Woolsey Life

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!

Hey, I twittered that about this last night. I was on my way home from picking up dinner and saw a 15 passenger van with some mountain bikes on the roof. It was all plastered with a logo and the name Nikao da Xtreme. They had a website on it too, www.castashadow.org. I looked into it a little bit and so far I think it looks cool. They are a Christian organization that is into world missions and building community through cycling. I will do some more checking to see if they are as cool as I think they are.

Has anyone else seen these folks around?

I have my opinions about what is happening in our country right now and I think that this election year is going to be a big one.  I think that we are at an important time in our nation’s history.  But I am not going to say much about it.  Vince has listed his concerns and I agree with him, so just read his post.

Impact Church has a December tradition called the Papalote Perspective.  During the crazy Christmas season while we are all running around spending more money than we have on things that we don’t need, and for people that don’t need what we are buying them…there is this great thing happening about 7 hours south of here.  In the town of El Papalote a church get hundreds of presents together from churches all over the place to distribute to children in their town.  We have been blessed to be there two years in a row and be a part of this.  I love taking teams down there because it gives everyone a chance to gain some perspective while being removed from the Christmas rush.  How about you?  Could you use some perspective next Christmas?

I haven’t written much lately because I haven’t been overly inspired to do so. But tonight I have something to share. We had our staff meeting late tonight and we went out because Travis hadn’t had dinner yet. On the way back I saw 2 shopping carts from the nearby Stater Bros. on my street. I happen to know which family is responsible for this and even though I don’t understand their reasons for leaving them where they do, I know I don’t have to.

A couple of weeks ago at one of our iGroup meetings we were talking about anger and whether its right or wrong. In fact, this is a topic that comes up more than a little in our group, maybe we can discuss this more in depth later… Back to my point - this one night we were discussing what anger is about after watching a Nooma video narrated by Rob Bell. His topic was anger and he postulated why people are angry so often is because they have passion to be in a fight and they are not in one. He suggests that these people can use this passion to do good. So, as we were discussing this topic I had a fresh thing in my mind. The topic of my neighbors’ shopping carts. I try hard to make my home look presentable and make it an asset to our neighborhood and when someone else does not I tend to get frustrated. So when the carts are around from time to time I get really annoyed and naturally tend to get mad at my neighbor. But after our discussion that night I decided there needed to be a switch. So afterward I went out and grabbed the shopping cart, put it in my truck and ran it back to the Stater Bros. down the street.

Read the rest of this entry »