Misadventures in wrenching and riding

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#11 Unread post by **Skier** » Tue Jul 18, 2006 7:06 pm

I found out my neighbors were in a motorcycle wreck a few days ago. It was really bad and they didn't even have a chance to make it. I pray they are both riding in the great ribbons of pavement in Heaven.

They are the second and third people from the left with their red Silverwing behind them:

I'm in a state of disbelief they are gone. They were great people and I was lucky to have met them.

VermilionX · Wed Jul 19, 2006 3:34 am

my condolences skier.

#13 Unread post by **Skier** » Sun Jul 23, 2006 10:37 am

I guess I'd better update this! I've been pretty busy lately, getting started with my new job while juggling my other job, riding, errands and home improvement.

My group of friends recently got into geocaching, as well. I've been hounding all the sites around town like nobody's business and it's a hoot. High-tech treasure hunt! It's amazing the cool places in town you don't know about, but can find when following some GPS coordinates. I highly recommend it as an inexpensive hobby. You can get an inexpensive GPS for $100 and drive as much or little as you want with a group of friends. A couple days ago we found a graveyard from the 1800s in the area I never knew existed. Total cost for about three hours of entertainment was $5 or so in gas for my car.

It's really a lot of fun. There are lots of variations on the caches, as well. There's one downtown that's a webcam cache. You have to get your picture taken in front of the webcam with your geocaching.com user ID written on something, then you get credit for the cache.

It's a bit tough to take a bike on this kind of adventure, though. Plus the roads we hit are sometimes gravel and I dont' like cleaning and lubing my chain daily. Perhaps it's time to look into a shaftie bike...

Mon Jul 24, 2006 5:40 am

Im sorry for your loss Skier. I recently lost a friend as well a few weeks ago in a motorcycle accident. Prayers to the family and friends.

#15 Unread post by **Skier** » Tue Jul 25, 2006 6:18 pm

Since working two jobs while finding time for riding and home improvement leave me with too much free time, I picked up some supplies at the hardware store for round two of my home-brew rear hugger. Total cost including the shoddy first one should be under $30. Much better than the $150+ the plastic huggers go for on ebay.

Got in over 100 miles today. Lots of nice twisties, trying to apply what I read in Total Control.

Now it's sleep time!

#16 Unread post by **Skier** » Sun Aug 06, 2006 5:39 pm

Work and other stuff has kept me fairly busy, and some kind of problem with my right eye has kept me from doing more than commuting on my bike. I have been having fun though, geocaching with my GF and a friend. We hid our first cache yesterday:

My friend Norm figuring out his GPS, with his tripod set up for some photos. My GF, Kim, is trying desperately to ignore me:

Cache placed!

Moving on to the next day, or today, depending on your point of view. We're off to find the three caches hidden in the ghost town of Elberton, WA. At one point in time it vied for the capitol of the state, but it has since died out and has about 40 reisdence in the area.

On the road there we met our first obstacles:

We perservered and made it. Here's the city's old church:

We climb into a ropes course where Boy Scouts have retreats and whatnot. What's Norm found?

Oh, lookie, it's a geocache!

We sign the log and trade items, then move on. We follow Norm's unerringly accurate GPS:

About 250 yards later, I'm losing faith in his ability to use his GPS:

We end up going back to the car and realize we shouldn't have moved the car, it was already as close as possible to the cache. My buddy is fired.

We did find the cache. Well, my GF did, as usual.

Some of the town has burned to the ground, and I thought this would make a decent shot:

We move on to the last cache of the day. It's one in the local "Eternal Rest" series of small, lesser-known graveyards. We take the mighty Civic off into the bush and clean the underside:

"Ah, here we see the Civic in its natural environment:"

Great view from the bluff the plot was on:

On the way back out, we met our nemisis again:

She had nothin' doin' moving until liberal application of the horn. Once she got moo-ving (I'm so sorry), a bit of one-tire-fire gravel burnout sped her up a bit.

A great way to spend a Saturday afternoon and evening.

CNF2002 · #17 Unread post by **CNF2002** » Mon Aug 07, 2006 2:59 am

I love the pic of the civic buried in the grass.

Okay I admit I had to look up 'geocaching' on the internet. Looks like a lot of fun, too bad you couldnt do it on the bike!

That cow in the road is hilarious. They have no fear

Mon Aug 07, 2006 4:32 am

"Ah, here we see the Civic in its natural environment:"

That was hysterical!

roscowgo · #19 Unread post by **roscowgo** » Mon Aug 07, 2006 9:25 am

Awesome pics. It's a special feelin drivin a honda off into the weeds. 80's model accords do it well...and they just love gravel roads

#20 Unread post by **Skier** » Fri Aug 18, 2006 12:43 pm

So what have I been up to lately? Sadly, not enough riding and too much working.

I've swapped my wrenching hat for a landscaping one. The pond in our backyard started leaking and was dry for a long time after an attempted fix by my sister's fiance. I just went for a new liner to replace the old busted one. And while you're in there, ya might as well dig it a bit deeper!

Old bustedness:

New ingedients, from left to right:
Corona bucket (for filtering), small pond kit (liner and pump), driftwood from the Snake River, buckets filled with lavarock (for filtering) and stones from the Snake.

No venture outside is complete with a visit from the neighbor's super-yappy dogs:

Here's how things look with the new liner in, before I had a chance to hide the liner and get the big rocks back in:

Filter in action! A pump is buried by lavarocks and then big rocks are placed on top of the lava rocks. This provides biological filtering and the rocks on top prevent the fish from cutting themselves up on the lavarocks.

Displaced dirt:

And where it's going to go:

I got tired of hauling our big lawnmower up and down those dang steps.

I have also been pretty busy at work. Well, I have my fulltime job and a part-time job as an admin for a group of computers, including two small clusters. Here's our smaller, older cluster:

There are about 20 Athlon XP 2600 or 2800+s, with a big, beefy Dell PowerEdge server as the head node. There are also four P4 machines in the cluster. They are all running openMosix, but I will be migrating it to a different diskless distribution and integrate them into the new cluster, which is across campus.

Here's the Mac cluster across the room:

Someone else admins that, thankfully. I'm wonderously ignorant of how those little boxes work.