Quinn's Pet Ant

if you look closely in the bowl you will see Aurthur. Quinn caught him herself but after playing with him for a few minutes, decided that she would let him go to roam the house on his own.

Craig's Field Test

Basically you go as hard as you can sustain for 30 minutes and that tells you where your lactate threshold is. It is painful but very informative. This was Craig's first attempt. Did i mention that for it to be very informative, you need to complete the whole 30 minutes and not 16 1/2 minutes?

Spring bike ride

Today is the first official day of spring and so i thought i would celebrate by going for a bike ride this morning.
The flashing sign at the bottom of little cottonwood canyon that said chains or 4 x 4 required didn't make me feel like it was spring.

Spring is Here

I have some plants starting to come up in my yard and the birds are starting to come back. It has been a hard winter this year in my neck of the woods with lots of snow. i ended up plowing the driveway and trapping the "molester van" behind a wall of snow. the snow has melted enough to get the van out and i drove it today for the first time since december. It feels good to be cruising in style again.

Weekend Bike Ride

I have avoided puting too much info about my bike rides on here, because i don't think they are very interesting to anybody but me. Especially because all of the other info i put up here is very, very interesting, maybe even captivating. I did have the chance to go down to st george this last weekend and spend a few days rolling around. My dad , dysfunctional brother and i went down on thursday morning, and the ladies in my life came down then next day. We met up with some guys from the American RADD race team who is sponsored by agel. Thursday's ride was supposed to be "rolling terrain". The difference between rolling terrain for my 61 year old dad and rolling hills for 28 year old Bryson Perry are fairly significant. about 30 minutes into the ride when they said that we were going up to gunlock resevoir my dad knew he was in trouble.
he had been there a long time ago to swim in the resevoir and remembered it being up hill. After passing the resevoir we made our way over to the st george marathon route and down snow canyon and back in to town. He remembered this part of the road as well, from the times he ran the st george marathon. he knew this part of the ride had hills as well. My dad took up cycling last fall to keep in shape and lose some weight, since his body can't take the impact of running anymore and after a few injuries, cycling was a nice alternative. Last fall on a ride, he got his heart rate up to 147. He thought he was gong to die. he has been faithfully riding his bike on the indoor trainer 6 days a week since christmas, and has lost some weight. The difference between riding indoors on a trainer and riding outdoors with some pro racers became quickly evident to my dad. 2 of the guys we went with helped my dad up the hills with a hand on each side of his back pushing him along. You may be thinking to yourself.."hmmm, that sounds really nice of them to help him up those hills"... my dad saw it a little differently. When you are riding and get to a hill, you ride up it at your own comfortable, but hard pace, whatever that may be. When you have a guy on either side of you, pushing you up the hill, you tend to work harder. A LOT harder. The old man's heart got up to 164 on a couple of occasions and averaged 150 for most of the ride. My dad just kept asking if they had been promised a part of the inheritance if they succeeded in killing him early.
As hard as they tried, he lived that day and did 30 miles on friday and 40 miles on saturday. Although the other 2 days were at a slightly slower pace, he kept riding.
Pain is temporary, Quitting last forever. In his case the pain lasted a little longer than he was hoping for. I got in a few more miles than that and felt good for this time of year.
The girls got to play outside and ride their bikes and stayed down for a few extra days since they are off track right now. They went swimming and had a great time. I'm Happy to have the snow this winter but it is nice to ride in shorts again.

On a sad note

MILWAUKEE (AP) - Gary Gygax, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons and is widely seen as the father of the role-playing games, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva. He was 69.

He had been suffering from health problems for several years, including an abdominal aneurysm, said his wife, Gail Gygax.

Gygax and Dave Arneson developed Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 using medieval characters and mythical creatures. The game known for its oddly shaped dice became a hit, particularly among teenage boys, and eventually was turned into video games, books and movies.

Gygax always enjoyed hearing from the game's legion of devoted fans, many of whom would stop by the family's home in Lake Geneva, about 55 miles southwest of Milwaukee, his wife said. Despite his declining health, he hosted weekly games of Dungeons & Dragons as recently as January, she said.

"It really meant a lot to him to hear from people from over the years about how he helped them become a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, what he gave them," Gail Gygax said. "He really enjoyed that."

Dungeons & Dragons players create fictional characters and carry out their adventures with the help of complicated rules. The quintessential geek pastime, it spawned a wealth of copycat games and later inspired a whole genre of computer games that's still growing in popularity.

Born Ernest Gary Gygax, he grew up in Chicago and moved to Lake Geneva at the age of 8. Gygax's father, a Swiss immigrant who played violin in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, read fantasy books to his only son and hooked him on the genre, Gail Gygax said.

Gygax dropped out of high school but took anthropology classes at the University of Chicago for a while, she said. He was working as an insurance underwriter in the 1960s, when he began playing war-themed board games.

But Gygax wanted to create a game that involved more fantasy. To free up time to work on that, he left the insurance business and became a shoe repairman, she said.

Gygax also was a prolific writer and wrote dozens of fantasy books, including the Greyhawk series of adventure novels.

Gary Sandelin, 32, a Manhattan attorney, said his weekly Dungeons & Dragons game will be a bit sadder on Wednesday night because of Gygax's passing. The beauty of the game is that it's never quite the same, he said.

Funeral arrangements are pending. Besides his wife, Gygax is survived by six children.