Portland Autoshow

This weekend we went to the Portland Autoshow. It was a TON of fun! I've got a more detailed description on my family blog. Basically, it was great, I decided the new Mustang convertible isn't a good family car, the Honda Civic Si Sedan would be great fun to drive, but not enough back seat family room for the kids, the Element was nice, but smaller than I want, and the little Honda Fit is perfect for my driving needs. There's only one thing I don't like, it is GUTLESS!! 0-60 in 11 seconds!!!!

So after many years, I was able to get a Honda s2000 (a 2001 model). It was AWESOME!!! You know those old guys with grey hair driving the Porsche's? They finally got their dream car and are enjoying driving it. That's how I felt with the s2000. But it wasn't a good family car, no back seat and you couldn't turn off the passenger side airbag. Semi-ok for one kid, but no way with two. After 10 months I finally agreed to say goodbye to it. Believe me, there's not a day that goes by that I wish I still had that car!!!!! Got a 2001 VW Passat 1.8L turbo. It is actually fun to drive, has decent pickup, really good stereo, but a step down from what I had. The s2000 wasn't necessarily fast (0-60 in 5.2 seconds), but a TON of fun to drive on corners! Perfect 50-50 balance, could corner like it was on rails, just more fun than I've ever had behind a wheel.

Anyhow, the Passat is fun, and a better stereo, but a step down. Now the Fit. 31-37 MPG. I drive about 6 miles/12 minutes to work each day, and I don't drive it much otherwise. If the family goes anywhere, it's in the Honda Pilot. So for me driving back and forth to work, the Fit is a perfect "fit" (ya, I know, bad pun but no other way to say it). BUT, I'm not sure how fast the Passat goes 0-60 - I'm guessing about 8 seconds - the FIT does it in 11 seconds!! So I'm going to from 5 seconds to 11! ARGH! Yes, that's hard to drive a car where I step on the gas and it says, "Huh? What? I'm sorry, you wanted to get up and go? Oh, ok, hang on, let me get things together..." If this thing would just do it in 8 seconds I'd be really happy.

Fortunately there are things I can get to help. K&N has an air filter and an intake filter that can help boost horsepower and fuel economy, so I can probably easily go from 11 seconds to 9. I don't necessarily want something that jumps off the line, just want to be able to downshift, step on the gas and have the car easily pass the car in front of me.

However, there are no Fit's to be found in Portland! I emailed a couple dealers and they told me the Fit is very popular and they don't have any. One said they aren't taking any new orders for at least 6 months. 6 months!! Wow, I guess this thing is really popular. Oh well, that's actually kinda good. We have a tendency to jump into things and this gives us a reason to think about it more and make sure this is right.

There were lots of other cool cars at the Auto show. Audi had their S8, their sporty version of the A8. $110,000! I didn't feel worth enough to even sit in it. Lots of other cool sports cars, lots of actual race cars, we sat in a Land Rover and found out why people like them - talk about cool features! It was a fun 3 hours, and the funniest part was trying to get Riley to leave. Until I sat in the first car, he didn't want to be there or sit in a car. When it was time to go, he was mad cause he wanted to sit in more cars! LOL!

Learn to Speak Body: Tape 5

This video is FANTASTIC! It is by BodyVox and Mitchell Rose. BodyVox is owned and run by one of the owners (and his wife) of the company I work at, she's in the yellow dress and he's in the "I don't know" set. Checkout MitchellRose.com for more videos from BodyVox. My personal favorite is Deere John.

Feeling better & Snow

So last week I slammed myself into the concrete. Here it is a week later and I'm feeling pretty good! Pretty much everything is much better, my knee is a tiny bit sore, my right elbow is almost completely better, my face never got any bruising (which surprised me since I hit really hard), but my back is still quite sore. Obviously that's where I did the most damage, I'm pretty sure I pulled a muscle or something. I just need to take it easy, which isn't easy with two little kids around. haha

Today we have a snow storm here in Portland. I know many other parts of the country laugh at us for getting 1-2 inches and having problems driving. We just don't get a lot of snow here so people don't know how to drive in it. And we have a LOT of hills here, you can easily go from 300 feet to 1000 feet in a matter of a few miles. So what looks good where you are is really bad trying to go over the hills. These are days I'm glad to be working in IT where I can work from home!

Which is harder, concrete or my body?

First, I have to say I thought this blog thing would be fun to just share random thoughts I had. I still that, however for it to work, I kinda need to actually write stuff here. D'OH! Last year from Sept on got crazy busy in every way possible. I took a week off from work between Christmas and New Years and that really re-energized me. I feel refreshed and ready to go! So this year one of my New Years resolutions is to blog at least once a week. SO, to start it off, here's hopefully a good laugh for everyone from this last weekend. I know I'm laughing about it. :)


We get our Christmas tree right after Thanksgiving and take it down the weekend after New Years. This year we had a fantastic tree, it was still taking water even the day before we took it down!

So this last weekend my wife was at the beach with her mom and I was home with the kids, they were actually very good and we had a great time. Sunday morning at 8:45am I remembered the Christmas tree had to be at the curb by 9am for the boy scouts to pick it up. I quickly took all of the ornaments off the tree, the lights, and shoved it out the door top first (I know that was the wrong way to push it out, I can only say I'd been up for about 15 minutes so wasn't thinking clearly, which probably explains the rest of this story, that or I'm just stupid which is always a possibility). Of course it got stuck, I took off the tree stand and pushed it out the rest of the way.

It went out fine, but then started to fall to the right. I didn't want it to fall on a plant so I was trying to guide it. As it was falling faster than I could guide, I went to move my right foot to catch myself, but I caught it on my pajama pant leg and proceeded to fall over off a two foot step onto the hard concrete in front of our house (and ours has those little rocks coming out, not the smooth kind).

Hit my left shoulder, left side of my head (my cheekbone and head), my right knee a little on the inside, my right hand to catch myself, and after I was down my feet finally came down too. I laid there thinking, "Oh great, my wife is at the beach and I've done something stupid and probably broken something." Took a quick inventory and nothing felt broke so I started to get up. My left side hurt (upper back and upper front on my chest) and my right knee, I couldn't put pressure on it to stand up or use my left hand, which is of course how I always get up so had to change position to stand up.

Got up, checked everything again, all felt ok, nothing broken or out of place, so I finished taking the tree to the curb.

When I got back in the house, I looked at my knee and it had a HUGE welt on it! My left should only has a few little marks and they look normal, and very little bruising. My right hand has three cuts which are healing fine. I went into the bathroom to checkout my head and was shocked to find NOTHING! I mean there wasn't any sign I'd tried to shove my head through the concrete! Very weird, but I've always known I'm thick headed. hehe

When my wife got home, I asked her to check my back as it was still sore and hard to lift my left arm. (Did I tell you she's a licensed massage therapist?) She said it felt like I pulled a muscle or really strained it. By the end of the day my knee was feeling better, my back was ok, but now my right elbow was acting up, really sore. I think when my right hand came down I kinda jammed it or something. This morning my knee feels great, just some cuts and it's still tender where I hit it, my hand is fine, my back is sore but better, my head still feels fine with no signs of anything, and my elbow was feeling better, though today I've been leaning on it too much and it's hurting again. I did think I might have gotten a concussion from that, so I looked it up online and had none of the symptoms.

I'm quite shocked that I came out of it feeling pretty much just fine, just a few scratches and bruises. So now I can laugh about it cause I'm sure I looked really stupid, I certainly felt stupid.

But I did get the tree out in time and they did take it! WOOHOO!! And that's what really matters as I didn't want to have to deal with it. hahaha