Oh how the mighty have fallen

I suck at blogging. I was just looking at my blogging history:

2004: 47 Posts
2005: 115 Posts
2006: 88 Posts
2007: 89 Posts
2008: 131 Posts
2009: 74 Posts
2010: 12 Posts

I blame that stupid website facebook. Now I think I'll link this blog post on facebook.....I suck.

I'm still alive

I've been busy, as you all know, during the Fall. With it now being over, I hope to blog a bit more. I've mostly just been blogging about my son's football season. We finished the season 11-0 and won our championship game 46-12. What a blast to pay one of our best games last. It was even more exciting because we played it in the worst possible conditions (white-out blizzard).

Here's my coaching blog in case you're interested in how our season went (highlight videos are from each game).

Coach Root

Just got a crazy snow storm here. I'm wanting a snow blower REALLY bad.

Work is going well. About 1.5 months and I'll have been on the job for a year now. I think I can hack this thing, I just wish my office was closer to home. Maybe someday.

I'm trying to get back in shape and have been working out with Alene for about 2 weeks so far now. I really hope we can keep it going. I've lost about 6 lbs so far. I honestly want to be down to about 185 lbs, but I know I need to take it in steps, so I'm wanting to lose 10 more lbs and get down to 220. Then 210, then 200, etc. I was 200 when I married Alene, so she at least deserves that :-).

I've got a few projects I want to work on during the winter (if I can find the time). I have a TON of my families old home movies that I want to get put onto a DVD for everyone. I also have a lot of footage from my friend Tim's film we did about 6 years ago that I want to upload and edit. My brother Russ had it all edited, then deleted it on his computer, thinking nobody cared about it. I still would like to get it finished to know we had it completed. Tim wasn't super happy with how it turned out, but I really think it's important for something like this to be finished regardless of quality, so I'm going to get it done.

Anyway, hoping to be able to enjoy the holidays and find time to get closer to my family. Caiden is having a hard time in the home, so I really want him to know we love him. Bailey is SO cute and I'm having fun watching her grow and learn.

That's about it for now.

Entering another dimension

Last weekend Alene and Bailey went camping. I couldn't join them because I had to be at a football equipment check out Saturday morning, so toward the end of my work day, my brother Russ called me to invite me with him to a classic car show put on by Bo Huff.

I had learned about this guy a few months before. Russ is currently restoring, from the ground up, a 1951 Chevy 2-door hard top. He is pulling it apart piece by piece and fixing it up. It's very impressive to watch him as he progresses through it. Anyway, Russ told me about Bo Huff, who is one of those guys famous for re-storing cars, or for "chopping" cars. He is originally from East Carbon, UT (a small town outside of Price, which is a pretty small town itself). He has been restoring cars since his teens, moving to SLC, then LA, where his work really took off. He eventually moved back to Utah, where he continues to restore cars for people all over America.

So, with that said, I high-tailed it from work in order to head down to East Carbon, UT to check it out. In one of my previous posts, I mentioned that I used to LOVE going to classic car shows with my dad when I was younger and I've recently taken a liking to getting out and doing it more now. Someday I hope to be able to restore a car and cruise it to my death bed.

We arrived around 6:30pm and when we got there, we immediately felt out of place. I'd say about 90% of the people there were extremely hard-core. They truly lived the life of car choppers. Most had tatoos all over the place, most were drunk off their rears, and most looked like they would slit your throat if you looked at them wrong. I felt like I had jumped back to the 50's among a group of greasers. Now, I wasn't intimidated, because we found as we talked to everyone, they were all pretty nice. We saw Bo walking around talking to everyone. Russ had first met him while working security at the airport and talked to him for a bit. He saw Russ and said, "Whats up daddy?". Dude was cool as a cucumber, long white haired beard, white hair slicked back, sunglasses. People around there just absolutely worshiped him.

The town itself doesn't have a hotel (that I know of), so people were just camping out on the side of the streets or in their campers. A lot of the cars were very interesting and I wished I had brought my camera (these pictures are from Russ'). We were actually there a day before the official show, so we didn't see every car. That night they had a concert with two "rockabilly" bands playing. I was impressed with each band because they had their own niche.

The first band was Joey Fender and the 55's. This dude was very interesting and had a great way of playing a slide guitar while also helping out on drums (see video below). He also had a rock-star moment when he jumped off the stage and started playing his guitar in the crowd.

The second band was cool because it consisted of 3 brothers and some older guy on standup bass. The guitarist couldn't have been older than 17, the drummer had to be about 12-13, and the lead singer was about 9 years old. You couldn't really understand what he was singing (mostly original songs, with a cover of "walk this way"), but the kid MOVED like a frontman (with a guitar) and he had feeling in his voice as he sang. I felt like I was looking at a group of kids from the 50's. It was surreal.

Since the bands didn't start playing until 10pm, we didn't get home until about 1am. It was still a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to going back next year.

Russ outside of Bo Huff's shop



Some pictures of the various kinds of cars that were there. While some may not look finished, that is what was so cool about them is they are left like that on purpose. Kind of an "F-U" to the world that this is what they're doing with their car and it will smoke yours any day in a race-attitude.

This guy was from Montana. Funny as hell.





'50 Mercury. Love how they chop the top down on top of the cars









If I remember right, this car was pretty much hand-made, but had a Ford engine in it (even the body was fabricated by the owner)



Some of the rusty chopped up cars





This one sat there and burned out for about 20 seconds





One of Bo Huff's personal cars



Joey Fender and the 55's







Check out the slide guitar technique



The "brothers group" (can't remember their name, but they're from Springville, UT)

Bill's Photos

Check out a couple of pictures Bill took on our recent trip to the Moab area.

Bill's pictures

Playing with Ice

I have some giant icicles hanging from my gutters that look like this:



I decided to break them off and have some fun with them in the front yard snow pile:

"Friday's Arms and Back....."

I love that scene from Anchorman when Will Ferrel acts like he's just finishing his 1000th curl as his love interest enters the room. He goes on to explain how many curls he was doing, then his routine, "Friday's Arms and Back...."

With all the snow shoveling I've been doing, I definitely feel like Friday, today, was Arms and Back. I'm SORE. Alene and I spent a good amount of time this morning piling snow up and clearing ways to make it easier to get to the cars. It's crazy. I have not seen this much snow since I've lived here, but it does rival Christmas 2003 when I had so much snow I was able to build a tiny hill and a jump in my back yard:





The thing is, I had the energy for that then. Now I'm pooped after shoveling for 10 minutes. Most of it is the fact that I'm out of shape, but maybe I am getting older??? Alene mentioned to Caiden and his friend Alma that she saw an awesome snow fort in a yard down the street. I was nervous they were going to ask me to build them one. Not that I don't like the idea, but I was pooped about that time. Luckily I talked them into playing with their new Christmas toys downstairs.

Here are some pictures of our yard this morning. Since this time we've had another 3"-4" fall.









If you look closely, you can see me in the background using a snow blower. My neighbor offered to let me use it to get the really icy stuff at my driveway entrance




Note: Yes, I do know this is the norm for people up in Minnesota, Canada, and Alaska, but it's my own little Hell, so I'm going to rant about it.

It's really coming down right now

It's snowing pretty hard. This is the hardest snow I've seen since Christmas 2003. That was some crazy shiz. We went to Alene's parents for Christmas today and the drive home absolutely sucked. Super strong wind-gusts. Couldn't see the lines on the freeway for the lanes. Cars driving all over the place. It wouldn't be so bad if it were just me driving on the road, but you have all these other idiots that you have to watch out for.

The one thing I'm very thankful for is the truck. I have a 1/2 ton Chevy pickup that just grips the ground like no other. Driving on the freeway was really a cinch, but like I said it was the other drivers I had to worry about. Not once did I feel like the truck was out of control or about to lose control.

Here's a picture of the drive down (this is I-15 south-bound around Layton):



It ended up taking us close to two hours to drive from Roy to our home in taylorsville (usually takes about 45 minutes).

This is how I roll

Russ and I went to the shooting range last week.

80's skateboarding

My brother Jeff sent me this link that showed a "competition" of sorts among skaters who were big in the 80's, but are all now in their late 30's and early 40's. Most of them are still involved in skateboarding one way or another still, but it was funny to see them ride this ramp and do tricks from that era. Tricks nowdays are so much more evolved, but Tony Hawk did comment that back then the boards were so much bigger and heavier that it makes the tricks actually tougher to do.

Watching this brought back some memories for me. From about age 9-13 I was really into skateboarding. I wasn't very good at it at all, but it was my identity for a while. I bought all the videos, magazines, and tried my best to get good at skating. I couldn't drop in on a ramp, I could barely ollie. I could kind of grind my trucks on something, but for the most part I was a poser and just rode my skateboard around trying to look cool or something. Seeing this video made me ponder on my skateoboards I had over these few years and I started to search for them on the internet. Here is a run down on my history of skateboards:

My first skateboard was actually a "Kamakazi" skateboard, which was a generic brand that Costco sold. I thought it was the bomb. After wearing that one out, my parents bought both my brother and I matching "Nash" skateboards. We were happy to have anything, but we wore through those so quickly. When we were both able to save up enough money each (about $50), we went and bought Tony Hawk skateboards. We didn't get matching colors though, because that would have been gay (but my Hot Pink deck was NOT gay)


The thing that kind of sucked the most about having the money to buy a nice deck was not having enough money to buy nice trucks, bearings, or wheels, so we used our old trucks and wheels off our Nash decks. They were heavy and they were hard and not forgiving against cracks and rocks.

Eventually I earned up enough money to buy some Independant trucks and some Bullet wheels.

On a side note, one of my best friends from that time is the person that got me into skating. His name was Raleigh and he is now an airline Pilot for Skywest (I think?) here in Utah (useless info I guess). I was impressed because when I met him, the dude owned TWO skateboards, but only one set of trucks and wheels, so he'd switch them from deck to deck now and again. He was a "Vision" guy and only rode these two Vision skateboards:

Mark Gonzales (on the left) and the Psycho Stick (on the right; most decks back then were associated/designed by the rider. I'm not sure who the rider of this deck was)


My friend Raleigh moved away when I was 11. Raleigh was a good skater and a really good artist. He had plans of going pro and would even draw his ideas for skateboard decks. I thought they were so cool. I don't remember the name of them now though, but one had some clocks on it with some dollar bills too.

My next few decks were a bit blurry. I remember buying this Steve Caballero deck:



Then agreeing to trade it for this crappy Mike McGill deck. Stupidest thing I had ever done. It was in crappy shape and even had stress marks. I remember trading it with this dude that was older and really popular among the skaters I rode with. I think I just wanted him to think I was cool or something.


After that, I bought this Lance Mountain deck. This was one of the best decks I had ever owned. It had a HUGE tail that made it easy to ollie.



I traded the Lance Mountain deck with my friend Jeremy for a month or so. I rode his Natus Kaupus deck, which I could actually ollie the highest on (about 12", which was HUGE for me).



My Lance Mountain deck was stolen and I knew who it was because I saw the dude riding it. I was the only person in friggin' Eldorado County that had this deck (at least I thought I was) and this dude was riding it. He was the son of a group of Hells Angels (and probably in prison now for murder), so I didn't dare mess with him.

I then made my best deck purchase my last. Chriss FREAKING Miller. I had no idea who this dude was, but I saw the deck and it spoke to me. It was made by Schmidt Stixx I think? (by the way, all the decks I have spoken about were made by Powell Peralta, except the Natas Kaupus, which was made by Santa Monica Airlines; I had considered myself a "Powell Peralta" guy up until that point). This deck was perfect for me. I felt so much more free on it, I could ollie well, grind well, even could go higher on ramps than I normally could. Next to the Lance Mountain deck, this was the best deck by far.



I eventually saw the writing on the wall and all my friends started to ditch skateboards for BMX bikes. I followed suit and I think I ended up trading my board for some bike rims or something.

Those were great times though. I remember being so frustrated because we lived in the "country" so there wasn't a lot of hard surfaces to ride on and if they were blacktop or cement, they were usually covered with rocks and gravel. I remember how stoked we were when my parents paved a part of their driveway in front of the house. We had so much skating surface, it was unbelievable. Every once in a while a friend of a friend of a friend built a half pipe, but I was too chicken to ever try dropping in, so I'd just ride up and down from the middle. It was lame, but that was the best I could do. Russ was a stud though. Dude wasn't afraid to try anything and he was always good. I think he might be part of the reason I ditched skating; I couldn't compete. The funnest times was having one of our parents drop us off "downtown" placerville so we could go find a parking lot to ride on, or just ride down the sidewalk along main street.

I now leave you with a nice picture of me in my skater era mullet, cool skate shirt with a bird riding a skateboard. Enjoy:

Changing a water pump

I have a '97 Chevy CK 1500 truck that developed a water leak of sorts in August. I have not driven it since because I had the Dodge and I was pretty busy the past few months fixing the basement. Russ came over and helped me out. I used to really know how to work on cars and all their components, but I've since become a dunce. Russ has all the "Car" tools while I have all the "construction" tools, so it's a good partnership we've formed.

We pulled the water pump off and inspected it for cracks. Nothing, but we noticed the gaskets were pretty much gone, so it was safe to assume we just needed new gaskets. We've got them now and I just need to put the sucker back on. I'll probably do that tomorrow.

One of the most annoying thing about the water pump is the fact that the fan is connected to and IMPOSSIBLE to remove before taking off the water pump, so you have to take the whole thing out.

Here is a picture of where the water pump/fan should be:



Here is a picture of the water pump with the fan attached

Got a new camera

My friend Clint upgraded and he was looking to get rid of his old camera (it's less than a year old). It's an 8.0 mega pixels Canon Powershot S5 IS. I felt like I robbed him on the price, but he was cool with it. He threw in a 2 GB SD card, a case, a lensemate, a UV filter, and a tripod. I'm not a hardcore photographer, but I like the idea of being able to take decent pictures. My previous camera is a Canon powershot A540, so this one has a quite a few more bells and whistles.





Here are a couple of the first pictures I took with it around the house.







The yewts are "Fully Intoxicated" and damn proud!!!! I love those guys.