Woolsey Life

Well, now you have. Its called a Tri-Runner and its from a Chinese company. They run a 250cc water cooled 4-stroke engine with a pseudo-variable speed transmission (Salisbury) with a centrifugal clutch. Fully suspended and capable of about 40mph. Think of it as a recumbent version of a 3 wheeler like Honda used to make…with a roll cage. I would never consider buying one of these considering their place of origin could make for questionable reliability and repairability…but never the less the Woolseys have come into possession of one! A friend of my dad’s acquired 4 of them and had no where to store them. He offered to give my dad one if he could keep them at his house. My dad at first didn’t know what to do with one but soon realized I would put it to good use.

Next time any of you are ready for a quick trip out to the desert I will be ready with my exotic, china-made ride.  Try to keep up

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Deep down I must be an environmentalist at heart.  Before my break from the world of engineering I was gearing up to get LEED certified and have always been drawn to more efficient technologies.  That interest and concern has tended to spill into other avenues of my life.  That combined with the increasing cost of energy I am getting very interested in alternatives to driving my truck all over town.  When I started getting excited about riding my converted mt bike around as a commuter I started wondering what other people were doing.  Were others converting mt bikes or was there such a thing as a commuter bike that is made by any of the manufacturers.  In the course of my education I discovered the Xtracycle company.  They make a frame extension for almost any 26″ or 700 wheeled bike.  Simply remove the rear wheel and hardware, install the FreeRadical and put the rack hardware of your choice on and you have a sport utility bike.  It looks like a great idea and offers the rider a TON of opportunities to leave the car parked in the garage.

I won’t be doing anything like this soon.  I have only been at this for a week and need to see how it goes.  This town isn’t an entirely bike friendly town.  I can say that my goal is to see if I can make a tank of gas in my truck last a month.  Wish me luck!

Today I am having fun with something so I thought I would share it. I have been thinking a lot about ways to cut back on the amount of gasoline our family burns. Now, our cars are pretty efficient and I can’t complain but I figure any opportunity I can take to reduce is good. So, I stopped by the bike shop to check out some ‘commuter’ bikes. They aren’t unreasonably expensive but they run close to $500. What struck me when looking at them is they resemble a hard-tail mountain bike with road tires on them. They also have taller gears, but that is neither here nor there. After making this observation I got to thinking about my old mountain bike (Trek 4500) and that since I got the DB it hasn’t been used at all. So I grabbed some 26×1.5 road tires and put them on tonight. Its a different bike! I took a test ride around the block. The pedaling effort has been reduced by almost half on the street. I didn’t expect this kind of improvement. I will be getting a rack for the back and some saddle bags. I think this bike just because a commuter.

It rained today. Only for about 15 minutes but during that time the storm dumped a TON of water. It haled too, really big hale. The tarp top over my side yard parking had to come down or it would have torn for sure. Also, I just seeded my back yard yesterday afternoon and I was a little concerned about how well the fresh soil would take to 2 inches of water standing on the lawn bed.

Check out some pictures of some of the flooding in the greenbelt near my house.

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This year Impact Church is going to the Colorado River for its summer family camp. We are working pretty hard to get the costs to something manageable so that lots more people can come. But sometimes manageable doesn’t just mean costs, sometimes its scheduling. Every modest sized church I have ever been a part of (including Impact up to this point) that does vacation stuff like going out to the river or desert or even fishing has done one thing that excludes so many. They go during the week! I don’t know why other churches have done that but I know we have always leaned toward going outside the weekend because we wanted to preserve the importance of Sunday worship. This year, we are switching gears and will be utilizing the talents of our ministry team differently by having trips like this on the weekend so that normal people with regular jobs can go.

Now the application here is this: we are going to have programming at the river Friday, Saturday & Sunday. We have a team ministry model at Impact Church so there are FOUR pastors! That means that we should be able to do this. Here is our plan. Friday and Saturday we will have all four pastors out and Saturday night Jeff & Travis will leave so that Church happens as scheduled and expected on Sunday at Thompson Middle School. Vince and I will remain at the river with some of our oversight and we will have church Sunday morning at the campground. This is a cool step for us because we are not a large church and usually we employ our entire ministry staff every Sunday. This is a step toward growth for this ministry and hopefully a step in our reach into our community.

If you live around Murrieta and would like to join us, you are welcome to come along - this is an open event. Go to the Impact Church website and click on the Soak 2008 image or you can click on the image in this post, it takes you to the same place.