thats right i said repeat

we had the pine wood derby again this year and Ross's car won again. very narrow margin of victory this year. every heat is best 2 out of 3 and many of the races had to do all three runs. but he took it the whole way out. still no special reward for the winner. in fact the fist child to get eliminated got their pick of the awards, which was a picture of a real car. so in some ways you were rewarded for losing first. ross won the thin and got last choice of the pictures. he still had a good time though. mark will be doing it next year so he will get most of my help but ross has seen and helped do 2 so he should be ok. i know there are some dads that are gunning for us this time. so ill have to make sure we build fast cars this year.

this may not have been my best idea

I have love old cars sense i was a little kid. i really went nuts when i saw the movie "Christen". as the coarse of regular events goes, about three years ago, i was out at the farm where i hunt talking to the guy that owns the place about a bunch of stuff. i remarked that he had a lot of cars around. he told me i hadn't even seen all of them yet. he took me around to one of the many sheds he has and i saw several. he had a story about all of them.(i love old people and all the stories they have its living history) then i saw one in the back of the shed. it had a bunch of junk piled on it and was absolutely stuck in the corner. after a bit, i said i would love to have an old car like that and eventually asked him how much for the car. he told me he would have to get as much as he payed for it. and again i asked how much. $250. so for the next three years i kept telling him i still wanted it and said that i would start making payments on it until i payed it off and would come and get it. well i never made any payments. then i started to joke, that some day i would just show up with the money and get the car. he always laughed at that because i was always broke. so this year we got a pretty good tax return and i begged my beautiful wife until she finally broke and i went and got it. it took 4 and a half hours just to get it out of the shed. another 2 hours to put it onto the trailer. it almost didn't fit on the trailer. the trailer is 18 feet long and the car is 17.5. it needs a lot of work. i thought i would start with some thing easy that would help me do the rest. i will take the wheels of and grease the barrings so it will roll easy into and out of my garage. the passenger side came off pretty good. i mean i had to lean into it the break the bolts(yes lug bolts not lug nuts) loose but not to bad. i went over to the driver side and could not get it off. i tried different things for the next two days all to no avail. they would turn but would now break loose and come off. i just wasn't making any progress until i got a call from a friend of my dads who is a car gooroo. he asked me "its a 1951 right", yes, "Chrysler right?" yes "driver side?" yes. "those are going to be left hand treads."

so i went out side and much to my chagrin, i had been turning the bolts the wrong way. i turned the other way and they came right off. i hope this isn't a sign of the way this whole care is going to go.

how time flys

so, its been over a year sense i last did a blog entry. i have become a lurker. shameful i know. so as expected i have much to talk about. i will talk about the most recent today. the base ball team. what happened is this. ross and mark decided that they want to play ball this year so we signed them up. a bit later we got a call from the boys and girls club to get some extra info from us. i was talking to the lady on the phone and she asked me if i had any interest in coaching. i told her that i would be happy to show up to practice when ever i could and would work with the boys as much as i could but i didn't want to be THE coach. she went on to tell me they needed one more coach otherwise the league would be a team short and all the boys from that team would have to be put onto the other teams making all of them be to large and that some of the boys would not get to play. i told her i would speak to some of the other parents and that we would figure some thing out. two days later i went to the meeting she told me was a parents and coaches meeting. turns out it was a coach's meeting. i went to sign in found my name on the list and next to my name was the word COACH. i guess to her "we will figure some thing out" meant, yes i would love to coach. so now I'm the coach of rosses team. we had our first practice last night. the first thing we had to do was go over the "players code of conduct" and have the boys all sign off that they herd and understood. i then dismissed to boys to go play catch while i talked to there parents. i went over some spectator rules with them, like no swearing, no arguing balls and strikes and , talk nice to the kids. when i got done with that i told the parents i was happy to be the coach and that if any of them had any questions. ideas or constructive criticism i would be happy to talk for as long as they wanted about what ever they wanted. i then went on to say "but if you have any complaints, don't bother to call, i don't want to hear about it. if your just going to try to bark at me it will end up not being pleasant for either of up." then i had the kids spread out on the field and we had batting practice. no joke, it started raining withing 30 seconds of me trowing the last pitch for the last kid. i hope i don't make a complete fool of my self.