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Hold Onto Your Butts...It's Almost Christmas!

Yeah, it's snowing outside, and about 10 degrees (fahrenheit... -12 1/4 degrees C.) which makes the snow into sparkling crystalline flakes. It's pitch-dark around here before 6pm, and after dinner the four of us who are more than a year old sat on the back of the couch, turned on the porch light, and looked at perfect hexagonal flakes shining up at us from the porch furniture.

It's December 23, and tomorrow is widely considered to be the longest day of the year. We've got some things planned to keep the older kids occupied for at least SOME of the 92 hours of Christmas Eve, but there's no way we'll escape several hours of tightly-wound monkey-children orbiting around the room at shoulder-level and at about Mach 1.3. The noise will be profound. At least one of the children may very well phase into the ultraviolet spectrum and pass through the floor.

Yesterday we piled into the red van of my avatar and drove two hours south to visit my dad's mother-in-law. She was married to the president of Dow Chemical and lives in the old Dow Greenhouse research facility -- it's about 10000 square feet of brick ranch, with a dormitory wing, a living-room wing, a kitchen/dining wing, and a greenhouse the size of our entire house, with a live and functioning grapefruit tree. In Michigan. Last year I plucked a semi-ripe grapefruit off the tree and ate it. In Michigan. In December. I was suitably impressed. Anyway, dad was there and took us out to Applebee's for dinner. Mm, Crapplebee's!

Tomorrow we're making the Christmas Dinner...the Holy Four will be on the table...if I didn't mention this at T-Bird day, that's Turkey, Stuffing, Mashed Potatoes and Gravy. There will be other things on the table and that's okay, but the Holy Four are where it's at. Angel's mom and husband are coming, as is her brother, if he can pull his head out of his anus enough to find our house. He's kind of a dumb-a$$. Angel called his work to have them remind him that we've moved and they even said something like "yeah, he's kind of a dumb-a$$." Whatever.

So, we're not planning on going anywhere until maybe later on Christmas Day. We're in for the duration...we've gotten 2-4 inches of snow, and another 3-5 are forecast for the overnight, then some light snow on MOnday, and Christmas is supposed to be sunny and 32 degrees. (freezing, 0 degrees Celciustigrade) That's got to be the most perfect of Christmas days...sunny, pleasantly cold and oodles of fresh snow to catch the sun and sparkle in an epiphanical way. Yeah, I made up that word, what of it?

And I think I'm winning this week in Fantasy Football, so, woot!




Merry Christmas from the Noodlenoggin kids!

Groundhog's Day

Here I am again. Still winter, still cold, still snowy. I could just say "I live in Michigan," and that'd suffice until late May/early June, really. This seven-months-of-winter carp gets pretty old. The bike is still dormant in the garage...hopefully I'll get to insure and register it this year and ride. I dunno, though...it never seems to happen. Other things end up being more important to the family as an entire unit...the bike is only important to me. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...or the one." Yeah, F%ck you, Spock...

On the plus side (I guess) we're buying our house. We've been renting it since September, and we're buying it this month. We spent January looking at every feasible house in the area, and ended up back where we started...the house we already live in. It's a mixed bag but overall we should be all right, I think. It's big enough, just. We can finish the basement and get a lot more space out of it. The kids can stay in a school district that they've just flourished in, and we actually like the little hick-town we live in. It's not pretentious, like some neighboring hick-towns...this place is just good, honest, hard-working hicks, not uppity, snotty, "I moved here from Detroit" hicks. We're actually part of the community, which is unheard of for us.

Anyway. This is just a sort of a Yes-I-Live sort of post. Later.

Daddys sanity is important to the entire familys well bieng

Motorcycle Content? Barely.

Basically, I stopped at the Honda / Yamaha / Suzuki dealer on the way home from work Friday. Sat on a Hayabusa and a GSXR 1100. The 'busa sits nice, fits me well -- almost as nicely as that ZX-14 I still lust after. Actually I was sort of surprised to see as many bikes on the floor as they had -- I didn't know if they were just going to have snowmobiles out. I admired the paint on a Yamaha cruiser. If it was a decal it was under a lot of clearcoat. I'm not big on Japanese cruisers but this paint was nice. Lastly I sat on a VFR800 Interceptor. That bike suited me just fine...a bit more upright and a bit more sport-touring than hardcore-sport.

When I got home, I tried to convince my wife that we'd be saving $5,000 if we bought the Interceptor. "Because the ZX14 that I really want is $14,000, and the Interceptor is only $9,000...that's a $5,000 savings...and you do want to save $5,000, don't you?

It went over about like you'd think.

Also, we got our tax refund, so the subject of insuring the bike for this year came up for the first time. It didn't go well. It was postulated that a certain spouse would really like me to just sell the bike "so we don't have this fight every year."

It would be different, and easier for me to give up on actually riding the bike, if there were even a hint of possibility that money would show up in the noodlenoggin budget to at least work on the bike during a down year. But it won't. Let's face it, my bike is 24 years old, original, and being maintained on an ever-decreasing schedule. It needs tires, air-filters, oil change, new plugs, possibly new alternator brushes, and a new battery. And that's just the short term. In the overall picture, it could use an engine overhaul and a general restoration, too. Not to mention my thoughts that simply won't go away about making it into a mild cafe racer.

And if the money were miraculously not a problem, the time is. Year-and-a-half-old twins are unsurprisingly no less work than newborn twins. Any time I get to actually be outside this summer are going to be spent on spouse-approved projects like lawn-rehab or driveway post-lights, (she's rabidly adamant on the post lights. It's post lights...what the h-ell's the deal?) Cripes, even while I type this blog, there's a baby crying upstairs because nobody's actively holding her up off the floor.

Inhale...

...exhale....

There, that's better. It's only February. Unlike you lucky bass-turds in BC or the UK, I still have at LEAST two more months of solid winter to get through. Mid-May is awfully darn optimistic to think of starting to ride a motorcycle in Michigan. April is pie-in-the-sky. We could seriously still have a blizzard in April, and it's not unheard of in May. Night-time temperatures won't stop getting down into the 30's or low 40's (F, not C) until June sometime. Then from June, we've only got through September until the nights start getting cold again. October is dicey. A couple of years ago we got a blizzard on October 13 or so, and that was it. Winter was on, and it didn't stop being 20 degrees until spring again.

Anyway. (that's a useless word used to take emphasis off the preceding paragraph, see?"

Later.

AZRider wrote:Daddys sanity is important to the entire familys well bieng

Quoted for truth! I'm a Dad as well. I've got two boys, four and two years old and this is this first year I will be riding, ever, at the age of 33. I've waited this long, I'm not waiting any longer. It took over a year of saving to buy my bike and all the ancilliaries, but I had to do it.

Plus the wife got sick of hearing me whine about it everyday.

EVERY DADDY NEEDS A MOTORBIKE!

'Specially NoodleNoggin.

It was postulated that a certain spouse would really like me to just sell the bike "so we don't have this fight every year."

WOW.
Well, enjoy your Volvo and minivan.
Good luck bro.

noodlenoggin wrote:Motorcycle Content? Barely.



It's only February. Unlike you lucky bass-turds in BC or the UK, I still have at LEAST two more months of solid winter to get through.

Unlike you lucky bass-turds in BC or the UK

Hey...I resemble that remark.

It was so sunny and mild today that Doc was riding with his jacket unzipped and I didn't even need my neck tube.

I just got caught up on your blogging. I enjoyed reading it.

Why, thank you B2C...I've always enjoyed your blog, too.

So, I lobbed a test-shot over the wall. Not a salvo, more like a badminton birdie. My wife was telling me at dinner that the home insurance guy was taking pictures out in the yard today, and it was a nice segue into:

"So, I priced out bike insurance on-line today."
"Two hundred-something, right?"
"Two hundred even."

Nice, level-headed response. I didn't get shut down hard, I didn't get the withering death-fire look of daggers'n agony at all.

I should fill in some back-story, I guess. My wife isn't against motorcycles at all, or against me riding one. When we were in college she used to ride on the back of mine all the time, and liked it. She knows full well just how much I love riding...also that I've been with my bike for a year longer than I've been with her. In fact, the last season that I got to ride, it's because she went out and got bike insurance for my birthday.

So I think the total fight on riding is a money issue. If we can spare it, it'll probably happen, but spare money is rare like 4-leaf clovers around the noodlenoggin home. I know I can't pull the "it'll pay for itself in gas savings" argument -- our riding season is just too darn short.

Enh...we'll see.

You just need to work a little overtime for a week or two.

blues2cruise wrote:You just need to work a little overtime for a week or two.

That would be nice. I'm salaried...I can work all the overtime I want, and they don't even have to say "thank you."