyed the play /musical. The Phoenix Theatre is much smaller then the Portland Civic Auditorium -where we saw it before (think about the same size as most chapels for seating capacity). Which made it so you could see the actors faces, unlike the huge auditorium we were in before. As I said before we both loved it and were really impressed with the performances. The only issue was that it STARTED at 8pm and it's a three and a half hour play... so it was a late night. Luckily we had some great friends from the ward watch the boys for us as all the youth were on the trek (where they pulled handcarts through 6 inch deep sand). So luckily Dan and Jamie were willing to hang out at our house for like 4 hours so we could go as nearly all the youth were out on trek.

Bowling

We went bowling on Thursday afternoon.

Spring Break

We are in the middle of our spring break and we have done nothing. That's because we have been sick :( Now that we are felling a little better, we are looking for things to do indoors. As Kyle is on antibiotics that do not allow him to be in the sun (ugh! living in the valley of the SUN!).

End of winter sport season

Here are some pictures of the boys playing in their last games (of the winter sports season). Tylor played flag football on the sports league called I-9 sports -we chose them because it was kind of low key more of a learning how to play football league. He really enjoyed leaning and playing football and he got considerably better at it over the nine weeks he played. Kyle is the only one in a white jersey in this photo. He enjoys soccer but is really looking forward to trying football this next season. Ryan really loves playing soccer -although he is really jazzed about the idea of playing "baseball" (coach pitch t-ball) in spring. He likes to play goalie. He has also been really good at it. Here is a short clip of him stopping the ball. One game this last season, he was stopping the balls by rolling on top of them and then over so he was laying on the ground with the ball on top of him... it was great but I didn't have the camera with me then (of course).

2009 LIVESTRONG Challenge

As many of you know Carmen's sister lost her husband last year to cancer. It was tough as Arlie was one of my brother-in-laws that I would have been friends with even if our wife's weren't sisters. He and I just had a lot in common, and well his passing was hard on everybody -I'm not going to pretend that it wasn't hardest on his immediate family I'm quite sure it was. But it was a great lose to us all. Both of us have a passion for two wheeled vehicles, although he liked his with a little more (OK a LOT more) horse power than I like mine, we both enjoyed many of the same activities. Over the last year as I’ve thought about it I’ve decided that I want to do something in his memory. So I signed up for the Lance Armstrong Foundations fund raising event the “LIVESTRONG Challenge”. I need to raise $250 dollars before I can participate in the 100 mile bike ride that is the Livestrong challenge in San Jose CA on July 11-12. I would ask any of you who can to please donate to this very worthy cause. Thank you.

How this works is I set up a personal fund raising page. Any and all donations go straight to the Lance Armstrong Foundation to support the fight against cancer. So please follow This Link to visit my personal web page and help me in my efforts to fight cancer for those around us besieged with the disease.

Thanks,

James

Ryan's Birthday Party

Yup, Ryan is 5 now... I cannot believe it either. He had his party yesterday -although Friday (his actual birthday) he was a little irritated that we weren't having the party ON his birthday... He invited some eight friends or so, five of which were girls; yeah he's got a way with the ladies...

Here's everybody singing happy birthday to him.


He made out like a little bandit on the present scene too (look at the pile behind him in the third photo...)

I... AM... A... BIKE... GEEK

I believe it's been said that there is power in coming to grips with who you really are... Well maybe I'll get some power from this I don't know...
So anyways, a little while ago I started to notice that the rear wheel on my daily commuter bike was out of true (had a slight wobble for the non-bike geeks out there). No problem I've trued it (straightened it by adjusting the tension on the spokes) before so no big deal. Well when I went to true it this is what I found.





So for those non-bike geeks out there that's a view of my rim and tire. Now here's a little bike terminology lesson. How a wheel is built: you have the hub -I hope you already know what that is, but it's the center where the axel rides in bearings. The rim and tire -the rim is laced to the hub via spokes. The spokes pass through holes in the hub and have a head on one end so they cannot go all the way through the little holes in the hub. Out at the rim the spoke is threaded. It screws into these little brass bits called nipples that are too big to go all the way through the holes in the rim -part of them does stick out of the rim, it's that part that you turn to tighten or loosen a single spoke. Now if your rim has a wobble to the right you'd want to tighten the spokes that go to the left side of the hub in the region of the wobble and possibly loosen the ones that go to the right (if they're significantly tighter than the ones that go to the left). It's sort of an art because there's a real feel to knowing when it's too tight or a little lose.
ANYWAYS, as you can see in the photos of the rim the nipples are pulling through the rim, the metal (it's an aluminum alloy) is ripping and the holes are elongating. So now if you thought the above discussion was geeky, I've only just begun. So being a nerd by trade I started to wonder how many load cycles those spokes had seen, because aluminum unlike steel has an endurance limit. An endurance limit for metals means that no matter how small the load there is some finite number of cycles that will make it fail (break). So this is where I wax really, and I mean really geekie. I'm just forewarning you. So the wheel size on my bike is 26 inches, this is actually measured to the outermost diameter of the wheel and tire combined. That’s the diameter so the circumference of a circle as I’m sure you all know is C=2*pi*r, where pi is a constant you know the one 3.14159265… (it’s an infinitely long number that doesn’t repeat so I think 8 significant digits to the right of the decimal place is sufficient…) r is the radius of the circle. Therefore for those of you without your calculators handy the circumference of my wheels is… 81.68 inches or 6 ft 9 inches. So every 6 ft that I travel on my bike each spoke is loaded and then the load is relaxed one time (assuming that it isn’t loaded when it’s on the opposite side relative to the reaction force from the ground on my tire, but I haven’t modeled that behavior yet so I will conservatively estimate that it’s only loaded once per revolution and not twice… Currently I travel about 6 miles per day by bike, in Sunnyvale it was about 12 miles per day. At BYU it was like 2 miles per day. Now lets assume that I bike on average of 4 days a week all year long (most of the time I ride every day so that should make up for holidays and vacations and what not). Therefore, over the last 8 years of primarily bike commuting I’ve ridden about 8,700 miles, which is approximately 46.4 million ft. Which means that each of those spokes and consequently each of those holes in the rim has been loaded some 6.8 million times. WOW! I know that is not near as many cycles as I would have expected it to last either. I was thinking like 20 or 30 million at least. So let's postulate some reasons for the low number...
a) It's loaded more than once per revolution
b) I bike more than I think
c) The holes in the rim act as stress concentration factors and reduce the number of cycles that can be attained.
Hum... Yeah I'd better stop or I'll have the longest post we've ever had. Sorry but it’s been on my mind and I had to share it. And trust me Carmen’s heard enough of this kind of stuff already…