The big tree if front of our house is loosing its leaves and it has finally cooled off. The Sierras have their first snow and you can smell the wood fire smoke from nearby chimneys. I love Fall.
OK Thanksgiving. We were too poor to travel far for Thanksgiving and with our "New Years Extravaganza" fast approaching, and besides Kelly's family is only a few hours away so it was a no brainier. Because Kelly works in the retail world she had the day before Tday off but not the day after so fortunately my schedule is flexible and I was able to change our companies holiday schedule to fit me needs. (some days it's good to work for a small company) Kelly's family only tenuously embraces the traditional Thanksgiving (last year there was a real risk of no pie! Kelly saved the day.) so we had the big dinner on Wednesday evening in keeping with our one day early schedule and then on Thursday took it easy and went to see both the latest Harry Potter and Walk The Line. Both were very good films but Walk The Line was a real treat. I have been a fan of Johnny Cash from my 9th birthday when I got a clock radio. Another interesting thing about Johnny Cash is that he died the day of Kelly and I's first date. We remember talking about him and listening to some of his music that I had, so It was kind of fun for us to remember those times.
I'm finally doing it… The 4 to 1 conversion on my jeep's transfer case. About a year ago I bent the shaft where it comes out of my transfer case a bit. That made it hard to drive over 45 because of the vibration. I acquired a used replacement some time ago and had Tom cut it to length and tapped the end so it would work with my hack and tap slip yoke eliminator. I also got a TeraLow 4 to 1 kit. I figured that if I was going to go that deep into my T case I may as well get a performance boost from it. So last night with the help of some friends we dropped the case out and tore into it. Right now the thing is in pieces on the work bench and with a bit of luck we will at least get a good start on putting it back together tonight. For those of you who don't speak Jeepanese but are still reading for some reason, a 4 to 1 transfer case just lets your jeep go slower in low range. For most things off-road slower is good because you get more control. I now have 2.72 to 1 transfer case so if I combined that with my 4.1 to 1 axle ratio and my first gear that I can't remember but is something like 4 to 1 I now have a abysmal combined final crawl ratio of about 45 to 1. With the new case I'll bring that to much more respectable 65 to 1. Now that's not crazy low or anything but it's not bad for a daily driver. Plus I'll get my freeway privileges back!
Well as you may have noticed I changed the way the site looks this weekend. I have been wanting to do this for a long time and working on it. A few weeks ago I got the navigation bar to stretch across the screen and now I have added the banner picture and made them go all the way across the screen. It ended up being kinda hard to figure out. I'm going to get technical here so you non tech folks can tune out if you want. What I did was change the BODY tag style in my style sheet to have no margin. That was actually the part that took so long to figure out. I had been trying to just set the margin for the elements at the top of the screen that I wanted to go all the way across, but I never could get them to overcome the BODY margin. So having set the body to 0 margin I had to use the P tag to keep the rest of the content away from the edges and then go back in and to all my pages and be sure I had P tags on all my paragraphs. One problem I still have if you look close is that when I have a pic that is included in a P tag it gets double margin, one from the P tag and one from the IMG tag. I'm not really sure how to resolve that but I don't think I'm going to do it tonight. It's past 12:00.
Kelly and I have had a very long week. Tonight we are going up to Pollack Pines to hang out with our friends the Shanks, have dinner and play some games. Last night Kelly made puff pastry in pie pans like a pie crust because dumb Safeway is anti pie and they never have the right pie stuff. Tonight she covered one with banana slices and chocolate pudding and the other in cheese cake and strawberries. So even though I'm not getting pumpkin pie I think I'm going to be ok here. That Kelly sure is awesome when she busts out her crafty skills. We're going to play one of our favorite game lately, Tri-Bond. The deal is you pull a card and it has three thing on it and you try to figure out what the common bond is between them. Sometime they are quite esoteric. The President of the United States, The Prime Minister of Britain, and a kitchen. Here's the hardest one ever; a hula hoop with a nail in it, a snow storm in Florida, and the USS Bainbridge. If you know what either of these sets have in common send me an email. By-by we're off.
This weekend our ward took all the youth out to Point Reyes National Park for a leadership training retreat. As assistant young men's advisor I went along but really didn't have a specific role. I was looking forward to getting to spend time with my guys and getting to know them better. It's about a 2 hour drive out there. We stopped at a rest stop in Vallejo so everyone could stretch out a bit. At the rest stop there was a good view of Vallejo but there was a steep hill that looked like it would offer a better view so I said to some of the priests "I'll race you to the top" and they took off. I made it to the top last with my legs burning. Man I'm getting old! The view was great though. Anyway we slid down and jumped back in the cars and an hour later pulled in to the parking lot where we were to begin an 8 mile hike. As I slid off the seat and out of the tall SUV my legs literally gave way completely and I was in a heap on the ground. It turns out sitting in the car for an hour, running up a really step hill and down, and then sitting in the car for another hour is a bad way to start a hike. The young men's advisor who is a Dentist (therefore a doctor) assured me that if I started walking my strength would return. It was kinda scary but I took his word and started walking. We stopped regularly to let everyone catch up and I was actually staying ahead of the slow folks. Sure enough my strength did start to come back but the weakness was replaced with Pain. Man I'm getting old! After awhile the bishop decided I was keeping a good pace and told everyone to stay behind me. We stopped frequently and people had prepared short leadership lessons. It was cool but every time we started to walk again it took a while to get the legs going. The last mile was along the beach. At the end we had a great catered dinner of BBQ'd ribs and New York strip, home made chili, rolls, salad and cake. It was all really really good. I am really soar today. Man I'm getting old!
