ANOTHER ONE IN THE BAG

We've come to the end of another season of cycling. The last race in Utah was on September 27th. The Harvest Moon Criterium was held in Ogden. Rachael came with us. We were to the race course early to enjoy the Farmer's Market. We enjoyed wandering around, seeing the sights and enjoying the smells.


(Was it to be a bike race or a horse race - notice the racer painted onto the horse)

We met up with Cindy Yorgason and had lunch before the racing began. My assignment for the day was the Wheel Pit. I haven't worked the wheel pit very often. You have to pay attention to the race so that if a rider comes into the wheel pit, you can get him back into the race at the correct place. We had quite a few racers in the wheel pit, they came in with lots of construction staples in them.

Richard was the Assistant Judge, with Doug Murry as the Chief Judge. They did a great job working together to score the races.


It was a beautiful day for a race and ended with a great win by Mike Booth in the 1/2 race. As you watch the video, notice Ira Tibbits jumping in excitement as his teammate wins. At the very end you will see Richard hard at work scoring the race.



We have had another GREAT season. Worked lots of GREAT races with lots of GREAT people. We have learned new things and been able to put them to use.

(I think we are already looking forward to next year!)

Family Day

After being gone for a week in Missouri, we decided that our family needed to do something fun together. Rachael picked BOONDOCKS! I left work a little early and we headed to Boondocks. We decided to do the "Whole" thing and started by having dinner there. We should have thought twice about that one, the foods wasn't all that exciting. We bought our passes

and let the fun begin. Off to the bumper boats. We agreed in advance to not spray each other and get all wet, so we just did the bumping thing.












The place was really quiet, so we got to play in the water as long as we wanted. Sometimes, the boat was hard to turn and get right where we wanted and we ended up going in circles and not being able to bump the other person.

Off to the slick track. Richard is the
fastest and bravest, he just floors
the gas pedal and goes, no matter
how fast Rachael and I were going
we just could not keep up.

GO SPEED RACER - GO







We headed up to play miniature golf next.
Richard is still the golfer in the family. He
beat Rachael and I on both courses

















I think the favorite thing that we did was the laser tag. By the time we had played 3 or 4 games we finally had it figured out and knew when to shoot and when we had been shot. We decided that the perfect number for teams would be about 5 or 6 any more than that it gets to crowded in the game room. A couple of games we had a little boy who once he found someone just followed you around the room trying to shoot you every time your vest reset. We were glad when he moved on to something else.
No trip to Boondooks is complete without spending some money in the different video games trying to get as many of the little yellow prize tickets as possible. We each had a share of the 87 tokens that we got. We played some games together and some games on our own. In the end Rachael got to redeem all of the tickets and get some great prizes from the prize wall.

Good Bye to Color Guard

Rachael had some disappointing news on September 13th, she was told that the Alpine School District won't let 8th graders go on over night trips. So she and her friend Sarah were now off of the Color Guard. It was a big disappointment, after 5 months worth of work to not be able to be a part of this wonderful experience. After a weekend full of tears and unhappiness, Rachael was ready to move on. We attended the family show for the Marching Band and Color Guard on the 15th. It was bittersweet to see the show. Hopefully next year we will be part of the fun.

GOOD LUCK AT GRAND NATIONALS!!
G

TOUR OF MISSOURI

WOW!!!! What a FABULOUS week of cycling. I was lucky to be a part of the Officiating Crew for Tour of Missouri. It was a great race, with great officials, great volunteers, great fans, and GREAT CYCLISTS! I have learned so much working at races this year. It was fun to be able to put it all to use at this event and see how a race should go if everything followed the book/rules. We had a good amount of officials, a great timing company (Thanks Fred and Hilda), lots of motor marshals, corner marshals who kept us entertained as they pointed us in the right direction, a great staff from Medalist who made sure that everything fell right into place in each host city. If only every race I worked could go this smoothly.
We had signs all along the way, for all cyclists, or for one cyclists. Students in some schools did reports on the hometown of a cyclist and then made a sign cheering them on.
We had kids lining the streets to cheer for any car that came along the way with a "TOUR OF MISSOURI" sticker on it. They were there in the rain and in the sun.




In Big Towns and Small Towns, out on the farms. the fans were everywhere. The bands even showed up to welcome everyone.



We had big motorhomes for cyclists to get ready in before every race.
Cars and drivers, thanks Marek and Judy for driving me around.The people in the Feed Zone, we saw them a couple of times every day.
I don't know how they drove from feed zone to feed zone around the race.

We had pretty flowers to look at and Ronald McDonald to pose with.

We had beautiful cities to see even after they got 5.5 inches of rain in just 6 hours, and had thousands still out of power. They had a bike race to put in and they did a GREAT job pulling it all together in such adversary,

When all was said and done I had a GREAT time, and made some new FRIENDS, I worked with Great Officials
and somehow came home with the winner's (Christian Vandevelde) autograph for Rachael. I also got Mark Cavendish, George Hinciape, David Zabriskie and Jeff Louder's for her.
Hopefully I can do another event as well put on as this again.

Salad Night

For our September Home and Family Enrichment Meeting we had a salad bar. Everyone was to bring their favorite salad and the recipe to go with it. We had a GREAT selection of salads, even taking a small taste of all of them was more than I could eat. It was a fun evening with Good FOOD, Good FRIENDS, and Good TIMES.

LOTOJA 2008

As a family if we were to take a vote about which bike race is our favorite every year. I think the vote would go to LOTOJA. The race starts in Logan, Utah, and finished at Teton Village, Wyoming. It is about 207 miles, all raced in one day.

We arrived in Logan early Friday evening to find long lines of people waiting to pick up their number and race packet. We found Mac of Milliseconds hard at work making sure that everyone's timing chip was associated with the correct race number.
We found Brent chambers in the Motorhome, moving people into the correct categories.


Rachael seems to find her way into the packet pickup tent and helps get the packets ready every year. ( One woman even remembered her from helping years ago when Rachaell was small enough to fit into the boxes from the shirts and just played while Dad and I did the helping). We all have a great night visiting with volunteers, and cyclists who come every year. We always hope to get to bed early, but it never happens, and the alarm going off at 4:00 a.m. is way to early. The hotel was gracious enough to have their Continential breakfast start at 4:30 and we were the first ones in line. By 5:00 we were headed over to the start line in front of Sunrise Cyclery. The first group left at 6:00 a.m. - the TOUR group. Our friend Kevin Leake went in that group. He took a bunch of friends with him, I think Kevin's job is to push the pace and keep them going along the way so that they get to Teton Village before dark. The actual RACERS started at 6:25, we had a group leaving every 3 minutes for the next hour and a half. We watched Mark Shaeffer head off again, I think he has done this race 12 or more times. Mark is a great friend and onw we enjoying seeing at all of the races. We also got to watch Jamie Leake start the race, it was her first time in the Women 1/2/3 field. She ended up in 4th place.








Rachael and I take off after the last group of cyclists have started. We have a ham radio operator with us in the car. He keeps us informed of things having along the race route as informed by all of the Ham radio operators. They truly help to keep this event safe as we have 1500 cyclists out on course. After 9 hours and 23 minutes we arrive at Teton Village and watch Cameron Hoffman sprint to the finish to win the Cat 1/2/3 race. We keep the finish line open until 8:15 and call it a SUCCESSFUL day. Lots of cyclists finished the race and no one went away in an ambulance. As we say at our house "Another one in the bag"

Sheep Hearding Championship

We picked up three FREE tickets to the Sheep Herding Championship at the KSL/Macey's Pre-game party earlier this month. We headed to Midway and found our way to the Soldier Hollow Olympic Area. We gave our FREE tickets at the gate and headed to the arena. On the way there we ran into this group and enjoyed the music for a couple of minutes
I love listening to the bagpipes, we could hear them in the backgound througout the whole time we were at the festival.

We found a seat on the bleachers and watched the dogs and their owner's herd sheep. they had a 15 minute time frame to leave the owner, run up the mountain collect 6 sheep bring them back down the mountain going through a series of "gates" along the way. Herd them into a "ring" separate 2 of the sheep out of the group, get them all back together and then into a fenced area. We did not see any of the dogs and owners working together get the sheep into the fenced area, but they got points along the way for getting the sheep through the gates. It was very intersting and fun to watch. We enjoyed this enough to come again next year. We also watched a dog show in another arena. The dogs used in the show have all been picked up form dog shelters. A great

reminder that if you take the time all dogs can be trained. (Note to self . . . spend more time working with Chloe on her tricks. Rachael has been teaching her to roll over).












We watched someone in front of us eating this really yummy looking plate full of food. We couldn't resist and so Rachael and I went on a mission to find whatever this was. Neither of us remember what it was called, but it was good.

We ended our day up at the Dog Pool watching the jumping contest. Some of the dogs can really jump for a long ways across the pool.

We had a great day watching dogs do all kinds of things.

What a cute group of people!

Couldn't resist putting these pictures up. Aren't these people who are near and dear to my heart, just CUTE!













I love you!
Richard
Steven
Rachael
Austin
and Sean!!

Another year older

It happens to all of us, that one day a year rolls around and somehow suddenly we have to add a year to our age. Yes, it happened to me. I received exactly the presents that I asked for and then some,\ from Richard and Rachael. I got the Happy Birthday phone call from Mom and Dad. Ross and his family called and so did Amy. I had the dinner that I wanted, Good Steak, cooked just the way I like, medium rare, just a tad more on the rare side than the medium side, cooked by the best chef I know (Richard). Chocolate cake to share with everyone at work. Free Cold Stone ice cream for me, (We had to pay for Richard and Rachael's).

It was a GREAT BIRTHDAY!!

Thank you everyone!

Austin has a birthday.

Austin has turned 8. Steven's oldest son is growing up. We had hamburgers and hot dogs, brauts, and salads, chips and watermelon. Good food and good friends all wishing Austin a GREAT day.


Austin bought a "Ben 10" watch with his birthday money from Great Grandpa and Grandma Anderson.












Austin got a fun basketball game, very similiar to one that Steven had years ago.




It was a fabulous birthday for a fabulous little boy. We LOVE YOU AUSTIN!