To Ride an Iron Horse - Jack of the Green's Blog

[JackoftheGreen]

Whew, that was almost too long to go without an update!!

Man its' been a busy few weeks! We've been dividing our time between our regular full-time jobs, MSF certification, drone practice (AWESOME!!) and replacing one of our vehicles that hasn't been behaving very well. Oh, and hosting D&D weekends with our family and friends and trying to restore order to our yard and garage after a long cold winter.

I say after, but there was a sprinkling of snow in the valley today and more than that in the mountains. Ridiculous. It rained almost every day of Spring Break. I'm sure they were partying in Miami Beach and Cabo, but here in Utah. Spring Break was just another nasty, rainy, windy week of dreary.

Despite frigid temperatures and wet weather, Carrie and I did COMPLETE OUR MSF CERTIFICATION!! Yes, as of last Sunday we are official MSF RiderCoaches. We'll be teaching with our local program, Utah Rider Education, which on top of being the premier MSF sanctioned program in Utah is also woman owned and operated. We're really proud to be working for them. Also, one of our coaches happens to be a state MSF chief coach (they're called something different now, can't recall at the moment) and was literally the FIRST MSF representative in the state. His font of wisdom is only surpassed by his font of sarcasm. And if that weren't enough, one of the other coaches is one half of WheelNerds, an awesome motorcycle podcast with a national footprint. We're just a little star-struck!! We're planning to write an article about our experiences going through the certification, so stay tuned for that. It was eye-opening, and you never realize how much you DON'T know. I've you've taken an MSF course, post and tell us what you thought or remember. Did you take some follow-up classes? And if you haven't, why not?

One more thing to watch for! Here in our office is a brand-new pair of Cardo 4+ "Duo" headsets, which we'll be reviewing over the next few weeks. We haven't had a headset to review since the SCS-S1 back in the Spring of 2017, so we're really excited to be taking some new ones out for a spin. What do you look for in a communicator? And if you don't use one, what would they have to offer to change your mind?

Oh. And I've lost about 15 pounds in the last six weeks. But let's not make a big deal about that, in case the magic wears off.

So anyway, that's the update! More to come soon, stay tuned!





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[JackoftheGreen]

That really WAS too long to go without an update!

This summer has been a busy one. In addition to teaching classes for URE, Carrie and I have also been through a few medical things (everybody's okay, no worries!) and upgraded our bikes. Carrie traded in the Ninja for a CTX1300, and my Versys is now sitting around for sale while I'm riding a Concours 1400. LOVE the new bikes!

The impetus for this was our children. As the kids have gotten older, they've picked up boy/girl friends, jobs, and a host of extracurricular activities, and this means that there are a lot of weekends we only have two of them as the third has an event to attend. Two kids, two bikes, roadtrip!! So we bought touring bikes so we can comfortably take the kids around. We've done a couple of rides already and it's a lot of fun. The kids really enjoy the bikes and these big touring bikes don't mind the passengers even a little.

I say touring bikes, the Concours is more like a cruise missile with two seats strapped to it! Ursula will do 100mph in SECOND GEAR if I let her, which I try not to of course. The CTX is also a monster for speed, but low revving and much more comfortable. We trade back and forth on some trips.

Teaching new riders is very rewarding! Even though it's hot (100+F out on the range some days), it's a blast to take someone who's never been on a bike before and have them pulling U turns and acing the braking chute in just two days. If you haven't taken a class, you need to. I can't stress enough just how much you don't know you don't know. All the other coaches with our organization have been a blast, and there's even a couple who I'm pretty sure read this blog! So that's cool.

Something else to draw your attention to! We've moved/mirrored some of our YouTube content over to DailyMotion, because reasons. If you're a fan of the TMW YouTube channel, please consider heading over to DM and subscribing to the channel, update your links and share in your networks.

Thanks for your time! I'm out for now!

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[JackoftheGreen]

Sitting at my kitchen table, quarter to 11 on Labor Day morning and super excited to not be at work.

We're hosting a "super-soft birthday party" for the kids today, got the idea from the show "Letterkenny". If you're not familiar with it, you should be. HILARIOUS. Content is inappropriate for small children though, so exercise caution. We're got a 7' wide inflatable flamingo sitting in our big plastic pool, and a smaller unicorn in the kiddie pool. Also there's a couple dozen cupcakes with unicorn decorating kits and frosting and tiaras and all sorts of junk. The kids are 16, 15 and 13. It's gonna be a riot.

We've been working non-stop in the yard for a couple of days to get ready for the party. Did some string trimming (I can't seem to keep a string trimmer alive for longer than two months, the latest sacrifice is an electric GrassHog.) and clipped all the deadheads off my vast assortment of torch lilies. The greens look much better now. I've also gone through three cans of spectrecide, every year it's a battle with the wasps. Our property shares a border with a wetland preserve, so there's a lot of native grasses and thistle that encroach on our yard. The incest population is intense, along with snakes, voles, and huge wolf spiders.

On the topic of arachnids, a new problem this year is black widows. We've lived here for six years and never had any, then just since April I've found three on the property. Not sure why they're showing up all of a sudden, but there you have it. I feel bad killing them, they're just awesome looking little bugs. Our kids are grown enough that a widow bite wouldn't be a huge deal, but my mother is almost 70, and our family and friends often come over with small children, so I can't let them stay. Maybe I could strike a bargain with the widows, they can stay if they'll eat the wasps...

In case you missed it, my latest article is live on the main page!

https://www.totalmotorcycle.com/review/ ... er-exhaust

We reviewed the Scorpion RedPower slip-on for my Concours. I'm really pleased with the article and the YouTube video that goes with it, check them out while you're enjoying your holiday!

Last but not least, I'm contemplating doing an article about installing an auxiliary fuse box on my bike with switched power. I've done boxes on all our other bikes and they've been very nice to have, and on the larger bikes they'll get even more use. Would you be interested in something like that? Or have you considered installing such a thing on your own bike but not sure how?

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[JackoftheGreen]

Super-soft birthday party was a success! We had cupcake decorating and temporary tattoos (I still have my unicorn on my bicep, maybe I'll even share a pic if someone requests it), karaoke and swimming. Little Ceasars supplied 8 pizzas, and we had two leftover.

We bought all kinds of silly party decorations to make it just as soft a party as we could manage. Witness the horror of the unicorn cupcake surround and topper below:



We ended up with a ton of those leftover too, and so Carrie and I are supplying cupcakes to our coworkers for the next three days.

Our poor neighbors had to listen to me sing "American Pie" with my daughters. They have beautiful singing voices, me, not so much.

And I flew the drone around for a bit and got some more practice with it. That thing is a ton of fun, and we really get some awesome footage with it. I'm still learning to use it as a camera and create usable material with it, but I get better every day.

I'm teaching out at the range this weekend, and looking forward to it. The extra income is nice, but more importantly it's a lot of fun to be there with new riders while they're learning. It's a new level of involvement with the community, and genuinely one where I feel like I can do the most good.

And, I'm going to be changing to a new schedule in a couple of weeks. I'll be going in to my regular job extremely early, 5am, so I can get off earlier and have more of an afternoon to get stuff done and see Carrie and the kids. Other than having to wake up so stinking early, this will really be a good thing.

That's all for now. I'm going to get this posted and then unhook my computer and take it down to the garage. The fans have been making a horrendous noise for the last few days and I'm ready to fix it. I tell my children, the most useful tool you will ever buy in your life is an air compressor.

Thanks for checking in! More to come later!

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[JackoftheGreen]

Just gonna take a minute here to get on my platform (not a soapbox, I'm not complaining) and flesh out something I said in my previous post.

For the casual DIYer, a good air compressor really is one of the most useful tools you'll ever buy. I have a 10G electric compressor and a 100ft hose on a Harbor Freight hose reel, and that tool gets used almost every week. It's especially useful for maintaining other things you own, which makes their worth almost incalculable.

First, the obvious. Keeping the correct pressure in your vehicle tires will extend their service life and improve your fuel mileage. An air compressor makes that super easy to accomplish. Just make sure to buy a good sized one. I used to have a 3G pancake air compressor and that thing needed two or three cycles to add five pounds to all four tires on my truck.

That tip doesn't stop with cars or bikes though. My ride-on lawnmower performs better with correct inflation, so does the wheelbarrow.

Next, do you wish your vacuum still worked like it did when it was new? Spend ten minutes blowing out all the filters and hoses with your air compressor and it will. Same goes for your lawn tools. Blow all the compacted grass and other detritus from the nooks and crannies, and it will all run better.

Also, get yourself a large water container and a part washing tool and now you can do even more with your air compressor. It's not as heavy duty as, say, a pressure washer would be, but it's great for smaller jobs. I get a lot of use out of mine cleaning yard tools and especially our gardening shoes! Mix a little degreaser in with your water and they're great for cleaning small engine parts too. I even used my parts washer to clean the brush I use to scrub my grill.

And last, but not least? Computer fans. My PC is quiet as a church mouse now.



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[JackoftheGreen]

A few weeks ago, I decided I was giving way too much of my life to Facebook.

Not that I was huge Facebook person anyway. I've never had more than 200 friends on there, and I only belonged to maybe a dozen groups. Local motorcycling groups, amateur videographer and drone pilot stuff, like that. Ostensibly I was trying to use social media to amplify my impact here on TMW. Get our videos out, bring new people into the fold, like that. Most of the people I really care about I'm in personal contact with anyway.

I also made a few brief attempts to use it as a learning tool. Those groups I mentioned earlier? I'd ask questions like "Why wont my Spark files play in VideoStudio9?" The only answers I ever got were of the most unhelpful "Buy a better computer/drone/editing software" type.

And all my efforts to promote and amplify my work here on TMW? I could count on maybe, MAYBE, ten people to like a post I shared about this work. Two or three people made it a habit to share my stuff. And that's it.

So I decided I would give up on FB, and spend my "social media" time keeping this blog updated. There's an impression out there that FB Groups and other social media outlets are killing forums.

Don't you believe it.

258 people have viewed this blog since I updated it Wednesday. That's 48 hours. A little more than five people an hour. That's more traffic than any post I ever made on Facebook ever got. Even pictures of steak, lobster, or my children.

I know you're watching, I know you're reading. I'll keep writing, and thanks for being here even if you prefer not to say anything. You should join my revolution. Quit giving so much of your time to social media and come see us here in the real world.

Gonna go grill some hamburgers now. They're going to look delicious, but I don't suppose I'll share pictures of them on my Insta.



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[pchast]

JackoftheGreen,

Facebook is a link to my children's lives. Less than 1/2 hour a day does it there.

I feel your pain on the time burned. Its virtually impossible to Know what platform or content
will draw conversation and interest. I'll never understand the whole social media evolution.

Your work here is appreciated.

[JackoftheGreen]

Pete,

Thanks for the affirmation!

I know what you mean about FB being a link to loved ones lives. I have some extended family that I tried to keep up with, but I'm sure they're on FB for their own reasons too. Whatever the reason, it just felt like I was spinning my wheels with the whole platform.

My children still live at home and none of them have FB accounts, but I'm sure the day will come when I have to venture in again to keep track with them. Either into FB, or whatever the popular platform is at the time. I think if I go back to it, I'll keep my friends list small so I'm not lost in the "infinity scroll". If I could keep it at 1/2 an hour a day that wouldn't be so bad.

[JackoftheGreen]

We just got home from the range a few minutes ago. I was teaching a class on one end of the range, while Carrie was being a "pretend" student for a class of new RiderCoach candidates on the spare range. It was a good class.

Tomorrow I'll be doing the pretend student bit too, and I'm excited about it. It's always nice to sit back and be the student for a bit, and you can always benefit from some coaching. Always be improving.

While we were at it, I got some footage of myself using counterweight posture for an article I'm tinkering around with. We got some fun overhead footage of the U-turn with the drone, while also filming from the side with the GoPRO 5. It all looks very good, and I'm excited to put it all together.

Now we're waiting on bird people to arrive. Carrie and I also breed and sell parakeets and cockatiels, only as a hobby, there really isn't much money in it. You may remember the post a few years back (six years maybe?) about our zebra finches and "budgies", that's been a thing in our household ever since. Today we have a family we've sold parakeets to in the past coming to visit their next bird, another parakeet. He's just barely fledged the nest and isn't ready to leave yet, but some people like to come meet them when they're still babies. It's fun, and we get some families who keep coming back and back to buy more.

Once they're done visiting, I believe we're going to head out again to get noodles for dinner.

Thanks for checking in again!

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[JackoftheGreen]

THIS IS A TEST.