As promised, here is the video of Richard, a stranger we met on the road, explaining why skating should not be a crime. This would not be the last skating incident of the road trip, but Richard does a good job of representing the sunny side of the sport.

After leaving Chicago, we headed for Madison, Wisconsin, where we stayed with our friend and IV hero, Rich. We planned to stay one day, but the one day stretched into 3. We went skiing on the lake, visited the IV gallactic headquarters, spotted "Radar Dan," and explored the University of Wisconsin campus and surrounds. This week's clips are of our trek around campus. As a bonus piece, tomorrow I will post an extra video of Richard, one of the many incredible strangers we met on the trip, explaining why skating (amoung other acrobatic activities) is good for the soul.

Thanks to Kelly for sending me this news tidbit. Sounds like I can cut back on showers now....

The multitaskers of yore had it so easy. Walking and chewing gum at the same time? Please. Kids today do more of that before 9 a.m. than their elders did all day.

They’re still working on getting their socks in the hamper while watching ESPN.

Youth Gone Wild will air about noon again today. This may become the norm.

On Tuesday, Halleigh turned one month. In Brooklynne's family, kids get a cake every month until they are one year, and when they're one, they get to sit on the table and eat their cake. Until then, the cake's all mine! Click "continue reading" below for a clip from the NC state fair and another one from Halleigh's birthday.

GMU history professor Lawrence Levine died this week. He had been ill for some time and his death reminds me that even brilliant minds die, and that knowledge isn't even the beginning of life (see 1 Cor. 2:4-7). I never met the guy, except through his book, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, which made me conscious of the significance of my own small cultural acts. He was much loved by those who did know him in person, and I've been touched by a couple of students' rememberances of him so I'm taking the liberty to post them in the extended entry. Also, for a window into his approach to teaching and his hope in American universities, here's an interview he gave about his 1996 book, The Opening of the American Mind.

Whether you are in bed while your partner calms the baby, or if you're the one holding an inconsolable child, one more piece of indispensable baby-care equipment....

When we woke up on day two, Jessica had already left for work, so Cory and I had a long quiet time, changed the screensaver on her computer to reply a thank you message, and then headed out to Chicago....

For all you guys who rolled out of bed early just to see the latest installment of the YGW tour 2000, it will air today at noon. The preparation of this clip was delayed by an 8 pound trainwreck.

Some of you have been wondering how I've been dealing with the lack of sleep due to the screaming banshee that has taken up residence in our house. My answer...

The Halleigh Show continues with two clips of tummy time and Halleigh together with Kona Bean. These clips were recorded 10/16/06, at three weeks and one day old. Click "continue reading" below to view the videos.

Tonight was supposed to be the Durham Dodgers' first game in the league tourney, but due to the rain we've had the past couple of days, the game has been delayed until Monday. Instead, I'll be watching Lost. I'm excited that this episode promises to reveal the fate of John Loche, Mr. Echo, Charlie, and Desmond, all the characters that were still inside the hatch at the end of last season. I think the hatch plotline is WAY more interesting than the Others. Thoughts from fellow Lost junkies?

I love Super Mario Strikers. It's the only thing keeping my love for my Nintendo alive right now. Especially since the release of the new Zelda title has been pushed back again (to Dec. 11)

I was hoping for the new zelda last Christmas, but that was before the development team announced a delay until April. Brooklynne gave me a "magic dollar bill" for my birthday that was supposed to transform into the game in April, but the zelda programmers thwarted her plans and announced a longer wait, this time until September. Since then, the game has been delayed twice more with projected dates of Nov. 19 and now December 11th. There have been rumors that Nintendo is planning to scrap the GameCube release altogether, and only release a version for their new system, the Wii, and it's not hard to believe the rumors anymore.

If that happens, I'm going out and buying a Sony or a Microsoft. Or both.

But for now, a small shred of love remains for my beloved Nintendo, the company who taught me that anyone, including my mother, could save the princess. I think of my love for my Nintendo when I play Super Mario Strikers. So much fun, and if you can remember that "a" is pass and "b" is shoot, you can be a pro. What is this world coming to when you need a college degree and six fingers on each hand to play a game?

Thank goodness for Stikers and Mario Party and Paper Mario and all the old-school fun you can still have when you're a kid at heart.

Charlotte to Indianapolis

I'm still working on smoothing out the video processing, so the text of this first post in the series is lacking, but the videos are good, so hang in there.

I don't remember when we first started talking about going out west, but we had tossed around the idea of working over the summer at Mt. Hood in Oregon at least as early as my sophomore year at Carolina. I think the final decision was made in the Carolina Union Underground, where I was a pin-chaser/pool ball broker. The conversation went something like this...

Cory: I'm really thinking seriously about the roadtrip.

Miles: Let's go.

Since Mt. Hood was glaciated, the original plan was to work at Mt. Hood starting in the summer, but we never secured jobs and our good friend Ray was getting married in August, so we moved our departure date back to the Sunday following Ray's Saturday celebration. The new plan was to make Mt. Bachelor (near Bend, OR) by the beginning of the ski season and spend the winter honing our snowboarding skillz. Little did we know....

In the past, everybody's parents had embarassing pictures of them naked in the bathtub that resurface in yearbook ads and wedding slideshows. Well, now we can have entire bath-time videos online. As promised, I plan to offer one Halleigh video and one YGW video each week. Today's video is a short clip of Halleigh taking a bath on her two week birthday. Click "continue reading" to watch the movie.

This entry is to announce a new feature of the Travis Web Journal. I have finally joined the 21st century and created a YouTube account. Now I can upload old and new video footage and stream it onto the blog. My plan is to post a Halleigh video once a week and every Monday I will post a series of retrospectives on the Y2K Youth Gone Wild roadtrip that took Cory Cavin and I to Montana and back and led to my marriage to Brooklynne. I know that it's kind of self-centered to imagine that my readers will want to watch Cory and I goofing off for a few minutes every Monday, but I'll try to make the segments fun or meaningful or both. Click "continue reading" below for a small sample of what to expect.

This weekend was Kelly's birthday. It was SO much fun and I just got the pictures from mom and dad. We premiered the new season of Lost, ate barbeque, and David, Elizabeth, and I won the Mushroom Cup on Super Mario Strikers. Kelly and Evan have really settled into their new house as evidenced by their abundance of home improvement projects including painting, de-popcorning their ceilings, and airating/fertilizing their lawn. But the party was a break from all that and, like I said, the party was also a great photo op. Click "continue reading" below for more pictures including pictures of Halleigh.

For a while now, the Travis clan has been dreaming of building a mountain cabin that would be a weekend/vacation get-away for friends and family as well as a holiday gathering place. I'm getting excited because the dream is becoming more and more of a reality. My dad has started looking for land and below I've pasted a topo map of the front-running property. It's 45 acres with no road frontage and a couple small creeks that drain down to the river. The pros are that it's big, it's remote, it borders the national forest, and it's near the river. The cons are accessibility issues, the steep slope of the most of the land, and the close proximity of a power company dam. We're planning a whole-family trip to explore the site a couple weekends from now. Today's food for thought: if you were building a vacation spot in the mountains, what ONE key feature you would want? a view? a place to fish? a frisbee golf course or horse shoe pit? hiking trails? a sweet cabin? a bluegrass band? other ideas?

Why doesn't the Church offer affordable group health insurance to the community?

This is a confession. The Bible Church is holding a 24-7 prayer vigil this month and I signed up for the early morning sessions thinking that would be the only time I would definitely be available. Well, last night, Brooklynne said to me, "Miles, are either of us supposed to pray at the Bible church tomorrow?" and I replied, "no, they send me an email to remind me, and I didn't get an email this weekend, so we're good." This morning around 7am, when I woke up, I had an email saying that I was scheduled to pray today... at midnight.

This is the second time I missed my scheduled time. The other time, I had just got home from the hospital the second time, after Brooklynne's crisis. I felt terrible because God had just brought our family through a very scary time and I didn't even think of Him or follow through on my committment to the Church. But I marked it up to stress and claimed the grace to go on.

This time, I felt sick. I had been too tired and lazy to check the schedule myself. I remembered the disciples who could not stay awake even when Jesus had warned then of his impending betrayal, and I thought about all the things I should be praying about and that I shrug off when I miss chances to lay them before the Lord. I think my lack of committment to prayer is the number one obstacle to my life with Christ. It kills me to think that I have already sinned against my daughter by failing to pray for her and Brooklynne.

Besides a confession, this is a challenge to others and a call for accountability. Help me devote myself to prayer. Help each other. Amen.

The Comment email filter is a roaring success!! Burly (trusted) and Kristy (untrusted) commented and proved that the fix worked. Now, when I approve a comment from your email, I will also "trust" your address. That means that as long as you put in the same email address each time you comment, your comments will automatically publish, while offensive spam will be held until I delete it. If you appreciate this feature, consider donating a couple dollars to Arvind Satyanarayan at movalog.com, who designed the plugin and helped me get it working.

Regular readers know that I have been waging an ongoing war against spammers and a few months ago I enabled a filter that keeps comments from being published until I give them an ok. But the way it was supposed to work is that once I ok'd a comment from a certain email address, the filter was supposed to "trust" comments from that address and publish them automatically in the future. Well, this has never worked and many of you probably get the same waiting for approval message every time you comment. I think I've fixed the problem now, and I'm conducting an experiment. I've marked some of my regular commenters as "trusted" while other's I've left as "untrusted" so I can see the difference in the site's treatment between the two. Please help me by leaving a brief comment here so I can see how the new settings work. If you're one of the "untrusted" test group, please know that you aren't really untrusted and that you will soon be included with the rest. Thanks!

What's wrong with me? I have bluegrass fever and I can't get it off my brain! Tonight, at the American Tobacco Warehouse District, the Raleigh band Kickin' Grass will be playing a concert to support WUNC, the local NPR affiliate. Tickets are a $10 donation to WUNC. I'm debating whether Halleigh would be soothed by the rhymic pluck of the bass, the metalic twang of the banjo, or the smoking whine of a fiddle bow. A father can dream....

It looks like we might be able to get basketball season tickets this year thanks to Brian Sellers. I'm pretty excited about this, since the previous years my family got season tickets sadly corresponded with the years I was living in Montana. During that time I got to see exactly two games versus App. State and Coastal Carolina--not what I would call intense matchups. This year's events should be much more fun.

However, the purchase of basketball tickets leads me to reflect on the lack of football games I've gone to this season (0). This may seem strange to some folks who know me well, and have heard me say that I would gladly trade 3 future basketball championships for 1 football championship, hands down, no hesitations. But you have to realize that I'm willing to trade good basketball for good football, and I'm declaring today that I will not watch or follow UNC football again--EVER AGAIN--until they get at least one quality win. Comments?

I upgraded to Movable Type 3.33 last night. I really never know what I'm doing when I install and configure these things, so it took me MUCH longer than it should have. The Key to my eventual success was finding a great walkthrough on learningmovabletype.com. I'm still experiencing a few glitches, so if you experience any foul-ups, please email me so I can fix the problem.

Yesterday was a rough day for teams called the Dodgers. Brad Penny really dug us in a hoe in the NLDS, and the Durham Dodgers lost by one in the bottom half of the last inning.

On a more positive note, yesterday was a good day for me personally. I got a hold on a good pitch and hit a solo shot over the right field fence. My next at bat, the other team put the shift on toward right field (I hit left-handed for those who don't know), so I went the opposite way, trying to find the gap. I really hit it almost right to the only outfielder on the left side, but she lost it near the fence and I stretched it into an in-the-park homer.

Next week is the last week of the regular season for us and then we will have a tournament Oct. 16-19. Unless something crazy happens between now and then, we will probably finish seeded 6th of 8 teams.

Here's a couple of new toys I'm planning to try.

Librarything.com allows a user to store a "bookshelf" of titles and then connect with other people who read similar stuff or who want to exchange ideas about the books in your library.

Del.icio.us stores your bookmarks online so you can access them without being at your own computer. It also allows a user to tag their bookmarks so you can organize and search your bookmarks as well as other peoples'. This seems particularly useful for finding quality blog entries on spicific topics, since search engines often have trouble indexing individual blog posts.

The Durham Dodgers won last night by two runs. The game ended on a semi-controversal interference call when the other team's thirdbase coach failed to get out of the way of a foul pop-up. Even though the guy did kind of step back, our third baseman could have made the play if he had not been standing there. It's kind of a cheesy way to end a game, but we've had our share of bad calls, so we're happy that one finally went our way. By the way, the last time we played that team, we lost 35-5.

So the regular season is over, and despite a tie-breaker that gave the division championship to the Padres, the Dodgers will be playing on into October. I think they have as good a chance as any in resent history, so let's hope they make the best of it. It's especially fun that we're playing the Mets also, because the only time I can remember the Dodgers winning the series, they had to win a big series against the heavily-favored Dwight Gooden/Darryl Strawberry Mets in 1988.

On a similar note, the Durham Dodgers have hit a rough spot and we've gone on a slide that has taken us far below the .500 mark. We play again tonight at 7:45, and if we can just string some hits together maybe we can right the ship.