Note: Blog iz pahrtlee writen with a proetoetipe fonetik eenglish spelling.  Wun possibul spelling=wun possibul pronunceeaeshun.  For a deetalde explanaeshun klik here. For Albuquerque Tuesday MTB/Cross or other race info klik here. For the New Panhandle Unified Sports Calendar klik here. 11-11-12 My first blog update for forever and a day.  The kid with the poeneetale iz my littul stepson Noah.  Ther ahr ahlso lots uv babee foetos up at hawkandsamantha.com.  The first foeto belo iz uv the eeklips in April, eech dot uv lite falling betwene the gaps in the levse iz a tinee kresent like the eklips itself. The third wun is sum smoke frum a forest fire dhis spring muuving in tu town frum the west. The third wun belo is a funhouse dhat I probablee helpt bild bak in the early nientees.  The snake wuz in the Sandias on the Piedra Lisa trale.  Dher ahr sum mor foetos frum this last hike up on Steven Angulo's FB paje.  3-19-12  Samantha is expecting, and due in August, for those of you who I haven't told yet.  My little Tuesday "race" series starts a week from today on 3-24-12.  Info here.   12-6-11  Someone peed on the seat at the restroom at the mall.  I have trouble understanding this.  How hard is it to just flip the seat up with your toe?  More than that, let us picture an angry individual, maybe angry at corporate America, his girlfriend, the world in general, God, or whatever.  Who exactly is he "sticking it to," as it were?  The mall manager?  The CEO of JC Penney's?  The next user of the stall?  The person most affected by his little act of rebellion is the poor guy who cleans the bathrooms at the mall.  Now maybe it is personal and the urinator knows him, but I doubt it.  Of all the people in America, it is hard to imagine a person less deserving of the urinator's wrath, not because he is is a saint, but because he does one of the most humble jobs in of all the workers in town.  Sigh.    The new family is doing ok.  We went to Amarillo for thanksgiving.  We will stay here for Christmas.  I finally got some of the wedding photos up on hawkeandsamantha.com.  I found a kind of cool freeware program called ThumbStudio to make the gallery for 250 odd photos.  It took longer to get the software figured out than it did to make the album.  It is a little limited, but works pretty well.  11-1-11 To celebrate the bitrhday of the Protestant Reformation Samamtha  made a candy apple commerating Martin Luhter.  Very cool date by the way.  I guess at least one wedding picture is in order. We will eventually get all of the pictures up from the wedding, but it is not the highest priority right now.  Maybe a less silly wedding photo might be good as well.   7-22-11 As it happens it is almost exactly two months since I have had a moment to write here. I guess I have had lots of moments  when I could have written, but I chose to use them doing something else. This was the view out my window this evening. Things are going well.  It has finally started to rain some, and the forests have been mostly reopened. The girlfriend of the last post has been promoted to fianceé. This is a bit of a miracle in Hawke's life. We are scheduled for August 27 at 7PM as of now. You can get info at hawkeandsamantha.com. Pretty cool we have our own wedding website. It comes of having a weird name and marrying somone with a kind of weird name. I have been down in Socorro most of this week with Doug Moser's Korean missionnary third world training camp, teaching basic auto repair. Maybe I can get some pix from him to put up here.       5-22-11 It has been pretty busy this last few weeks.  I have been in  Socorro playing nurse a lot.  My dad was in town and we did some work on the carousel.  We also made an offer on a house that was accepted, so if all the I's get dotted and T's get crossed I may be paying on a house instead of renting in a few months.  It is a little duplex near the Thai Orchid for those of you that live here.  I have a girlfriend, which some of y'all may not know.  She is quite nice.  That also occupies a bit of time, but I am certainly not complaining.  I went riding today and the legs, at long last, are starting to feel fast.  I have been riding my MTB almost exclusively, with my rigid forks, to help strengthen my upper body.  I hope to start racing in a few weeks, but I have to feel that I am in better climbing shape than I was in last year before I start shelling out dough for entry fees and gas and all.    5-7-11 I have been down in Socorro for most of the last week.  My friend Doug was mistaken for a turkey on a hunting trip and now has 108-112 lead BB's in him, mostly in his leg. We counted, but it was not always clear what was an entry hole and what wasn't. The lesson in this is if you go hunting, make sure you know your target and have a clean shot. He will be pretty much in bed for another couple of weeks I think. I have decided that nursing is not for me, as far as careers go.  I had several nice MTB rides in Socorro. On Thursday I went uut on the new trails that have been made out in the desert northwest of New Mexico Tech. I am not a huge fan of desert mountain biking, but parts of those trails are super nice. They go for quite a ways too.  On Tuesday I explored some mining roads near the box.  I saw a herd of antelope, which I have not seen around there before.  I am trying to do a few base miles this year in a more organized manner than I have in the past few years.  I hope to start racing late this month or maybe in June.       3-23-11 I got bak frum Costa Rica last night. Here ahr sum pix. I did not take menee, dheze are frum hyking around outside San José. My brudher haz lots uv pix up at hiz tumblr site. I spent a weke looking at malz in San José, and a weke traveling uround with Alex and Ellie. I wuz rillee struk with how expensiv Costa Rica has bekum. Even dhe middul klas areuz wur priceeyer dhan I rememerd. I got tue where I wus getting around pretee wel, and not geting lost al dhe time. Dhe malz wer generallee nicer dhan here, cleener, preteeyer.  Dhey wer slower during dhe weke and bizeeyer on dhe weekendz dhan here. In dhe parts of San Jose that I wuz in, I saw onlee a few foreners, but at dhe beche most of the clyents were foren. It wuz a rele contrast. Toristee plaesez wer mostlee emptee.   A lot uv dhe expats and long term travelerz seem to be a bit on dhe New Agey side. I think they ahr uttrakted tue dhe eco-torist imaj. They do not seme veree integrated with the Ticos (Costa Ricans) eedher. I ges dhis iz commun in manee simalur plases.                 2-22-11 I was talking to someone last night about all the denominations in America and how I think it is a good thing on the whole, that many Americans are serious enough about their Christian faith to research a bit as to what all these denominations believe, and find one that that agrees with their individual conscience.  But as I got to thinking about it, it is not conscience only, but also Bible literacy.  Most of the Europeans and a lot of the Americans also follow their individual consciences in deciding to have nothing at all to do with the Christianity.  As far as Christianity is concerned, conscience alone is not enough.  But conscience added to Bible study is another thing.  I find that I agree about most (obviously not all) moral and theological issues with about 90% of American Christians, regardless of their denomination, and that they agree with me.  And the 10% that I disagree more with are the ones who do not believe in the Bible being entirely true (like the Episcopalian or the Unitarians) or ones that believe that something must be added to the Bible (Like the Mormons or the Jehovah's Witnesses.)  I would venture to guess that among the major countries of the world that more Americans actually read their Bibles here per capita than anywhere else.  This is partly due the will of the individuals concerned and partly due to our high literacy rate and the easy availability of all kinds of books, be they Christian or secular.  I was thinking about Luther, and how certainly at least part of the Protestant reformation existing in the first place can be traced back to Luther learning to read some Latin and Greek and actually reading the Bible for himself.  And what is one of the first things that he does once the reformation gets rolling?  He translates the New Testament into German, so that the average guy who can at least read, can actually read it for himself.  I think this is an affirmation of how important the Bible was to him.  Sadly, there are probably more more Americans of German descent in America that read their Bibles regularly than there are Germans who do so in the whole of Germany.  I think we could say this about most reformation leaders, that their Bible study led them to their respective paths.  I have been reading a lot of Saint Augustine lately and you could easily call a lot of what I have read a "Bible study guide," so much does he discuss and quote from the Bible.  After I was thinking about this last night, I read this morning about the two couples that were killed off by Somali pirates while carrying Bibles somewhere, maybe somewhere that the local government would rather that Bibles not be brought.  It makes me think also about the importance of Bible distribution missions like the Gideons or Wycliff.  This Biblical literacy is one of the things that separates the American church from the church in most of the modern world, and it has the potential to change the church anywhere, and in my opinion change it in a good direction.     2013 blog (not much there, new baby and all) 2012-2011 blog 2010 blog 2009 blog with Panama pix 2008 blog