Andrew's Birthday :)

Happy Birthday to Andrew!

A German chocolate cake courtesy of Naoko

We went to a restaurant called Elements and this was their gingerbread temple.

The happy couple.

Andrew with his steak.

Naoko's lobster ravioli & risotto

Dessert ...

Chocolate Purse (AMAZING!!)

Creme Brulee with strawberry basil sauce

Thanks to everyone for the Birthday wishes!

Thanksgiving

Here are some pictures from our Thanksgiving.

This is Susan, Naoko's boss, with the main course.

More importantly the dessert table.

Andrew enjoying some treats.

Naoko enjoying some too.

The group.

The group after playing some "batsu" (punishment) games.

Naoko and I relaxing and enjoying the Utah Jazz game.

Mom's Bike

*Disclaimer* This is a long post if you don't want to read then scroll through the pics.

The Idea
So I thought I would lay out the juicy details behind mom’s birthday gift. At the beginning of summer, Naoko and I found a 1962 Schwinn bike at DI and purchased it for 15 dollars. At USU there is an awesome program called Aggie Blue Bikes that gives students the tools and know how needed to do any repair or maintenance on your bike. The person in charge of Blue Bikes, Adam, worked on the Baja with me so I decided to go in and try it out. I overhauled the Schwinn cleaning all the bearings and tuning everything up I decided to not repaint it as I wanted to maintain authenticity and couldn’t locate all the decals I needed. When I finished I thought well that wasn’t too bad and soon after I remembered mom’s bike the only one she has ever owned that she got when she was 8. This was also the bike that had been sitting outside under the tree house for years and had not been ridden in who knows how long. Since this year’s birthday for mom was a big one and we were planning a party and what not for her I thought it would be fun to take her bike and get it in working condition since she has always said that she wouldn’t throw it away.

The bike pick up
My timing couldn’t have been worse for this. Naoko and I went down for Shaun’s wedding and I though this would be a good time to grab the bike to begin work on it. At the time mom had recently finished school and was in the process of cleaning the yard for the summer. I nabbed the bike that night after they had gone to bed. I thought I had made a smooth get a way when I got a call from dad the next night asking me if I knew where mom’s bike was. Sigh. Since she was cleaning the yard that week she noticed immediately that it was missing and went straight to the neighbors ( with who we’ve had some small issues in the past with such things) wondering where her bike was. I told dad my plans and he promptly told mom that “one of her boys might have taken it..” Mom took cookies and apologized profusely right away. I probably could’ve gotten away with it if only I had waited until the next week when she had finished the yard work.

The overhaul
I should’ve realized that the years rotting under the tree house would make this difficult when I got the bike the wheels were not attached the back fender was bent up and it had lots of spider webs and earwigs. I started to tear it apart and was able to get the back fender, chain guard and kick stand off at home and that was about it. So I headed up to Blue Bikes and started going after it. I for the life of me could not get the head set apart and finally we had to get a hacksaw and saw off the stem. We also ended up bending the fork a little bit before we finally got the headset apart. It took drilling off a screw head to get the front fender off finally. With the right tools the pedals and chain came off smoothly. The bearings were a tough clean but they came out sparkling. The front fork got bent back into shape and welded solid again. All the parts were cleaned without too much trouble and a lot of time. I started to take apart mom’s wheel set and after getting into it realized that they were too rusted and in bad shape that they wouldn’t work. Luckily Adam at Blue Bikes had another old set that was in decent condition however they were green so I still took them completely apart. It took a lot of help form blue bikes and a couple tries re-lacing the spokes but the wheels came to life again. I ended up replacing the seat, wheels, chain, stem, and kickstand.

Paint / details
There is nothing that I hate worse than prep sanding for paint. There was a lot of it on this bike. I did my best to bend the fenders back into shape and sanded those. I sanded
and sanded and sanded the rest of the bike. I took the body and fork up to Blue Bikes and the very experienced at painting bikes, Adam, painted it for me and it looked amazing. One thing that turned out to be the biggest pain on this bike was maintaining the detail work aka the western flyer logo on the chain guard and stripes on the fenders. I decided to tape off the stripes and with Naoko helping me to meticulously mark the primed fenders we were able to tape it and it came out all right. I came up with the great idea to make a sticker for the logo on the chain guard so I was super excited when I found a clear sticker paper that you can run through your desktop printer and after a lot of work scanning the logo then cleaning it up and getting the image we wanted we tried it out. It was then that I realized that there was no way to print white ink none of the local copy joints could do it either, so much for my great idea. So Naoko suggested we do a stencil for it and paint it on. We grabbed a thin clear plastic sheet and Naoko meticulously used an exacto knife and cut out the stencil, (I’m the type of kid who can’t cut straight with scissors.) We did a test spray and it looked kind of ok. Then Naoko came up with the great idea to combine the two ideas…use the sticker paper as a stencil. Thanks to her late, late night of cutting stencils we finally got a template laid on the chain guard and were able to paint the logo on with great beauty.

The presentation
Two days before her birthday we finally got the bike totally put together and gave it a test ride. I had to tweak a last few things and I was finally done. Unfortunately I had to take it apart again to get it in my car to take back down to Orem. So I took off the wheels and fenders and carefully placed them in the car to not damage the work we had done and took it down. We threw a surprise party for my mom at the park and so Naoko and I went to the other parking lot and reassembled the bike and wrapped a bow on the front. Naoko went over ahead of me to be apart of the surprise and called me after mom got there. I rode the bike over to the park and blasted out a happy birthday melody as I rode up. She seemed giddy and finally after things had settled down a bit she took it for a test ride. It was the first time I had ever seen my mom ride a bike…

Special thanks to: the bro/sis’s that funded this adventure and definitely a thanks to Adamand the crew
at Aggie Blue Bikes
for helping me all along the way. A triple super thanks to my lovely wife who helped tremendously on the logo / detail work and let me spend a lot of free time on this project.

Long overdue baja post.

Well for the last year I have been engrossed with my senior project, the mini baja. It was a long stressful interesting process. Overall I feel like I was able to learn a lot and prepare myself to be a better employee quicker. Let me generally run down the project from start to finish.

First Semester
We started off learning some basic kinematics and principles to designing different aspects of a car. We split up into two teams since we had 20 people in the class. We each designed a baja car during the course of the semester and by that I mean the last month of the semester since we had little direction about what we were supposed to do. At the end of the first semester each team presented their design in a critical design review of several faculty members. Once that was done ideally we would've started building over christmas break, however, we had 2 designs and could only build one baja.

Second Semester

So finally about 3 weeks into the semester we put together a design that satisied the Dean well enough to give us the funding to start building. I had designed the frame and we were able to put most of it together around spring break. Here is what it looked like about that time.


The things that were unique about our baja was the rear suspension was a transverse leaf spring made with carbon-kevlar composite leaf springs and a fiber glass skull on the front.

The rear suspension

The fiber glass skull on the front

The Competition

The event was in Portland which was convienent for us since that meant we could crash with Josh and Teresa (THANKS AGAIN IT WAS GREAT!!). The first day of the event was in downtown Portland at the expo center this is where they inspected the baja's for safety and design. We had a very dissappointing time trying to get our baja to pass all of the little requirements of the inspection. It actually took until halfway into the second day when driving events had started for us to get the okay and start driving. We finished 14th in the design though out of roughly 75 schools. We crossed the river into Washington for the driving events. They had a drag race, manuverabilty course, hill climb and a rock crawl on the first day. Since we got a late start we were only able to do the first three and couldn't compete in the rock crawl. The third day of the event was the endurance race, 4 hours running around a 1.1 mile course that was built to wear out the bajas. We finished the race unscathed even after a roll over which is something USU hasn't done since about 5 or 6 years.

The Team

Naoko with the other wives.

A final look at the car after the competition.
All in all it was a good experience, I am not sad that it is over though.

Walking the Walk

So I guess I did it. Finally! Yesterday I graduated from Utah State University with a BS in Mechanical Engineering and Minors in Math and Japanese. Mom, Dad, Hazen, Annette, Tessa, and Makayla all came and celebrated with us.

After the Commencement stuff we went out to eat at the Bluebird it was a buffet style and not the usual menu but still very good stuff.

Anyways it was a good day and here are some more pictures of it all.



where's waldo errr Andrew.

Spice On Ice

About week ago, I was reading cache valley magazine at work & saw there's cooking competition called "Spice on Ice" held on March 26th in Logan. Considering myself gourmet food fan, I wanted to go but the tickets are $50! No way of spending that kind of money after spring break so I gave up. My boss Susan saw same article, seemed pretty interested & told me "Denny(our cook) wanna do this." Since he hardly speaks English, I had to call the info center to ask if we still could participate. We got the ok, then today, we went to fight! What we wanted to serve was our signature authentic Taiwanese food "Deep Fried Pork Sizzlin Plate" but since we have no equipment to deep fry right there & they didn't have place to cook food, we did what we could. We served "General Tsao's Chicken." Battered deep fried chicken in a little bit spicy sauce with fried rice. Other restaurants were serving fancy dishes, we felt a little bit out of place. But we served & we served & we served...total of 200 people. Unfortunately, we couldn't win any prize but had so much fun! Also after the cook-off, us & the other competitors started giving food to each others, bacon wrapped scallops with wild rice, indian curry, indian chicken something, bbq sandwich, braised pork slice, super juicy fillet steak & fancy layered cheesecake, etc etc...(probably should've taken pics of those food, too but couldn't wait to eat.) It would've been nice to win those prizes but we could eat fine food without spending money :P & it was really really a great experience for us.

What an accomplishment!

Spice on Ice is held at ice skate center, it was chilly.

Denny the cook

The dish prettied with the carrot rose & cucumber decoration

Andrew was a part of our team! He put sesame on chicken then put the flag on top of fried rice!