First thing tomorrow morning I’m getting in my car and taking I-70 to Denver, Colorado. When I moved to Kansas City I thought I would be here at least 5 years, but now less than two years after making the move to KC, I’m on my way off again.
If I had known my time here would be so short I would have taken more opportunities and done more KC things than I have. Sam was here for a year and almost certainly did more “KC stuff” than I did, at least partly because she knew her time was limited.
For anyone who is thinking “screw KC, woo Denver” I say screw you. Kansas City is great. I’m told Denver is great, too, and I’m looking forward to it. Just not at the expense of making fun of KC. I hope I get to come back every now and then for work stuff. It’s a pretty easy flight.
To my family and friends in the Kansas City area, I’m going to miss you. I didn’t make nearly enough effort to see people while I was here, and that’s one of my major regrets. Thanks to Adam for getting my goodbye party organized last night. I had a great time, and I’m really looking forward to you and JoLynn joining me in Denver.
I’ll see everybody online when I get internet again.
I saw an Indy Race today at the Kansas Speedway (thanks Bentley!). It was a beautiful day and the race was a lot of fun.
I took a bunch of photos and a few videos. I put some of the best in the gallery linked above. Below are a couple of the videos. One is a full lap of the race (less than 30 seconds), and the other is a skydiver making a hard landing before the race.
[MYPLAYLIST=1]
Tonight I rode home from work in the rain. I would have been fine if I had left when I originally planned to, but I got tied up. By the time I was unlocking my bike it was pouring. By the time I was halfway home I was getting hailed on.
Ah, fun.
Since then this proverbial storm of doom has been on us (that’s about 5 hours for those counting). We’ve had several bouts of hail, prompting me to move my car (of doom) into a covered parking stall. I don’t pay for one but there are a lot open and come on, it’s hailing.
I got some (bad) video of the hail coming down. You can’t see much because my camera is not good in low light, but you can hear the pounding.
[MEDIA=2]
I also tagged a really bad pic of the hail coming down.
Update: It is like half an hour since the last post, and things got even louder. I went outside and found these.
There was a big fire on 75th and Washington today, just west of Wornall Road in Waldo. The building that burned was adjacent (and I think attached) to my favorite local brew pub, 75th Street Brewery. I was just there the other night getting some growlers filled, and had plans to go there tonight with some friends.
I don’t think the brewery burned, but I have no idea what sort of damage it might have taken (smoke, water, etc), or if the beer got destroyed, or anything else. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
I planned to make a note from every city I hit last week, but didn’t manage anything after OKC.
On Wednesday night I flew to Chicago, on Thursday night I flew to Syracuse, and on Friday I flew back to KC. Site visits are fun.
Now I’m back in KC, but by mid year should be on my way to Denver. Work is footing the bill to move me there, and I’m pretty excited.
Sorry to keep you waiting.
Sam, Sam, Erin, Ben, and Andy all came to visit and it was awesome. Andy flew in from New York, and the rest met in Rochester, MN and drove down. I hear they stopped in Ames for Hickory Park. Of course, they took the wrong 435 exit and took the loop backwards, going the long way around town.
We went to Pangea for food on Friday, and then a couple of bars. There was a balloon blowing (or failure to blow) incident, a beer as big as Sam’s head, and other stuff.
Saturday we explored some of KC, starting with Union Station and then climbing up to the top of the Liberty Memorial, which has a great view of the city. Then we got kicked out. I seem to get kicked out of there as often as not.
After that fun we stopped at the nearby Jack Stack for some BBQ, then headed home becuase it was starting to snow. My original plan was that we would head up to Weston to go to O’Malley’s Pub but the heavy snow that had started derailed those plans. Andy and I drove through the snow to Hen House and picked up a bunch of food to cook in instead. It was good other than the Ben chicken licking incident.
The Minnesota folks left KC the next morning, but Andy was around until the early evening. We go breakfast at the Corner Restaurant (a personal favorite), hung around my place for a while, then stopped for an early dinner at Grinder’s (another favorite). $1 PBR is apparently the special on Sunday, so we had a few of those and a pizza. Then I drove him to the airport as soon as I found 169 North. For the record it is off Broadway, not Grand.
It was a good time, and the only real regret is that Bentley couldn’t come up from Tulsa.
The current list of people coming to KC on Friday appears to be Sam Wong, Ben Janke, and Andy Buck, and there are rumors of Sam Miller as well. It’s going to be an awesome weekend.
First update of 2007, sorry for the delay. If you TLDR me I will de-friend.
This one’s about the bike that I bought on EBay, received just before Christmas, and now ride to work. A while back I started looking at the Kansas City Craigslist site every day. I was keeping an eye out for an older road bike that I could clean up and get working wonderfully again. I had sort of decided that those new, gorgeous, awesome, fancy, expensive road bikes were great but maybe were not what I was really looking for.
Anyways, one day I ran across a bike that looked pretty decent. I didn’t buy it, but the guy posting it mentioned something about it being a good candidate for conversion to a “fixie.” At the time I didn’t know what that was, so I looked it up (yay for the internet). I found out that a fixie or fixed or fixed gear conversion or whatever you want to call it is a bike whose drive train has been simplified down to a direct connection between the pedals and the rear wheel. If the pedals are turning, so is the wheel, and vice versa.
This seemed sort of stupid but I was intrigued anyways, so I talked to my friend Boyd about it. He’d ridden fixed bikes before, and he was like “dude go for it.” I kept looking at Craigslist, but this time I was looking for a good candidate for conversion. I think I was sort of at the point where I’d done all kinds of biking and was looking for something new. I mean, I’ve done the whole mountain biking thing, the bike commuting thing (yay college), long distance road biking (yay RAGBRAI), and long distance idiocy (heavy suspension mountain bike 80+ miles in a day).
For whatever reason there are very few bikes on Craigslist here in KC. While I waited for the right one to appear I went to a local independent bike store downtown (Acme, it is awesome) and talked to the lady there for a while. They had all the parts I needed for a conversion, or even just to buy a converted bike outright. Then she showed me a new bike they had, the Redline 9-2-5. It’s a commuter bike, single speed freewheel or single speed fixed, depending on which way the rear wheel is installed. Had fenders and a chain guard, mustache handlebars, and was made of steel. It was definitely a bike for riding, and not for looking pretty. All the same, it did look pretty.
They wanted $600 for it, and I wasn’t ready to buy, but I was intrigued. Big time. Two days later I hit Buy it Now on an EBay auction for one. $400 shipped. OK, whatever. I can handle $400. A week and some later I get the bike, put it together, and promptly drive home for Christmas with the bike on top of my car.
On the Saturday before Christmas I took the bike out for a “short ride” that turned into a ride from my parents’ house at the south end of Ames to Stomping Grounds in Campustown. After having coffee and chatting with Jess, Kyle, and Kandice I realized it was about 4 and I needed to hurry home before it got dark (no lights, minimal reflectors, no helmet, etc). I made it home just as the sun was going down, made a 10 mile day after not riding at all for almost a year, and I was pretty much jelly after that.
For Christmas I got a headlight and taillight, and a floor pump that can handle the funky presta valves on the new bike. I started riding it to work shortly after I got back from break, and have now ridden it to work about 8 times since Christmas. It’s just about as fast as driving, is a better workout, and on the nicer mornings is just plain more enjoyable than driving. The only thing I don’t like is overheating for 20 minutes or so after I get from the cool outside to the warm inside of my building, but I can live with that.
I bought a new iPod a few weeks ago. I don’t really remember the actual date, but it is a 30 gig black video model and is pretty nice. Takes fingerprints easily though. The 2G I had before was a lot harder to smudge or smear, probably at least partially because of how worn it was.
The new one has a super nice screen , and it syncs ratings and play counts back to iTunes. That might be the best new (to me) feature, since now my smart playlists, like the one that only plays songs I listen to a lot but haven’t heard in over a week, stay updated whether i was listening at home or on the go.
Other things that happened include some Christmas shopping. Going to the mall is a bad idea (just try to find parking), but Westport and the Plaza weren’t too crowded. Seemed sort of odd but the Plaza was only marginally busier than a normal weekend, and Westport was just the same as always. I also got some coffee beans at the Broadway Roasting Company.
On Saturday evening I ran into my cousin Nick at Target. I was doing some more Christmas shopping, as was he. I haven’t seen Nick since he moved here to work for another engineering company, and seeing him at Target was pretty random. We ended up getting dinner at the Elephant Bar nearby.
But for now I want to link to the pictures I took on Sunday and tell you a little about the weekend. On Friday I met Sam, Ric, and others for First Friday, in the Crossroads district downtown. There are a lot of galleries and some studios that open up for the evening, and for a brief period of time KC proper seems like a city, rather than a collection of buildings. Last Friday there was a big stage set up near 19th and Wyandotte with a choir singing stuff, though they didn’t seem terribly enthusiastic.
One of the places we went to was this cool printing shop that had a big collection of old presses and the like. From the look of things they were still in use. They had atypical Kansas City postcards, and a wall covered in custom band posters detailing all of the bands that came to KC and Lawrence that I failed to see. I’m going to have to try harder in the future.
Our group ended the night at a restaurant called Pangaea, which is on 39th street just a little ways west of Southwest Trafficway. Good food and great presentation there. I was impressed.
I didn’t really do anything on Saturday that I can recall.
On Sunday I went downtown in the early afternoon and walked around a lot with two cameras and a light meter. The few people I did see also walking around seemed a bit shady, but no one bothered me or anything. I saw the current state of construction of the Sprint Center, which is no longer a giant hole in the ground. The Power & Light District is going up right across the street from that, and even though I’m cynical I am holding out some hope that they can help bring downtown up a bit.
I also made it to Union Station and the Liberty Memorial for the first time in what might be more than three years. I’m not entirely sure but that seems right. The nice thing about Union Station is that it seems just about impossible to take a bad picture in there. The trick with photographing the Liberty Memorial is to avoid taking the normal pictures: the entire Memorial from a distance or a shot looking up to the top of the tower. Neither gives a good impression of how massive that pillar really is.
