Lil B is home for summer

My son came home from college and it has taken some adjustment on my part.

A couple of accounts:
He goes into my closet every morning to find something to wear for work. One day I find my best pair of pants balled up on the hanger. I ask him what happened and he said he tried them on and they were too small. "Those are my skinny jeans" I said.

One night I made myself a sandwich the night before work. It was a delicious bacon avocado turkey club. In the morning I am in bed and he comes in and says do you mind if I take that sandwich to work. So I feel bad and say yes. I eat left over buttered pasta.

He now owns my car. I live 23 miles from work. I get to work via bicycle. A single speed bicycle I bought it used, parts of it were given to me for free.

My son has deemed my super light carbon race bike as the only bike good enough for him to ride.

So, he rides my bike, wears my cloths, drives my car and eats my food! Other than that he is pretty independent.

Executive food scraps

At my company they used to have very liberal policies about letting us order food trays for lunch time meetings. Then someone decided multi-billion dollar profits were just not enough and we needed to cut back by eliminating the ordinary Joes ordering lunch trays for meetings in which employees are expected to give up their lunch hour to work.

You noticed I said ordinary Joes. These rules don't apply to the people who made them. They are however, so very generous as to put the left overs out for us to graze upon. After the kings feast, the peasants get to scavenge on the food scraps.

The above picture is one of the offerings. A few strips of Kale and left over mustard. I wonder what the conversation was like when they decided to bring this over. "You know I think they might enjoy dipping the Kale garnish in the mustard."

Fatso goes Big Time

As an engineer I have gotten to work on some really cool stuff in my career, and sometimes that really cool stuff gets press coverage.

The above video is a bike which I help to create with my friend Craig at Mendon Cycle Smith. Don't be fooled by the guy talking in the video, Craig created this bike through and through. Craig was becoming enamored with a type of bike with really big tires, we are talking 4 inches here. That's really big! He also has been in love with lefty suspension forks (for most of his adult life as far as I can tell). This is a rather odd looking fork who's asymmetry makes it look like it might be unstable, but its not. So Craig set about to combine his two passions into one lovely contraption. He initially tried using off the shelf clamps for the fork but that did indeed make the bike rather unstable so he asked me to draw up some custom clamps. We dubbed them "Fat Clamps" and they had a few design iterations but I think the end results is beautiful.

So I am very proud that something I helped create has made the big time, verified by the photo shoot going on in the background of the video. The bike was displayed at the North American Hand Built Bike show and is featured in this month edition of Dirt Rag magazine. With all this attention, I think the bike is getting a big head to go with its fat tires, although how big a head can you get when your name is "Fatso".

Austerity it's not

This is a house I pass on the way to work everyday.  Sorry for the Google spy-cam image format, not really certain what happened with my camera phone but I snapped the picture quickly so as not to get shot at (You will understand why in a moment).

The house started as a modest single family home in a middle class neighborhood. Then contractor vans started appearing the driveway. Fences went up, awnings appeared, small additions, remodeling was going on. The Home Theater installation truck was parked in the driveway for a month. A playground rivaling Disneyland was sprouting above the fence line in the backyard.

Then new vehicles appeared, mostly Hummers and Escalades. Then the driveway needed to be expanded to fit all the extra vehicles. Then the mother of all projects, the complete covering if the entire front yard in paving stones. So I say to myself, this guy cant be bothered to cut the grass or pay someone to cut the grass... But no, the reason for the additional paving was to park a $1M dollar motor home / tour bus right smack in front of the house. OK you need to show off your wealth but do you have to park that thing right in plain view of everything.

The burning question in my mind is..what did this guy do to amass such enormous wealth so quickly...my money is on drug dealing and that's why I was worried about getting shot. The other burning question is why didn't this guy move to a property with more land instead of sitting in a neighbor hood of fairly modest dwellings? You know what they say in the real estate business Location...Location.. Ostentation!