The Wedemeyer Family

This photo was taken May 15 2005, shortly after Blossom’s sister, Lucinda, died in a motor vehicle accident. Blossom is the redhead in the center. Sharon Bell, who was also Lucinda’s teacher gave a very moving eulogy at the funeral.

This is a magazine photo of a Suzuki X-5 Invader motorcycle like I have in the Garage (1967). I also have a 1975 Honda Goldwing basket case and a 1985 Suzuki GN250 which I ride to work when the weather is nice.

Sarah and I cooked a tofurkey this year for Christmas dinner. We’ve gotten quite good at cooking these little faux-birds. It takes about 24 hours of defrosting, 20 minutes of prep, and 90 minutes of cooking. After that, you just need to eat it as fast as possible. Tofurkey does not have yummy leftovers the way regular turkey does. Just imagine eating a cold sponge the next day and you get the idea.

Sarah and I recent took out our ghetto mailbox from the previous owners. It was held in the ground by about 3″ of soil plus some chunks of rock to prop it up. It was pretty unsightly and left a lot to be desired. So…we got to work installing a new mailbox and post of our own.

We dug the hole about 3 feet down using an old shovel. Along the way we found the remnants (chunks of concrete) of previous mailboxes, we assume. We managed to dig around most of them and get a hole that the post would go into. Using 2 garden stakes and some twine, we managed to brace the post. Then we poured in no-mix quick-crete. Add water, wait, and you’ve got a solidly mounted mailbox.

Anyways, take a look at the pictures. They should explain it all.

Note: This is a super-jumbo mailbox with almost enough room to hold Dotty. As our neighbor Rai put it, “Are you guys expecting midgets in the mail or something?”

The Civil Air Patrol promises the cadets that they can each have 5 glider flights, but we have been unable to fulfil that promise because we had no pilots and no gliders. This past year the WV Wing got a surplus glider from the Air Force Academy, but it got assembled improperly and on its first flight the left wing folded up before it got off the ground. It has since been replaced and the glider is ready to fly, but still no pilots. I went to Julien PA (just outside of State College) last August and took training. I soloed twice, but the week was just not enough time to get my glider license. I have since joined the Cumberland (MD) Soaring Group to complete my training, but I can go there only when I am not on call which is alternate weekends, but if the weather is not good I am out of luck. I am making slow progress toward my rating because there is not much lift in the winter, but my landings are getting better. At first, following the tow plane was scary. My reactions were slow and soon I was swinging from side to side like a horizontal pendulum trying my best to track the tail of the plane ahead. The instructor in the back said to match his bank angle, but in a glider, because there is no motor up front, the pilot is seated in the nose of the airplane, well ahead of the wings. I was concentrating so much on the tow plane that I could not look back and see the wings. It has since gotten much better; I am able to relax and follow the tow plane, making small but quick corrections, and can even stay coordinated most of the time. I also am learning to fly the tow plane, so as soon as my friend, Dennis gets his glider rating and I have my tow plane rating the WV Wing will have a glider program.

In this photo I am in a DuoDiscus high-performance glider looking west toward the Appalachian Plateau in central Pennsylvania.

For Christmas, Micah and I bought a new bed, something we’ve been thinking about getting for a while but it never seemed make it to the top of the necessity list. We’re pretty happy with how it looks. (Dotty is pleased too.)

It’s been almost a year since I started riding my bike to work in one form or another, and it was finally my time to eat the pavement.

It had been raining and misting all day Thursday, and the temperature fell below freezing that night. So, when I got up on Friday morning, there was some ice on the roads. I took Dotty for a walk and tried to gauge the slickness. Based on the walk, the roads seemed fine.

What I failed to grasp is the extreme sensitivity of bike tires to bad conditions. The tires I use are high-pressure racing tires. They have almost no tread on them (to reduce rolling resistance), plus they are very skinny. All these factors together mean that I have very little surface area in contact with the road. A seat-of-the-pants guess would be that I have 0.5 square inches of surface area on each tire in contact with the road at any given time (0.5″ across and 1″ long). Plus, if either tire (especially the front) loses traction, the bike becomes unstable very quickly. So, it really doesn’t take that much ice to send me down.

I got my bike ready and set out like any other morning. I rode for about 5 minutes, taking things extra slow in case there was ice. I was taking a left turn when all of a sudden the bike slid out from under me. As the tires slid out, the bike came down on the left side, whipping me against the pavement. I was probably only going 5-10 mph at the time, so the speed wasn’t a huge factor, but the side of my head still came down pretty hard on the street. My helmet took all the impact and I didn’t even see stars or get disoriented. That was enough evidence for me that helmets are worth the money and hassle.

Luckily, my feet popped out of the pedals without any trouble. This has always been my biggest fear. I use clipless pedals that have a binding system allowing you to mechanically attach your special biking shoes to the pedal. It is similar to a ski-boot binding. Anyways, my biggest fear was that in a crash, my feet and legs would get wrapped up in the bike frame and the bindings would not release. In that case, I would be risking some pretty bad joint injury. As I said, though, my feet popped right out of the pedals and I was able to get clear of the bike.

The initial crash didn’t really hurt all that much. I jammed one of my thumbs when I hit the ground, and my helmet took a hit, but otherwise I felt pretty much OK. I climbed back on the bike and rode home. When I got there, Sarah said that I should come back to bed and take the morning off. It seemed like a good idea, so I took her advice.

The final tally of injuries is pretty minor, considering the possibilities. I have a rasberry on my upper thigh about the size of a grapefruit, a cut on my knee, and a cut on my ankle. The bike went down on the left side, while all the complicated derailler and gearing mechanisms are on the right. The alignment of the front brakes got screwed, but 2 minutes with the allen-wrench fixed that. The brake hoods got dragged along the pavement, and the tops are filed down, as if someone took coarse-grained sandpaper and worked them for a few minutes. The most puzzling issues is that the left brake hood has been twisted a bit so it faces inward more than the right brake hood. The brakes and shifting still work fine, but it looks weird and feels a bit ungainly. I’ll see if the bike shop people can do anything.

Other than that, the bike seems to be fine. I can’t even find any scratches on the seat or frame. There is some sort of clicking sound, but I can’t remember if that was there before. Plus, I threw the rear derailler a little out of alignment, but that could have been there before too. In any case, the bike is perfectly ride-worthy, and I rode it to the train station this morning.

Let’s just hope that I can go at least another year before I have to kiss the pavement again.

If you look in the sidebar on the right, you’ll see that there is now a contact info page under the links. With Christmas coming and the need to send cards/presents, I thought it might be useful to get contact info listed.

Please send me your updated contact info as soon as possible and I’ll put it up on the page!