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It finally happened last night.  About 3am the light drizzle turned to a dusting of snow in Big Bear, Ca.  Total accumulation at my house out in Baldwin Lake was around 1/2 inch.  Not much, but definately a sign that winter is upon us! 

Now if they could finish my dang garage at the house in Big Bear!  Can’t wait to head back up the hill for the weekend and do some mtn. biking.  The snow will likely be melted, but there’s always more to come.

You’re probably thinking gambling…unless you know me.  Then you already probably know I’m not much of a gambler.  I’m talking about Mountain Biking at 8000 feet!

Just a few days ago I took a trip up to Big Bear, California to take care of some business, and of course couldn’t pass on the opportunity to put in some miles in those beautiful mountains.

View from Bertha Peak, Big Bear, Californa

It was an incredible morning, about 72 degrees and sunny with a cool wind blowing.  My buddy Pete and I headed out from his house on the Southwest corner of Baldwin Lake.  We headed up Van Busen which turns into fire road fairly quickly and the climbing started.  We climbed about 3 miles before hitting the Pacific Crest Trail.   We left the road and hit the single-track for another 2 miles of climbing before we summited at Big Bertha peak at just over 8000 feet. 

The altitude and climbing were taking their toll on me, but the next 45 minutes would be well worth it.  We started our decent down Cougar Crest Trail, stopping briefly to chat with some local hikers we knew.  It’s a technical single-track, with large jutting rocks spewn everywhere, with a steep drop off one side or the other for the top 1/2 of the decent. 

I took my obligitory spill somewhere around the middle, remounted and we continued to fly down the mountain.  We came just West of the Discovery Center and flew back on the Alpine Pedal Path, and then headed back to Pete’s house.

The ride lasted about 2 to 2 1/2 hours total, but I’ve been dreaming about it since.  I was exhausted, dirty, scraped up a bit and I couldn’t wait to get back up there to ride again soon.

Wow, Halloween is gone, Thanksgiving is just over a week away, and before you know it, Christmas will be here followed closely by New Year’s. Squeeze in work, family and…heck, there’s no more squeezing.

I’ve been putting off my workouts and gained some weight. Nothing too major, but it adds up…15lbs over the last 6 months. I lost 100 lbs 2 years ago. It took me a year to do it, and kept it off for a year…and now I’ve gained a bit back.

I don’t like it. ‘Tis the season to over eat and gain weight. I’ve got to get a handle on it before it I end up with a few of those handles again!

What is ‘head clearing’? It’s when I do a download…a mind dump to get stuff off my mind.

Work – too much. I remember now why I didn’t like having a ‘job’ and a boss. It’s not either the job or the boss – I have two jobs now, and two bosses, and really like both. But it’s the loss of freedom. I’m an entrepreneur at heart. I like to be free to make my own path, my own decisions and work – at least mine – just doesn’t lend itself to that.

But, times are tough out there, and I need to feed my family, pay bills and take care of business – so I suck it up, shut up and go to work.

Kids – love ‘em. I have four kids. They’re all so unique and different and I love each of them for their own merits. My oldest son Cole is turning 18 today. Wow, feeling old right about now. My youngest, Jacob is 8. And I have two in the middle, Dylan 12 and Teddi my daughter is almost 16.

The older two live with their mom locally, and the younger two with me. The younger two keep me busy and unfortunately between their Baseball, Boy Scouts, School, and my two jobs, I don’t see my older two very often. Add to this that they’re teen agers..heck adults and they just don’t really want to hang out with Dad too much. It’s kind of a bummer – but life I guess.

Location – we’ve been trying to move to Big Bear, California for a few years now, but with the housing market stinking it up out here in California, it’s just not happening. We talked with a mortgage guy the other day about refinancing and that’s not going to happen either. So, the newest plan, save some money, pay off some debt and move to Big Bear and rent our home and hope and pray for the best renters in the world. Cross you fingers.

Racing – I haven’t done any Adventure Races in months. If you’ve known me for long, I did 4 two years ago I think, and 7 last year as I recall. Love them…but need to be fit and honestly it’s been tough…well if we’re being honest – I’ve been lazy. With my schedule, when I did have time to train I usually opted not too. But, I’m back at it. I have a snowshoe race coming up in 2 months. I got third last year so I’m going to start shooting for that. I’ve been running 5-6 miles 3 days a week – either road or trail runs, and riding my road or mtn. bike the days in between. I usually don’t do any workouts on the two days that I work my day job and then night job in the same day – my ‘double’ as we call it, pretty much zaps me. They’re 16 hour work days and they’re always back to back so I just can’t do it. But other than that I’ve been pretty disciplined lately. I wanted to get some kayaking in again and some high altitude hiking to get my legs and lungs strong for the snowshoe race as it’s up in Big Bear at over 6,000 feet to START and climbs around 1000 to 1500 feet from there.

Halloween came and went, before you know it Thanksgiving will be past and Christmas is just around the corner. Dang, it only reminds me we were hoping to be in Big Bear by now. Bummer. We booked a week up there at Christmas…keep the dream alive!

Ok, so you’re all caught up. I’m busy, but doing well. Hanging in there – you do the same!

Interesting…I just got a Blog comment from “anonymous” on my post below titled “Getting Red Going Green”. I was chastised for not keeping up on my Blog. I’m not sure how to feel…first they’re right – I haven’t kept up on my writing lately. But, second – where is their Blog? Who are they? What right do they have to judge my frequency of writing? Third, I put the Blog out there so should I be judged? Perhaps.

Anyway, here come the excuses…

Times are tough. I’ve been working from home for 5 or 6 years now I think, providing for my family from my various e-commerce endeavours. I started looking for work outside of the online realm, much to my demise. Even worse I found a job. And to top it off, I found another.

So, a month later, I went from working at home full-time to working two jobs for a total of around 70 hours a week for someone else.

I have a background in restaurant management, and fell into position as the Front of the House Manager at a local Irish Pub. The Pub is owned by Matt Hensley – ex-professional skateboarder, and band member of the fairly famous Flogging Molly. It’s a fun, lively atmosphere with live music every night and a young clientele and staff. I enjoy it despite the fact that I don’t drink and am not Irish. I work there approximately 30 hours a week, 4 nights a week.

I was happy to find a job in the evening allowing me to pursue my own businesses in the daytime, still be home when my boys get out of school and so on. But when I got the Pub job, I was just filling is serving, and the hours were less regular and not management, so I kept looking.

Amazingly after a few weeks I found another job doing basically what I’ve been doing myself – at home, though for someone else. The company has more business than I did, and they know more than I do about several areas of web-design and I was excited to learn some new stuff, get paid and still be working with eBay and websites. It was a part-time gig too and I could basically make my own schedule.

Then it all came together…or fell apart – depending on how you look at it. My skills were appreciated at the web design job and they gave me an enormous raise and asked me to work full-time. I accepted and things have been great there.

A few weeks later, the Pub asked me to start managing 3-4 nights a week – a raise was given and now I suddenly have two jobs for 70-hours a week or more. Don’t forget I never quit running my own businesses at home, but they’ve definitely taken a back seat.

So, why haven’t I been Blogging? Maybe I could start a band – Blogging Molly!

For the past several years we’ve had our boys doing chores around the house for a small allowance. The goal besides distributing the household workload was to teach the boys some

responsibility towards doing work as wall as managing their money. Honestly, it’s worked wonders!

One of the bi-weekly chores is to sort the plastic bottles from the aluminum cans. Once a few bags has accumulated we take a trip to our local recycling drop-off to turn them in for cash. What better way to show the boys the value of recycling, right?

So today – Monday, I tell the boys to get the cans and bottles in the car so we can go turn them in. We head down to the Albertson’s by our house where Re-Planet has a recycling drop-off location.

As we pull up, I can see the two big bins have the doors closed and as we pull closer I see a sign stating that they’re closed because the bins are full. A bit frustrating after putting the sticky, leaking soda can filled bags in the back of my car, but we head South to the City of Carlsbad’s recycling facility off of Faraday. I can’t believe my eyes when we arrive to see a sign saying they’re closed on Monday’s.

I head North again as I had to make a stop at the Post Office anyway. I recall a recycling spot off of Tamarack next to the Sav-On Drugstore, right by the I-5 freeway. As we pull up, my youngest starts to giggle as he sees before me that it’s closed as well. No sign explaining why, no business hours posted, no signage at all…just locked up tight. We continue to mail our packages and head over to the mall off Jefferson. I have to stop by Sports Authority. As I get closer I recall they had two self-serve recycling machines out in front of Stater Bros. grocery store. And as you can imagine by now…no luck. They’d replaced the machines with a water dispensing machine.

I was ready to quit at this point. Just thrown the dang things in the garbage can somewhere, and my older son reminded me of one last shot – the Re-Planet recycling facility next to Ralph’s off of Oceanside Blvd, just East of the I-5 freeway. It was just over the hill, so why not. Heck, I’d already spent $10 on gas at $4.59/gallon trying to drop them off somewhere, what was another mile or two?

As we pulled into the lot, my son was elated, “they’re open, they’re open” he chipped. But as we got closer it turns out they’re replaced the nice Hispanic man that ran this recycling center with two large bins and two self-serve machines. Oh well, a sign of the times I thought as we got out to feed the cans into the beast.

After an hour of driving, and literally five locations we were ready to get our $5.00 to give to the boys for their work.

***WARNING*** was what the little window said. As both machines were inoperable and jammed with something other than cans and bottles apparently. My boys looked at me not quite understanding when I told them to load the sticky bags back into the back of the car.

I was quiet for a bit on the drive home, reflecting on our adventure. My son, with his infinite wisdom said “it’s tough to help take care of the environment isn’t it Dad?” Yes it is, yes it is.

Ok, just summer. Wow, it seems like it was only a month ago the boys were heading back to school and bam! – they’re out for 3 months!

Dylan’s got Boy Scout camp in a few weeks. Jacob is playing All-Star baseball and still has his Tournament ball team too. He also has Cub Scout camp in a month.

No big trips like last summer (Tony Gwynn’s induction into the Hall of Fame in New York), but of course we’ll spend much of our time up in Big Bear. I plan on getting the boys to do a lot of trail running and mtn. biking with me, as well as kayaking. My guys don’t really watch TV anyway, unless it’s a baseball game, or really anything on ESPN. But the’ve never really spent much time watching cartoons or anything else and they don’t own any game systems. Closest thing they have is a computer and the only games they have are of course…baseball and football games – go figure.

So, it will be a fairly low-key summer and I bet before you know it, they’ll be returning to school and it will seem like a week since they got out.

Central Coast Adventure Challenge – This was a 12-hour race – with cut offs.

We started with a kayak leg that took us about 45-50 minutes and took us from one end of Santa Margarita Lake to the other. It was about 5 miles in our estimation. We paddles the 3-person Kayak with Randy, Myself and Veronica and Blake was in the solo Glider.

We were out of the boat in good position, maybe 10th out of the 50 or so teams. Next we had about a 2 mile run to the Bike Transition. Unfortunately about 100 yards into this run, Randy rolled his ankle severely spraining it, or possibly breaking it (no word yet).

I hooked him up to a tow system and helped him to the bike TA. We got him mounted and took off on the bike leg. I had made two tow rigs with some PVC and surgical tubing for Blake and I to tow Randy and Veronica. But, we hadn’t anticipated Randy’s lack of ability to really pedal much at all. One other surprise was a 17-mile fire road climb. YES – 17 miles of climbing – almost non-stop. I towed Randy the entire way except for a short distance when I just needed a break and Blake pulled him and I towed Veronica. Once on top of the Mountain we descended over rolling terrain hitting checkpoints flawlessly thanks to Blake’s excellent navigation and pre-scouting the terrain. There was 1 CP that I had to run to in my Bike shoes about 1 mile off the bikes and do a bit of rock-climbing to get the CP. In total the bike was around 30 miles and with all that climbing took us nearly 5 1/2 hours. Still we were encouraged when we arrived and found ourselves still in great position overall, but knowing that our teammate couldn’t continue. We’d come in right with Feed The Machine and a few other very well known competitive teams with “kids” (young adults in there mid-late 20’s) and we’re all mid-40’s, me being the ‘baby’ at 43.

We dragged Randy to the medic who said it was an absolute no-go for Randy. Ice/tape/rest was all he was having. At this point our 4 person team was disqualified – and all we’d earn was a DNF (Did-not-finish).

We decided to go after a few more checkpoints anyway – for the training anyway. We had 3 1/2 hours to get the last points, get the boats and get them back to the start/finish TA. I’ll make a long story short, we made a nav error – not Blake’s fault, but a team decision, and wasted a bunch of time/energy/water and fuel not getting where we wanted to go. When we did find where we needed to be we had run low on time/water and needed to abandon. We still had to get out to the other end of the lake and paddle the kayaks back.

What should have been an easy task was made more difficult when we ran into a bear cub about my size on the trail. A cub – but with Momma’ bear likely close by, we quickly changed course and had to re-navigate our way back to the boats.

At this point the light was gone, we’d been out almost 10 hour and had an hour paddle back to the boats with little fuel/water and no lights. Luckily between Black and I we remembered the layout of the lake and found our way through the darkness and 1/4 moon’s glow to find the finish.

Randy was there waiting for us. We packed up the bicycle/kayaks and finally left the TA at around 10:30pm after having arrived at 6am.

So….not the race we’d hoped for, but we learned a lot. I did anyway, and had a great time. Tough? – Absolutely. I was toast!

Can’t wait to do it again…can’t wait for the Poison Oak to set in. )

My son Dylan started paddling competitively just a month ago. He paddles down in San Diego on a coed team and really enjoys it. This weekend they had their first race since he joined the team. This particular race was not coed and they raced in the all boys division.

It was quite a surprise to my son when he found out the race was 1 1/2 hours long, and just the boys – no adults like practice. There workouts were typically an hour long and were supervised by an adult.

But as it turns out, they did just fine. They got 3rd place overall and as one of the photos shows, they’re sporting there medals (turtles). He was proud and tired at the same time. What a great workout and good time. I’m so glad he enjoys the water as much as I always have. Some great pictures below taken by a family friend that actually got him involved in the outriger paddling.