Rosco and the blogging thereof

[roscowgo]

Well for petes sake. Rode about 100 miles to go hang out with my geek buddies yesterday. For the nerds amongst us, it was a lan party. I knew there were supposed to be "isolated thunderstorms" in the area. Which 90% of the time around here means clear skies and frolicking birds.

It rained so hard at one point that visibility was down to about 10 feet.

So, Knowing that there was the possibility of rain.... i planned on staying at one of the nearby econo lodges overnight to wait it out. Also night + rain...icky in my book.

So 1 am, I load up in what is now a respectable shower, and scoot the 5 miles or so to the nearest hotel...my dripping shivering self is informed very politely that they have 1 room left, and that'll be 120$ a night. It seems it's race weekend in bristol. She called the other nearby hotels for me too, all full or even more expensive. Not having 120 or more to spare, i kinda hang out and talk to the hotel clerk until the rain tapers off.....some. Ride my wet butt to dads house..about 45 miles away. (DAMN you nascar)

I see something is wrong when i pull in, my uncle joes truck is in the yard hooked to a truck...... ok I think.... maybe i can scrounge the loveseat couch thing and catch a z or two..... oh helllll no. there are an extra 6 female midgets in the house. (step sister friends.) All of whom i managed to frighten into a squealing screaming mass of paris hiltonites. I can understand that i suppose. a 6 foot tall biker in black at 230 am wandering around muttering under his breath would upset me if it woke me up too.

Try to find a hotel in that town... it's back up to a decent rain by this time. with some lightning tossed in too. Same deal. Unwilling to sleep in dads shed on his tractor, I give up and scoot the other 50 miles home. Hey....the rains slacking off.... but fogs coming out. I learned something last night. the interstate, plus a dripping wet disgruntled rosco, with a wet inside and out useless face shield, +Fog=frozen to damn death. /sigh. laptop stayed dry though

Oh...bonus. jen wasn't expecting me home last night, so i got the lovely privilege of scaring living hell out of Another female in the wee hours of the morning.

[Wrider]

Lol wow... I guess just be glad you made it home safe, right? That's gotta be discouraging and hilarious at the same time! Although I gotta say, if all of a sudden I was confronted by a "6 foot tall biker in black at 230 am mumbling under his breath" I'm not sure either of us would have liked the outcome!
Either way, glad you're safe and all!
Wrider
(PS NASCAR sucks!)

[AZRider]

One word.
RAINGEAR.
See, one word
NASCAR rules.
Bristol is one of my favorite races of the year.

[roscowgo]

Let me rephrase the biker in black. I was also squishing as i walked, for some reason i decided to tuck my jeans INTO my boots instead of my generally extra squiddish flappin in the breeze motif. ( i really am full gear most of the time. i just couldnt stomach those hot arsed pants as hot as it was yesterday). And dripping all over the place. (which i didnt realize. my jacket is pretty waterproof. If it's one of those serious rainstorms like i rode in coming back from maryland....then it gets a touch soggy inside, but not bad. thus the eschewing of rain gear.

The dripping is what led to the squealing. Dad's back door is in a basement. It's very dark, and there are midgets (that i can't see) sprawled all over the floor. Your general sleepover on the weekend arrangement with teenagers that don't have enough sense to live in the country and sample budweiser until they pass out on the roof at 5 am like yours truly, amongst his chosen drinking buddies. (P.S. roof tiles leave one helluva mark on our hungover cheek the next day)

It appears i dripped onto one of the sleeperoverers. at some point in my trek to the loveseat i stepped right over the legs of one of the girls. drip drip drip....what the...and the alarm was given. I had just adjusted to the dark when the screaming began, and the lights got flipped on. so i'm suddenly blind. cold. wet. still wearing my gear, and surrounded by screeching harridans and one equally perturbed couchuncle. I made it out and back home with only minor abuse, and incidental damage to my eardrums. It being the case that teenage girls tend to the supersonic range of the auditory spectrum when screeching. As i am not a labrador, once this point is reached, i am quite well off ear wise.

I think couchuncle said it well "whatthehellsgoinwhosgotmygawdamnbedhat?"

And yep, made it home just fine. as there was no chance in hell of falling asleep while being that uncomfortable.

[Shorts]

That's a terrible horrible night - but one of the most memorables I suppose it'll be. Glad you got home safe. Trips like that seem like they'll never end.

[roscowgo]

Well that's an odd sensation. I drove my clankytruck today. I know... clanky is bad, but i just didnt feel up to piloting buelah this morning. Truck did fine...clank went away. In its place it left a gaping hole in my exhaust. I now sound like I have a grapefruit smuggling exhaust all to myself. And no superpowered stereo to overpower it.

I feel like I'm driving a tank. It's been a good two weeks since I drove a cage. My steering inputs are off, I find myself leaning into the door going around left turns, and I try to wave at every biker I see. People must think I'm a maniac.

Is rather nice not wearing a jacket in the heat. And as it sprinkled on me coming back from lunch all I could do was laugh.

The weirdest part is trying to not twist the steering wheel off when I want to accelerate.


Oh and one quick user story. A remote office user called me yesterday, said her PC was shutting itself off. I asked (thinking heat issues since this particular user isnt all that tidy and her computer sits on carpet), does it reboot itself or stay off? her answer, and I Quote.

"It stays off immediately always." At that point, all I could do was tell her that I would be down there asap. To myself I was thinking, Because you should be hit on the head with a brick and placed in protective custody from yourself.

That's a terrible horrible night - but one of the most memorables I suppose it'll be. Glad you got home safe. Trips like that seem like they'll never end.

Yeah it wasn't pleasant in the least. My buddy ward bought himself a vulcan, first bike in probably 20 years, drove it for about 500 miles in upstate NY, then hopped on and did the 700 mile trip from albany to here, with no windshield. in the rain and snow, with the highest temps at 37F. of course he's a crazy man.

[Wrider]

So what was up with the user?
And your buddy Ward is insane...
Wrider

[roscowgo]

Yep Ward is ..... Different. I hang out with a fairly odd bunch. 99% of em are computer nerds of one flavor or another and about that same ratio have either direct military experience, or come from military families. I think the only branch not represented at our nerdfests are the marines.

So imagine if you will, a room full of highly caffinated redneck nerds, all of whom are about as bloodthirsty and aggresive as its possible to be and not live in a cell.... and a good portion of us ride bikes.

The user...I have no idea yet. I havent gotten a chance to ride over there and extract the craziness from her head.

On the plus side, its a wonderful ride to that particular office, 40 miles or so, and most of it twisty mountain road. That special WV brand of twisty even. Hopefully they've cleaned the road of some of the gravel in the 180 degree turns though.

[roscowgo]

Since this is a motorcycle site, i'll post something that has absolutely nothing to do with bikes.


Jen and I found ourselves with a loaner kid yesterday. 5 years old.... and a hellion. (aren't all 5 year olds considered hellions though?) Jennifer went on and on about him being from the boonies and that we'd get along great together yadda yadda...She then proceeded to take me somewhere with streetlights and call it the wilderness....eh she don't know no better.

I couldnt help but notice......that good lord she's (to me) overprotective.

We wound up at a swimming pool. I'm a nice sunburnt rosco today by the way. Jen is 15 kinds of paranoid. Absolutely convinced the poor kid was just gonna suddenly burst into flames while drowning and that an artillery barrage was going to land on him at the same time. I Do understand looking out for a kid. Really. The level jen wants to take it to.....yikes. She woulda had 10-15 heart attacks per minute watching me at 5.

Let's contrast and compare. Me at 5. Riding a self propelled push mower around the yard, riding my bike in the road with just a pair of shorts on, shooting anything and everything that chanced to grab my attention with a .177 pellet rifle, riding my bike in the road alone, every day to the post office, being shooed out of the house just after dawn and having to be drug back in at 9 or 10.... lawndarts. hell i lived less than a mile from an open mineshaft, and used to walk barefoot in the creek over to it so i could throw rocks in. I was as brown as it was humanly possible to be and still be Caucasian. I used to go wildly running off into the woods. alone. for hours at a time, to swing out over cliffs on a grapevine that i had cut with my MACHETE for gods sake.

Poor kid we watched yesterday at 5. .... not allowed to jump in the pool (shallow end about chest height with a life guard literally 4 feet away), can't go down a slide alone, not allowed to run at a playground, scared to death of everything. One of his recurring comments at every unexpected thud or bang noise during the day was a panicked look around and a Shomebawdy got huwt!

I do understand that it's a bloomin miracle that I lived. Much less with all my digits sight and without a ceramic plate in my head..... but goodness sakes. let the kid jump in the pool and go down a slide.

/sigh. Not having kids..I just don't know though. Parents am I wrong in assuming that you shouldn't cover your kids with cotton batting 24 hours a day? I'm just trying to understand. Help me out here.

[sv-wolf]

Agreed 100% Rosco. Well, maybe 85%. If you were my kid, I guess one of us would have ended up in intensive care by now

But yeah, I hate to see kids have all the physical enthusiasm and courage knocked out of them by overprotective parents and a nanny state.

Having said that I can understand parent's fears for their children. I'm much more anxious for the wellbeing of other people than I am of myself. I think that's just a condition of being adult. It's like some biker friends of mine who are determined not to let their kids ride. But how did they get to be so protective? My parent's generation weren't like that at all - not where I grew up, anyway.

I probably have a slightly greater survival instinct than you by the sound of it. (:D) But I got kicked out of the house every morning and came home at night all cut up or covered in bruises and cowshit. We roved miles over the fields and through the woods by ourselves. I didn't have any brothers or sisters but I had an army of first cousins - about fifty of them (one of my many aunts had 17 kids). Their parents were far too exhausted to keep track of them all and they managed to survive one hell of a knockabout childhood. Well, thinking about it... most of them did! Whoops! Ahh... I don't know. Maybe this generation of parents is right after all.

Still, I don't like to see kids who are so fearful they won't venture on anything that involves a risk. Takes all the fun out of life.

Afterthought: on the other hand I don't like to see kids under a lot of pressure to take risks when they are just not up to it, either. There was a lot of that when I was a kid, as well, perhaps more so than today (?) It stressed some kids out and damaged their lives, I think. I just like to see people enjoying themselves.