When I’m not with my daughter, working at the radio station, working the race track, or working on side jobs, you can usually find me riding my bicycle. I haven’t written much about it on FM.com, lately (thanks, Twitter & Facebook), but I am pretty big into cycling and I have been riding seriously for a little over a month, now

When I was a kid, I used to ride my bike all the time. There wasn’t much for a kid to do in Eagle, Wisconsin, besides swim on the lake and ride all over the damn place. There was a loop that I used to ride that would take me from Eagle to Mukwonago to East Troy to Elkhorn to Palmyra(ish) and back to Eagle. It took me about three hours do to on my mountain bike and it was roughly 38 miles long.

Recently, I finally ditched my old Schwinn mountain bike (that I got when I was 13) and purchased a new Trek FX 7.3 hybrid road bike. It’s a road bike with straight handlebars. Don’t get me wrong, I like it, but now that I am hooked on cycling and riding some serious miles, I am considering trading up to a true road bike. From the last week of June through today, I have ridden over 300 miles, and while the bike feels good for the first 20 miles, it is really not very comfortable thereafter.

Back to my point of this article. When I was a kid and we had our mountain bikes, we used to call each other sissies if we would change gears out of the big chainring (gears by the pedals) when going up hills. We would put the cassette (gears by the back wheel) onto the biggest cog in the back while going uphill, but if we changed to the smaller chainring we would ridicule each other.

Until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t switched my new bike off of the biggest chainring.

I have been logging a lot of my rides on Map My Ride and DailyMile.com (best fitness site, ever). While perusing those sites, I have come across a lot of good forum posts and articles by people who ride a heck of a lot more than I do. One of the things that I learned is that the technique that I was using, above, is completely wrong.

Cross-chaining is when you are riding your bike with the chain on the big chainring and the big cog OR the little chainring and the little cog. Those are no-nos, apparently. After about the 200th mile on my bike, I started hearing a lot of chain rubbing and the gears weren’t changing like I wanted them to. It turned out that I had been messing up the settings by frequently cross-chaining the drivetrain.

From what I’ve read, you should be using the middle chainring for everything except for instances when you want to go really fast (use the big chainring and the smallest three or four cogs) or you are going up a very steep hill (use the little chainring and the biggest three or four cogs).

Who knew? I didn’t. Now that I do know, I am shaving a lot of time off of my loop routes and I can smoothly transform between a fast downhill and a steep uphill. It’s a lot easier when you do it the right way.

Just thought you should know.

My daughter has some friends over by her mom’s house. The boys are (usually) really nice and she really likes them. It’s her first real neighbor friends since her mom lives in what is basically a retirement neighborhood (not really, but most of her neighbors are probably enjoying liver and onions for dinner right now) and my neighbors are constantly outside smoking – not really my first choice for play friends.

This morning, my four-going-on-five-year-old daughter says, “Daddy, what are balls?” Knowing what she was getting at, I probed, “what do you mean by balls?” She nervously replied, “you know, on your body…”

I said, “lets just call those ‘jubilees,’ sweetie. The word, ‘balls,’ is rude.”

As you can imagine, I needed to find out where she learned her new vernacular… and, of course, it was the older of the two neighbor boys. I figured as much. I’m not really mad, because eight-year-old boys say those kinds of things, but I was taken aback since, well, she’s four.

Okay, time to go teach some boys what a ‘baseball bat’ is (an actual baseball bat, you pervert).

For a good 75 seconds, I was all alone on my side of the Panera restaurant trying to get some work done. While there were are at least 13 empty tables on this side of the divider wall, two HUGE women decided that they wanted to sit down at the table right next to mine. These weren’t just big women, they were big women that had two of the loudest mouths and stories that I have heard in a long time.

It was impossible for me to even think, much less work, with this kind of garbage four feet from my head:

Woman one: “Well, Tommy has never even been to Summerfest, but he’s really looking forward to going this year.”

Woman two: “You know, they’re saying that if this Swine Flu turns into a pandemic, there won’t be a Summerfest this year. They’re going to cancel Summerfest, and the Washington County Fair, and the State Fair, and all of those other big events. I bet there won’t even be baseball games.”

O.M.G. I need to leave.

A few weeks ago, I told you that I had some big career news that I wasn’t able to make immediately public. Well, last night I got the call, and now I can officially tell you that I will be the new track announcer for the Slinger Super Speedway.  This is a tremendous opportunity, and I thank Todd and Wayne for giving me the chance at this time-honored position.  Filling Todd Behling’s shoes will be a tall order, but I will do my best.

So come out and join me at the track this season. 2009 Slinger Speedway Schedule

…comes from my current lender. It’s very annoying.

Actually, yesterday was my eight-year anniversary on the air at 92.5 WBWI. In case you are wondering (or more for my memory), here’s my career time line, so far:

Sept. ‘96 – Auditioned for and won a shift at 91.7 WSUW

Sept. ‘96 – Hired as part-time board-op/announcer at 104.5 WSLD

May ‘97 – Took full-time sales position at 104.5 WSLD

July ‘99 – Left sales position at WSLD to go back to school

July ‘00 – Hired as part-time NASCAR board-op at 92.5 WBWI

Nov. ‘00 – Hired as full-time copywriter for WBWI

Jan. ‘01 – Promoted to afternoon-drive personality at WBWI (plus music director and associate program director duties)

Dec. ‘05 – Promoted to program director and morning-show host

President with socialist tendencies vs. Book with anti-socialist message

Shepard Fairey is a fantastic artist and a huge Barack Obama supporter. Recently, he designed the covers of George Orwell’s classics, “1984″ and “Animal Farm” for Penguin Books. I think it’s both ironic and contradictory.

My daughter and I just made a very small brownie with her new Easy-bake Oven. The last time I made anything with an Easy-bake was in about 1984 with Angela Janny. It tasted just about as delicious then as it does now. (I need some water).

On another note, I was amazed that Walmart* didn’t have any 100-watt lightbulbs that weren’t soft whites. I had to drive across the street to Menards, and it was a stretch to even find them, there. But we got ‘em. And now we’re cookin’ with 100-watts of salty-brownied fury.

I used to go to Starbucks all the time. Then, Panera Bread came to town. Now, when I need to get some work done on my laptop (read: always), I always choose Panera for coffee over Starbucks.

Why?

Simple. Starbucks’ Wifi service sucks… royally. In order to use it, you either have to pay the huge AT&T Wifi rate, or you have to do one of the following:

1. Buy a Starbucks gift card, pay for your purchase with that gift card, register the gift card online, sign up for Wifi with the card, agree to the terms of service, and then you get two ‘free’ hours of wifi.

2. Buy the $25 Starbucks Gold Card which enables you to use the Wifi ‘free’ two hours a day.

The Panera process:

1. Cick “accept” – enjoy.

This year, I would confidently say that I have spent 600% more at Panera than I have at Starbucks.

Lately, I’ve been so busy working on getting Fuzz Martin Media up and running that I haven’t had much time to devote to FuzzMartin.com. If you really care about what I’m doing, feel free to look to my Twitter feed in the column on your right. Twitter is like drive-by blogging. It’s great because I can bust posts out in between breaths and then get back to what I’m doing.

In the right-hand column, you can also see my latest iStockphoto.com files.

Enjoy.

Here is our new family pet. ‘Her’ name is “Nema.”

The local True Value/Ben Franklin/Radio Shack store was having a customer appreciation day event. I needed to stop there to get a couple of coax cable connectors – and that was it. While my daughter and I were there, we ran into our neighbors Phil and Lisa. They asked us if we picked up our free goldfish yet. Upon hearing that, my little girl HAD to have a goldfish. Since I won’t let her have a dog until we get a house with a bigger yard, I thought that it would be okay. Plus, I got the big “pleeeeeeease” eyes that make daddy melt, instantly.

So, she picked out her new goldfish and named her, “Nema.” Then we got a bowl, some food, and a net. Grand total for the ‘free’ fish: $20.

We got home and I cleaned the bowl. Then I filled it with some bottled water that I had picked up from the store a few days ago. It was in the refrigerator, so I let the bowl sit for about two hours to make sure that the water wouldn’t be too cold for Nema.

It didn’t really matter. Nema was dead as a doornail by the time that I went to go check the water.

My daughter sobbed and sobbed and sobbed like she had this fish for 10 years. I felt SO bad. “That’s my Nemaaaaaaa. Why did she have to go to Heaven?,” she cried.

Thank you, True Value. Paying $20 for a free, dead fish. Caveat emptor, right?

Yesterday, I decided that it was time for a proactive approach to getting in shape (as opposed to doing absolutely nothing). The last time I lost a bunch of weight, I started with Jay Robb’s Fruit Flush food detox program. It’s a simple 3-day program designed to get rid of the bad and start fresh.

The first day you eat nothing but protein powder. He wants you to buy his brand, but it costs nearly twice as much as most of the powders on the market. You finish the day with six cups of salad. The next two days, you eat pretty much nothing but fruit.

I’ve tried it a few times since that first time, but I never end up sticking to it. The program is pretty grueling. I’m hoping that posting this will help keep me in line. I’ll post updates as I go along.

I’m still not completely done. But it’s livable now. The trim and some other odds and ends will be put up soon. I’m buying new trim since the old pieces disintegrated. They’ll be white. So, use your imagination.

Here are the before photos.

This weekend, for the first time since 2004, I’m going to homecoming at UW-Whitewater. Seeing all the old Lambda Chi Alpha boys is going to be a treat. I haven’t had a boy’s night in a long time.

Day

Night

My daughter, 4, was upset that I put a McCain sign in the front yard, so she drew up her own Obama sign and taped it up for the neighborhood to see.

Yesterday I had what you could call, “a day.” After not sleeping all night, I did my show, and then I had a very long and intense meeting. Once my meeting was finished, I went to go pick my daughter up from preschool. I noticed that my left front tire was a little low on air. So, I bought a $9 can of fix-a-flat, sprayed it in, and filled my tire up the proper pressure. I got on the freeway and about five minutes later, the tire blew. I put the spare on and noticed that the spare was low. The first gas station that I drove to didn’t have an air hose!?! The second one did, but it didn’t work correctly and didn’t really put any air in. Luckily, I managed to limp into the tire shop. $200 later the tires were fixed and I went home to sleep off the rest of the day.

Today has been about 100 times better.