Archive for March, 2009
What a fantastic weekend!
March 24th, 2009 • 1 comment chatter
Tags: breast cancer, motorcycle, poker run
Aside from raining all last week and all day Saturday, the weekend turned out great. We go to go on our first poker run! It was the first annual Boca Raton American Cancer Society Ride For Strides poker run and it was a blast. Except the sore butts and sunburned skin, that is. The run was almost ruined by the weather except it was sunny and in the 70s all day Sunday with isolated showers. Those isolated showers came about an hour after we got home from the run and went all night. I don’t think that 8 hours of rain is “isolated” by any means.
There were not as many riders as expected but that was because of the rain. The turnout was still fairly good for a first year poker run that happened to coincide with a terrible week of weather. I believe around 100 bikes registered although, not all of them finished at the end. I know that some of the firefighters we rode with did not make it to the final stop. Hopefully they have it again next year and more people show up! Since it was a poker run, we played 6 hands of poker and had absolutely nothing. In fact, there was one good hand I believe, a four-of-a-kind. However, Jess did win the 50/50 raffle and won $70! That helped pay for groceries tonight, which was super awesome.
The ride itself was very nice, most of the travel was up and down A1A for some gorgeous scenery. We didn’t take many pictures because Jess did not feel so comfortable but there will be some up soon from the some of the stops. I did get to wear my new Fieldsheer mesh jacket and it worked WONDERFULLY. With a name like “High Temp Mesh Jacket”, you figure that a video review of the jacket would at least mention the fact that it’s extremely well ventilated but the one at Motorcycle Superstore leaves that little tidbit out. Despite the name, not all mesh jackets flow air properly. However, mine definitely does! Even tonight as I was riding home from school with my backpack on, I was very cool with my back a little warm because of the lack of air under the pack.
But tonight was a special night for me. It’s the first time I ever ran out of gas while on a ride. It was also the first time my battery died. Both on the side of I-95, not the safest place I want to wait for my girlfriend to bring me gas. Or have to jump my bike off. Running out of gas while on the way to get gas is ironic enough but then having my battery die because of keeping the lights on for safety is just sucky. At the point I realized that the battery was dead, I was ready for someone to just run into the bike and total it, I was so frustrated. Then the insurance I bought last week would have already paid itself off and I would have had a bigger bike! It was embarrassing but at least I know now when I need to get gas when running on the reserve and to never leave the running lights on for more than 20 minutes. I should probably get a new battery and fuel filter now that I’ve run the bike into the ground, essentially. I can’t believe it took me almost 90 minutes to get back home after leaving school tonight. I’ll know better next time!
Right now, I need to get to bed. Another fun day of work and school tomorrow.
Talk about embarassing
March 18th, 2009 • chatter
So, my site has been unavailable for almost 4 days now and I had no idea. I’ve been way too busy entertaining company for two weeks to really pay that much attention. Now I feel really dumb because of that and I was going to update earlier this week but did not do so, and now that I have I realize why my stats dropped to zero recently. Whoops!
I got a new Dell Mini 9 last week and I’m still getting used to the keyboard. The laptop itself is great. Small and very lightweight with a fantastic screen and fairly decent webcam but it’s hard getting used to this extremely non-standard keyboard. I’m still hitting Enter because I think it’s the apostrophe key since I have no idea why Dell thought it was a smart idea to move the key to beside the miniscule arrow keys instead of making the Enter key a half-sized key so the apostrophe would be in its normal place. Really, that’s my only kvetch about this thing, besides the default Dell-branded Ubuntu 8.04 installation they have. It’s horrifically out of date (as a one year old OS, Dell offers no official updates from Canonical for it! And it has plenty of updates), cluttered, and far more locked down than needed with some serious user interface issues. I’ve been running Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackelope Alpha5 since I got the Mini and it’s so much nicer than 7.04 that’s on my 700m and much better to use than Dell’s own 8.04.
It’s been raining for almost two days straight now, fairly unusual for this time of year. Normally it just rains for an hour or two a day everyday, but it’s been raining solidly since mid-day March 17. While the rain is very much needed, I could have used a real heads-up last night when I went out for St. Patrick’s Day and ended up riding home in a downpour . That was bearable except for my soaking wet legs and the stinging rain on my face. However, it was a great excuse to thoroughly dry the bike and re-lube the chain with my homemade bike stand. I really would not mind a hydraulic bike table but with the room I have, this homemade stand works perfectly.
This weekend is supposed to be the 1st annual American Cancer Society Ride for Strides Breast Cancer poker run on 22 March 2009 at the Starbucks at 5050 Town Center Drive, Boca Raton, FL. However, I know the weather is of great concern. There’s a 30% chance of rain forecasted for Sunday but it was a 30% chance all day yesterday and it rained just about all day. I wish the Myspace page for this had a update instead of a phone number, I don’t really feel like calling this random guy when he could just post on Myspace and update a lot more people with a lot less hassle.
Ah well, such is life. I think it’s time to go charge up the Mini and watch some TV.
I wanted a real Spring Break!
March 4th, 2009 • chatter
Kind of like I had last year where I took an entire week off from work and was absolutely worthless. Of course, the pile of work I had to handle even while on vacation wasn’t all that pleasurable, nor was the pile that I came back to. However, this year’s break is slightly different. While it started yesterday, we had a review session for our Anthropology of Religion midterm that’s next Monday. Given the arousing amount of zero questions actually asked about the midterm, everyone was there to see what Professor Keshodkar had to say about our essay based on the movie Groundhog Day. That’s certainly why I went. But I also got to take a quick, but cold, jaunt on the bike with my new Skid Lid half helmet along with some ear plugs to test out whether the helmet would lift off my head at 65MPH (it didn’t, unlike the Bell Drifter I owned for 15 hours did) and if the ear plugs significantly cut down on wind noise (they do!).
The rest of my spring break will be spent working tomorrow and then chilling out with my dad and girlfriend until I go back to work on Tuesday. My dad and I will still be busy building a new spice rack to replace the one we made last year, building a cheap-o bike lift so I can change the oil on the bike, and re-arranging our garage with new goodies. I’m so excited, I finally get to perform some real maintenance on my motorcycle that’s badly needed. Most glaringly is the chain, which probably hasn’t been cleaned/lubed in years if ever. The sideplates are a bit rusty but that could just be built up grime, but it definitely does need a thorough cleaning. Luckily, soybean-based Bean Clean is a seriously powerful degreaser. I had strong doubts whether it would perform as well as Simple Green or other environmentally-friendly cleaners would but it’s excellent.
I used it to clean a belt protector from our Focus and it looks almost brand new after years of road grime and oil baking onto it. My only gripe with Bean Clean is the fact that the spray is so powerful, you’ll go through an entire can pretty quickly. I must have used it for less than 5 minutes and the can felt much lighter than before I used it. That does not bode well for having to clean an entire 130 link chain plus sprocket. I won’t mind ordering a 4 pack from Applied Ingenuity but I do hope that their future package revisions will utilize less spray in order to both use less of the product — thereby using less resources for packaging and shipping and less soybean resources — and prolong time between purchase. Again, it’s not the price per can that’s an issue. If you’re using this stuff routinely to clean, you’ll end up ordering quite often simply because the spray nozzle is so powerful.
Aside from that, I’ve also got to pick up some Shell Rotella T synthetic oil and a filter so I can change the oil on the bike, along with some oil for the Focus. I don’t want to spend all weekend playing mechanic though, I want to have some fun! I wanted to go camping this weekend but that’s simply not feasible with my father’s sleep apnea. Not a big deal, maybe we’ll take him to Morikami or something. I’m just anxious for him to get here so I can start cooking tasty meals. I’ll be fixing grilled chorizo with halloumi, sausage stew with cabbage, grilled buffalo burgers, possibly some smoked Kingfish or monkfish and who knows what else! So many culinary delights, so little time.
Having said that, I need to get to bed, long day tomorrow!
