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The wet and rainy season is approaching fast in the Northwest.  There will still be plenty of time for outdoor activities, but we’ll just have to pick our days a bit more carefully.

We’ve got a ride lined up this weekend, but still haven’t pinned down where we want to go.  I have an idea: http://tinyurl.com/yfc2vlu but it might be a bit long for this time of the year.  Besides, I really don’t even know if some of those roads are open, the best of them look like they might be seasonal.

The bike is in top shape though. I’ve put a couple hundred miles on this week and it’s running great.  The local shop checked everything out for me and gave it a clean bill of health, and with the new windscreen I’m ready to put her on the highway again.

Finally fixed up the motorcycle yesterday, so I went for a little bit of a ride today to test it all out.  So far, seems to be working great.   Here’s the route I took: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&so… It was a perfect day for it, and the bike handled well.

When I get back from Europe, first thing I’m going to do is order a windscreen and I’ll be all set for lots more riding.  Hopefully the winter rains will hold off long enough for me to get a few more miles in this year.

Reminder: Next time you modify the engine of your motorcycle, finish testing it before setting off on a 400 mile road-trip.

Popped down to Portland for the weekend on the bike.  The weather was great and the ride down went along nice and smooth.  The ride home wasn’t nearly so nice though.

I’ve been playing with a new air intake for the bike which has added a nice bump to the power.  Unfortunately, there is almost never a stock setting for your carbs when you’re dealing with a custom air intake and exhaust.  It takes a fair amount of trial and error to get everything tweaked in just right.  Too little gas and your pistons overheat, too much and the bike burns dirty and fouls the spark plugs.

Luckily, I guess, for me it was just a problem of too much gas.  So 300 miles into the weekend everything completely choked up with soot and started to loose power and stop firing.  This made getting home a real joy, but I shouldn’t have done any permanent damage to the cylinders or pistons.

If you drive by this weekend, you’ll probably see me sitting on a bucket in my driveway again: busy busy busy stripping down and rebuilding the carbs one more time.  My next bike is going to be fuel injected, I promise.

You can’t live with them, and you can’t eat them.  I do have to say, non-porous surfaces are a god send for potty training.  But I understand the sentiment on days like this.  When you’re a walking sponge, it’s really a toss up whether you would rather go outside into the absolute downpour or stay inside and risk a beating.

I dusted off the motorcycle this week and have started riding again.  The replacement grips came in last week and they’re working like a charm again.  I also have a couple new things on the way.

In recognition of the type of weather that I typically get to ride in out here, I’ve ordered a type of bag that is probably new to the motorcycling community.  You can see them in the picture on the left.  You might be more familiar with these bags if you have spent any time on the water in canoes or kayaks.  If they can be dropped into the ocean and still keep your stuff dry, I think they’ll probably work fairly well for my gear as well.

Even more exciting for me though is I finally broke down and ordered some parts to upgrade the airflow for my motorcycle’s engine.  It’s going to take a little work to put it all together, but it’s really going to sound great and make a huge difference for performance.  And hey, I don’t need that gas economy anyways!

Well… my wonderful heated hand grips didn’t last long.  Something went wrong in the control box and they burned themselves out.  The company that sold them to me has agreed to give me a refund, but I have to send everything back. Luckily it doesn’t look like the fault caused any permanent damage to my battery.

So, I’m totally without my bike for the next few weeks probably.  When I installed these grips I had to destroy one of the old grips to get everything off.  The bike is looking really sad with just the bare bar ends.  Hopefully I’ll get a new pair in the mail soon and I can get everything back together again.

Until then: keep your leather up and the rubber down.

Yesterday was just one of those days. Monday definitely ended on a high note.  But Tuesday didn’t work out so well.

I started the day by running over my blue tooth headset with the car. Later, I got a tag etched for our dog, Sophie, but when I got home I realized that I had accidentally put down our old home number instead of Beth’s cell.  Finally, I found that my new hand grips are defective and won’t heat up anymore.

On a high note though, I have a beautiful new aquarium in my living room.  One of the members of the Seattle Aquarium Society was put into the heart breaking position of having to give up all of her tanks because of needing to move to a rental property.

I was fortunate to be able to adopt her 55 gallon Tanganyikan Lake cichlid show tank.   I spent Monday evening moving everything over to my place, and I am very happy to report that all of the fish survived the trip and appear quite happy in their new home.

Just for my own notes, the tank has: 5 Neolamprologus brichardi, 4 Tropheus duboisi (1 male, 3 female), and a breeding pare of Julidochromis transcriptus (with 2 or 3 small fry).

I’ve finally put everything together on the bike and taken some pictures of it.  Check out the full gallery here.

Pictured are the amazing new heated hand grips that I’ve just finished installing.  They are really wonderful to ride with.  As long as I can stay dry, with these grips going there isn’t much in the way of weather that can stop me from riding my bike anymore.

I really have to thank Kirk for putting together that rack on the back too.  I just finished the paint on it, and I think it really looks sharp.  If you look closely you can see how he bent the top of the sissy bar and back of the rack to match the curves of the bike.  It’s a subtle thing, but really makes the whole thing fit together in my mind.

Here are a few more pictures of everything:

I always get into trouble when I try to get clever, and boy were things going smooth for me this weekend.

I’ve been doing some back end tweaking to the website this weekend.  As a result there were a few artifacts in some older posts that needed to be cleaned out.  I did a quick search of the internet and found a script that should fix everything for me.  Blissfully, I disregarded all the warnings that told me the script was not intended for my version of the website and would probably break everything for me.

Well, I did a quick test and everything seemed fine… it turns out I was wrong. The script worked great on all of the older posts, cleaning out everything that I had hoped it would.  Except, it made a complete hash of all of the new posts that I had added this weekend.

I’ve gone back to my last database backup to restore everything to a working version again.  But, of course, that backup was from a couple days ago.  So, everything is back up and working again, sans: me talking about what fun I had this weekend.

Oh well.  Such is life.

Even if it’s not written here anymore, I still had a really nice weekend.  I spent quite a bit of time playing with the motorcycle and it’s in great shape now. I changed my own oil for the first time, tightened the chain without the back wheel falling off, installed some amazing new heated hand grips, and started painting the luggage rack that Kirk built for me in the fall.

I can’t wait for spring.  It’ll be great when things warm up a bit again to get out and take a camping trip on the bike.  I finally have everything I need for it to be a comfortable trip and be able to cary everything I need.

From time to time I like to ride motorcycles.  Rather, from time to time I like to ride my own motorcycle.  I suppose that I would like to ride other motorcycles too, but I only have one so that limits my experience to some extent.

Surprisingly, since motorcycles only have two wheels they take twice as much maintenance to ensure that they are safe.  Until now, I have avoided doing my own maintenance because I assumed that if I tried the wheels would probably fall off on the next ride and I would die. But you know what?  It’s really not that bad.  Just make sure a couple bolts are tightened and the wheels are probably going to stay on okay.

The first blizzard of the season has finally thawed, so I thought it was probably time to get out and winterize my bike this weekend.  I’ve been poor about getting around to it in the past and have as a consequence not been able to ride the bike for the last couple springs while I wait for the shop to finish fixing it.

This year I was good about getting the battery charger hooked up in time.  So all of the electrical was in good shape on Sunday.  Unfortunately I hadn’t put any fuel stabilizer in the tank, so the carbs were plugged with the rotten fuel.  Draining the old gas and replacing it with fresh, I was eventually able to get the bike started.  With some care, and by revving the engine, the carbs were eventually blown clear and everything seems to be working smoothly again.

As soon as I finished getting the fuel ready for storage the snow started falling again.  I mean, come on, this is Seattle!  So looks like I’ll be waiting another couple weeks for things to warm up a bit more so I can replace the oil and the anti-freeze.

Next time I buy a house though, I’m getting a garage.  It sure would be nice to have a warm dry place to do all of this work while the rain and snow is falling outside.

With time comes hobbies.  Besides, I always need a new project to spend money on right?

I’ve got my bike back from storage and I’m loving it.  I found an excelent bike shop down in Portland to get it running from me and had a real nice day driving it up to Seattle.  Now it’s sitting nice and snug out in the garage/new fenced area that I built for it.

With the new wrap on the pipes, the bike is looking hot.  The old leather bags don’t quite fit the look anymore, so I’m talking to a metal worker I know about whipping me up a lugage rack to hold my stuff.  The biggest item of note is the new seat.  I ordered the Vintage Sport Touring Seats w/Driver Backrest from Mustang seats. Boy was that a good decision.  It is an unbelievable difference from the stock seat that came with my bike, and I’ve been told that these seats really get a lot better after they’ve had time to break in.

The other little project that I’m starting to work on is setting up my fish tanks again.  While I was in college I had one tank setup that I got a lot of enjoyment out of.  This time I’ve built a cabinet that will hold two of them. Right now I have both of the tanks setup with the lights and air on.  I just picked up some of the plants today too.  I think I’m going to let them get established and start growing for a little bit before I start introducing some fish.

The plan is to setup a couple of schools of comunal fish and a few breeding pairs of cichlids.  I might even throw in an eel.  I think  it’s going to be a real neat setup when it’s all done. I’ve added a picture gallery for each of the tanks, here and here.  I’m going to try and post a new picture each week. I think it will be neat record of the progression of the tanks and their development as the plants and fish grow.