Question: What’s more manly that facial hair, mud, and diesel powered heavy machines?

Answer: Nothing.

For the past few decades, we at the King household have had a wonderful backyard. It’s about 2 1/2 acres of lush grass surrounded by tons of trees, where growing up we could play awesome games like tag, hide and go seek, baseball, or whatever else sounds cool to a kid. Last year, however, the yard became a quagmire. The spring showers turned to May flooding and the yard became a muddy mess. We hoped that it was just due to the excessive amounts of rain last year and perhaps 2007 would be just like the previous 20 years. Sadly, that was not the case. Robbie is a fairly industrious fellow, so he rented a front and back loading tractor with the hopes of digging up the current (presumably broken) drainage pipes in the yard, lay new pipe, cover with rocks, and grow new grass. It all sounds simple enough - if that were only the case.

Despite the wise adage that a good carpener doesn’t blame his tools, the tractor was not capable of the task at hand. When we drove even remotely close to the flowing water to begin digging, the tractor sank. For the next 90 minutes Robbie and I worked our tails off to remove it from the axel deep mud.

This is what we hoped would happen. Robbie looks rather productive in this shot… our productivity didn’t last very long:

This is what eventually happened:

As for the facial hair reference, Robbie grew a beard which looks perfectly in it’s place on the tractor operator.

I always look forward to coming home to New England and getting to race the local races that I’ve grown up doing the past few years. After arriving back to Rochester, NY one week ago from Joe Martin in Arkansas, Mayo and I packed the lightening quick Civic Hybrid up to the brim (thereby vastly limiting it’s lightening quick capabilities) and drove through a ferocious rainstorm to home sweet home in New Hampshire. The weather continued for the latter part of the week to be rainy with a chance of more rain, so the prospect of waking up Saturday morning before the sun rose in order to drive to central New Hampshire didn’t seem like the best idea. However, at 5:30 Saturday morning I was checking the consistently incorrect Weather Channel website and saw that there were only “Rare Showers” in the forecast. Being the optimist that I am, I took this to mean warm and sunny.

Additionally, the circumstance for my trip home in the first place called for a win. I’m sad to report the passing away of my paternal grandfather. Edward Oliver King lived every day of his 93 years to the fullest and truly brought happiness to all those who had the priviledge to meet him. He passed away last week and his memorial service was the same weekend as this race. He was always very proud of everything I did and I therefore figured that a win would make him especially pleased. Grampy was a very enthusiastic singer, so we sang Grampy’s favorite medleys and old college fight songs during the memorial supper. Here are his children, Betsy, Kathy, and Dad belting it out! Yea Gramp!

The Joe Martin Stage Race has come and gone. I’ll skip the relevant details of the race and talk strictly about the highlights concerning the race as it pertained to me (is that vain?). The utmost highlight of the weekend for me was in Saturday morning’s road race. The entire race was incredibly fast in brutally stiffling heat and humidity. Beginning at 8am, when one would expect it to be pleasant and cool, I was already pouring sweat like a faucet. Blah blah blah, with 40k to go, I broke away with Jimbo Meadly (aka James) from Jelly Belly. We rode and rode and rode and rode, with Toyota organizing a fairly efficient chase to protect the race leader. The two of us passed the 10k to go sign, then 5k to go, then with the peloton chasing frantically I dropped James, and kept on truckin’. The gap dropped from 1:30 to 1 minute, to 45 seconds, to 30. I was going full on time trial as hard as I possibly could, but was finally caught by the entire peloton with just 50 meters to go. It was heartbreaking to be so close and to come up empty handed. Sheesh.

Here’s a nice picture of the start of the race. Note the foggy humidity. In fact, the fog has actually cleared quite a bit in this picture. On the drive from the house to the race, we had to drive about 13mph in some spots because the visibility was virtually nill!For one reason or another, ever since Gila we’ve had an abundance of fruit around the kitchen - namely apples and bananas. Due to this fact, I’ve been baking lots of breads - namely apple bread and banana bread. After making yet another tasty banana bread, I heard Glen holler from the kitchen if he could have a piece. Naturally, I said yes of course. When I arrived in the kitchen some time later, I noted that Glen is obviously partial to the inside pieces of bread. Isn’t he clever.

With lots of help from mechanic BenO, we made the lengthy trek from New Mexico to Arkansas over the past two days. Pretty much right from the get-go, we were in a groove. Ben drives, Omer navigates and reads something like 400 pages per day from his book, I lay down in the front bench and occupy my time reading, crossword puzzling, and sleeping, Garrett watches DVDs, Scott sleeps and emits odor from his nether region, and Rich and Kate sit in the back of the van doing whatever they do back there. With just a few gas stops, one stop at Motel 6, dinner at Denny’s (see pic), and lunch at Panera, we made it safe and sound to Fayetteville, AR home of the Joe Martin Stage Race.

One highlight of the trip came during a gas station drop. For starters, we picked this particular exit because it prominently featured a Starbucks sign visible to drivers passing by. Little did we know at the time, that’s pretty much the extent of what it offered. The building wasn’t yet complete, so needless to say Starbucks was not open. Alas, we were already off the highway, so we needed to fill up with gas. Garrett and I ran across the street to Walgreens, where I got some normal food and Garrett got Garrett food. He ended up buying a can of Progresso soup - the kind you pop the top, dump it into a bowl and microwave or into a pot and cook it on the stove. But Garrett don’t need no hot soup! He proceeded to sip a little out of the can, in order to make room for a packet of tuna fish and taco seasoning! Stir, stir, stir and enjoy!

Alas, nearly 20 hours of driving and 1000 miles later, the seven of us successfully made the trip to northwestern Arkansas! Here’s a panoramic shot of our host house. It’s located right on a lake and on a really quiet road. It’s actually a really nice spot, as long as you don’t mind being chased by dogs and seeing lots of recently run over armadillos, turtles, and snakes.

Word up.