• Re-do minnesotabiathlon.com to wordpress
• Sell my Rossignol skis, pay for my Salomon gear
• Finish putting up the paintings in the apt
• Tune up my car
• Work on my online portfolio
• Cameron-Canepa Website header
• Figure out my Cell Phone Plan (Would really like to know when the Blackberry 8220 is coming to Sprint)

Unfortunately the clouds rolled in the overnight, and the sun would be pretty much non-existent during the duration of my stay. The weather was not exactly rain, but just a drizzle here and there, enough to warrant a rain jacket at times, but not all the time. When the sun shined it was usually in the afternoons, and would really light up the Mazama area mountains.

Betsy Devin Smith is the Coach of the group and has done a great job getting things going in a number of ways. Despite a limited experience in Biathlon, she has brought the team up to a encouraging level of experience. Having a number of Canadian venues within driving range is certiantly a valuable asset to the team, as both BC and Alberta have strong programs in the younger age groups.

The older boys will be heading up to Alaska this winter to race at the USBA Junior Trial races, just after Christmas. While I’ll be up cheering on my own full-time biathletes, I’ll be sure to cheer on the Methow Biathletes, and help them out in any way I can.

There is enough funding to get rollerskis, boots, skis, poles, etc for the team of 12. As part of my duty, I’ve been keeping a updated blog of our activities at http://anwatin.wordpress.com/. Here is a photo from one of the days where we got out the rollerskis and went for a spin, no poles of course, the athletes aren’t ready yet.

Things to do:

• Install whiteboards in office
• Move last few things
• Change to another wordpress photo gallery option
• etc.

So, what else is new you ask… I’m moving. New (to me) apartment, @ 24th Street and Lyndale Avenue. Right near the Wedge and spitting distance from the Leaning tower of Pizza, as well as a coffee shop and an oxygen bar across the street. Found a really decent deal wrapped up with being the caretaker for the building. Now to just pick some colors for the walls. 

Other happenings;

• 69 Mercedes is almost finished being converted to veggie
• Dining room is complete
• Waiting for clients to pay some bills
• Jimmy Pardo coming to Acme Comedy this week
• State Fair trip maybe Thursday(?)

Maybe I should think about how personal to be in this set up…

Life has gotten complex here in the last month. My father has returned from Alaska, where things didn’t work out optimally. Homeless and Jobless he headed back to Minneapolis, where Caitlin and I have been living in his house (and paying towards the mortgage all the while).

…

Soooooo, time to find another place to live, and quickly deal with the projects I’ve been saving for summer, but are too big for an apartment or anything but a good-size garage. Know anywhere like that?

Here’s a pic to make things fun:

2006 North Shore Camp

August Home Projects:

• Complete greasecar conversion on the 1969 Mercedes 220D diesel, and put it up on Craigslist or ebay.
• Take another look at the BMW.
• Motorcycle?
• September Bancroft Neighborhood Garage Sale
• Continue to shrink the amount of stuff I have.
• Another batch of soap? Need to get more fragrance oil, lots more than last time.
• All grain brew.
• Find a place to live.
• 5-year Financial Planning
• Art galleries
• Movie and Music

August Work Related Projects

• Websites, Websites, Websites.
• WordPress / Drupal
• Personal website design update (halfway complete)
• Personal Business Cards (address?)
• Fix KD invoice design (Just the star)
• User Groups / Interest Groups / Minneapolis
• Plan Biathlon Training for Fall / Recruiting

New Clients:

• TAPartners inc.
• Matt Liebsch
• Caitlin Compton
  others in the works

A lot of working in Wordpress lately, many a website getting created, as well as beginning the re-design of this website to something a bit classier. 

Biathlon Training for the Twin Cities group going full-swing. It is so much easier to run a training session, when the workout is already planned (and the athletes are hitting targets…). 

New Clients

RMA of NY
Logo and Website

Edge Legal Marketing
Multiple Websites with Content Management Systems

Cubical Network
Big Drupal based site 

Perhaps, like many sensible citizens, you read Investor’s Business Daily for its sturdy common sense in defending free markets and other rational arrangements. If so, you too may have been startled recently by an astonishing statement on that newspaper’s front page. It was in a report on the intention of the world’s second-largest brewer, Belgium’s InBev, to buy control of the third-largest, Anheuser-Busch, for $46.3 billion. The story asserted: “The [alcoholic beverage] industry’s continued growth, however slight, has been a surprise to those who figured that when the economy turned south, consumers would cut back on nonessential items like beer.”

“Non wh at“? Do not try to peddle that proposition in the bleachers or at the beaches in July. It is closer to the truth to say: No beer, no civilization.

The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer. To understand why, consult Steven Johnson’s marvelous 2006 book, “The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.” It is a great scientific detective story about how a horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighborhood pump for drinking water. And Johnson begins a mind-opening excursion into a related topic this way:

“The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol.”

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol — in beer and, later, wine — which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, “Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties.” Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had — what Johnson describes as the body’s ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying goes, “hold their liquor.” So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol’s toxicity or from waterborne diseases.

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors — by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. “Most of the world’s population today,” Johnson writes, “is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.”

Johnson suggests, not unreasonably, that this explains why certain of the world’s population groups, such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, have had disproportionately high levels of alcoholism: These groups never endured the cruel culling of the genetically unfortunate that town dwellers endured. If so, the high alcoholism rates among Native Americans are not, or at least not entirely, ascribable to the humiliations and deprivations of the reservation system. Rather, the explanation is that not enough of their ancestors lived in towns.

But that is a potential stew of racial or ethnic sensitivities that we need not stir in this correction of Investor’s Business Daily. Suffice it to say that the good news is really good: Beer is a health food. And you do not need to buy it from those wan, unhealthy-looking people who, peering disapprovingly at you through rimless Trotsky-style spectacles, seem to run all the health food stores.

So let there be no more loose talk — especially not now, with summer arriving — about beer not being essential. Benjamin Franklin was, as usual, on to something when he said, “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” Or, less judgmentally, and for secular people who favor a wall of separation between church and tavern, beer is evidence that nature wants us to be.

Plan biathlon training sessions

Go for a bike ride

Sell Chevy van

Brew a new batch

Fix & sell 69 Mercedes

Fix & sell BMW

Get grass growing in backyard

Start/Finish dining room

Fix up basement areas… filter room, beer brewery, wax room

Fix learn to ride the motorcycle