Well I have made through the mid point of my wee staycation. The problem with being a road warrior is that the instant you stop traveling, you get sick. Of course the only time I cease traveling is when I am on holiday and yes you can guess how this one started out.

Though my grand plans of snowboarding and biking have been mostly thwarted, it has been a good time. On Sunday, Hunter S. Thompson Memorial Greens (my wiffle field) hosted the season opener for LowBall.

Good times for sure.

Finally something original from the Laudromat.

While Isa and I were kicking it to the dump, we saw the holy grail of roadside debris, "the free bike". Now the free bike typically comes complete with piles of rust, a non pink exterior, and a host of other issues. Obviously the second is a near deal breaker for a 3 year old. There was some work to be completed. We stripped the bike completely down.

Painted the main components pink, obviously.

Scrubbed the remaining pieces until no rust or dirt could be found.

Put it together in a mere 13 attempts, chipped some of the fresh paint off, and holy cow a new-ish bike. Thrifty is the new black, get some.

Looks like another banger day and the trees are starting to green, only 4 days of staycation left.

S Nathaniel o.u.t.

Until this moment, I had no clue that I needed 5 pounds of silly putty. But man, now that I think about it, there are really a lot of things I could fix around the house with that. Or I could just do full sized copies of newspapers or make a really big bouncy ball. I bet you want some now too and lucky stars you can get it at the Crayola Store for only $76.99. When times get tough spend your hard earned money impulsively on completely irrelevant stuff. Yeah.

In the spring of 1777, My Great Grandfather (many times over) Samual, settled a fertile, wooded piece of land in the lower Champlain Valley, of what is now Vermont. Here many of my ancestors were raised.

Although my father was able to take most of the remaining farm into the family in the 1980s, one small 13 acre woodlot had remained in another family’s possession since Brig. General George Stannard's Father was just a kid, playing in these woods.

Acting mostly on faith and dreams, my father, wife, and I have purchased back this land and have begun the process of settling here ourselves.

The spruce and pine have been purchased from Adirondack Loggers, and is at the small family run saw mill near the land.

The crew of builders has been assembled.

The home has been brainstormed about by everyone in the family, and designed by “Big Ed” our great friend and builder.

In the coming Month I will move my family of five out of our overpriced carriage house apartment in the village. We will spend our spring, summer, and fall in a Cabela’s wall tent next to my family’s camp.

If our land perks and is approved to build…..I will spend 15 hour days, building a 3 story, passive solar/solar, wood radiant floor heated, “sugar shack” for my family.

I will update on all our positive news for months to come. I hope I can inspire others to kick the rent and oil habit and follow the faith of our fathers, into the American Dream!

I know posting on bad colonies is not the easiest and I have been delinquent on providing a tutorial. Now that we have some much welcomed new contributors, I have decided to put together a little tutorial. I also revised the sample code to provide the basic info you will need. It still is not perfect but this should give you a good start.

For this example we will create a simple post showing an image, some quoted text, and linking to the original site as shown above.

First we click the "create content" button and arrive at the above page. On top of the page we have all the code we will need to create our post.

Copy and paste the "image", "quote", and "link" code into your post as shown above. Note that I have also selected two secondmost tags, "auto" and "green". You can do this by ctrl clicking them. The img code is surrounded by two tags for centering. You can use these tags to center anything, such as videos, by simply putting them on either end of the code.

Now we need to obtain the content to fill this in. The text to be replaced with the appropriate information is shown in red. We will start with the image.

Right click on the image from the original page and select "save image as" to save it to your computer.

Open up photobucket.com and upload the image from your computer. You will need an account with photobucket.
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Once the photo is uploaded you will eventually arrive at a page with this information. Select the "direct" address as shown above. Paste this address into your post in place of www.addresshere.com in the code "img src=http://www.addresshere.com class="postimg". Incidentally, the code class="postimg" gives the photo the black border. The image should be no greater than 575 px in width. You can resize the image in photobucket.

Now we will add the quoted text and the link.

Copy the text and the link from the original page as shown above.

Paste this information in place of the placeholder text as shown above. Note that you may choose any text for the link that replaces "Display Text". I usually just put the basic web url. Note that the code target="new" simply makes the link open in a new window.

We now have a post that looks like this. Hopefully this helps.

photo: Seth Beck
Well Isa and I have returned to the homebase from our big adventure. While there was no actual riding involved, it was a trip that fully represented this 7YW. I loaded up the rig with a bunch of junk and one of my best friends. She cried a bit because we left her blue stuffed puppy behind, but all was forgotten when we rolled into North Conway. A lot has changed in the last seven years, people have settled and taken life a bit more seriously. We stayed with Brent and Ali, Isa declared as we awoke in the morning "Let's go downstairs, Brent will be on the couch and Ali will be working in the kitchen." And she was correct.

We rolled up to 1080 Board Sports and scoped the new shop that Charlie and Rocket have crafted. Very solid stuff, well laid out, with all the fly kit to be had. I scored a fresh Elm fitted that looks like a cross between something one of those massholes who wears "The Black Dog" t-shirts would wear and a gangsta fitted, much my steez. We enjoyed a crazy good meal and old school demolition company at Price and Laura's crib. Talk about change, there was no meat and no complaints, tip top meal Laura.

In the morning we rolled for Aunt Randcy's, Aunt Nancy and Uncle Randy's if you are not into the whole brevity thing. We were greeted with old and new family, gifts and food, discussion and laughter. Isa met both her Aunt Sarah and Aunt Olivia. Sarah fresh off her gig as a surgeon and Olivia from her gig as Tom Brady's personal confidant. Isa certainly has some strong, successful women in her family to shape her future. Isa was very stoked on the Uncle Randy and Aunt Nancy experience and I suspect this will not be the last 7YW adventure to their house.

We ate the turkey, then the pie, then we went for a walk on the beach, then we went home. Good times, thanks to all our hosts. Hopefully the 7YW riding season starts tomorrow. ciao ciao Seth

photo: Randy Billmeier