Jonathan’s Mindless Blog

I love it when the weather man is actually correct. Yesterday was an incredibly beautiful day so I took off from work and took a little road trip. We went up to Franklin, KY then across to Scottsville, down through Red Boiling Springs, then down past Cordell Hull Lake and Dam (where I took a few pictures),
and then back home via interstate from Carthage. The Cordell Hull overlook was really cool, and we stopped for a while to rest, but the coolest rest stop was in… well the middle of nowhere beside this little church. We were ready for a break and the side of the church lot had two huge oak trees on it and lots of shade next to a gravel parking lot that really wasn’t much gravel anymore since the grass had kind of taken over. Ended up sitting under the tree for a bit, and while we were chillin’ (all laid out in the grass) a car horn starts honking as it passes… weird since that’s usually a sign that somebody knows you and we shouldn’t have known anybody out there, so I sit up to see the back end of a gold wing trailer and another Gold Wing behind that who also tooted their horn and waved, just saying howdy. It’s almost like a club when you’re on a bike; other riders are usually very friendly and helpful and everybody waves.
We did right at 250 miles for the trip, but by the time the getting to and from the rendezvous point is added I put on about 300 miles yesterday. This morning I’m riding with another friend, but I don’t know exactly where we’re going yet, maybe ride the Natchez Trace. Can’t be out too late though, ’cause I’ve got a date this evening! We’re going to see the Gabe Dixon Band open for Jamie Cullum at TPAC, now I need to get the meal part worked out… Talk about procrastination in planning! All this after this morning’s Political Breakfast with the District 17 folks, I guess you could say I’m a bit busy? Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, or so I hear, so if that’s true I shouldn’t be constructing anything evil in the near future.

I finally completed the installation of my new GPS mount onto my motorcycle. Thanks to my Sis’ for the early birthday present. I took several of the pictures the other day in the daylight, but it’s been so hot I’ve just stayed inside and only gone out at night. It’s 10pm here and it’s still 88F and 60% humidity out, freakin’ oppressively hot to me! I just finished up the install and the final pictures are with the flash, but I tried not to make it too awful. Here’s the finished product:

Thanks to dad’s suggestion, I only drilled one hole and used one of the existing mounting holes, which made it a much more simple ordeal. I used drilled out brass nuts as standoffs to support the plastic and 1.5″ stainless steel screws to do the attachment. Also used some loc-tite thread locker to make sure those buggers don’t rattle out unintentionally. Now to finish the power cable… Right now, the forcast for this weekend is looking fantastic with a high on Saturday of only 89. I feel a day-long road trip coming on.
Oh, and I like the integration of flickr and wordpress and I can’t stand hitting limits of free services after only 2 days, so I’m now a paying flickr member! I have UNLIMITED bandwidth, which means I have no excuse for not posting lots of boring pictures. I think I’ll start with this one:

OK, enough for tonight, I need to update some other pages on the site and prepare myself to mow the yard in the morning.

So Wordpress is totally awesome… I needed to move my blog to a different directory on my website, so I just went to the support site and within 10 seconds found instructions for exactly what I was looking to do. Not only that, but the instructions, when executed, performed flawlessly. It was soooo easy. Even more, while I was there I saw a new version of the software, so I upgraded while I was there too. Wow, all that work and it’s only about 20 minutes later. About 13 of those minutes are the computer reboot and sounds of me angrily throwing things when the power glitched, I’ve got to get a UPS in here.

So I sat down to write a bit about a couple of things, first I got a new windscreen for my motorcycle. It’s from Cee Bailey’s Aircraft Plastics, who also make plastic products for motorcycles, and is about 6 inches taller than the stock screen and it has a vent. I rode about 100 miles last night with it and it will be great during the day, but I think for night riding I’m really going to wish it was exactly 1 inch shorter. I can take it someplace in town and get it cut down for less than 20 bucks, so I’ll probably be doing that sometime in the future. I want to make sure so I’ll probably ride a couple of months before stepping out there and cutting it down.

It’s late, so I’ll save the rest of my thoughts for later…

With my motorcycle of course!) I rode 726 miles this past Friday and Saturday and had a great time. Friday I went back and forth to Memphis to see my sister and three nieces, the youngest, Elizabeth, turned four, and the middle one, Elaine, graduated from Kindergarten, both on Friday. We went to the graduation in the morning and had a birthday party at my sister’s in the evening. Saturday morning I rode down to Hohenwald, TN, and met up with an uncle and we rode with a group of about 18 bikes from there to the top of Monteagle mountain, where I jumped on the interstate and zipped on home. It was the first time I’ve ridden with a group of bikes and it was pretty fun. I can see the attraction, even though I had the only bike with no chrome. Oh, I figured up my gas mileage for the Memphis part of the trip (~90mph interstate) to be slightly above 40mpg, but during the group ride I was getting 54.2mpg!!! If that’s not efficient I don’t know what is. I was able to get back in time to go helmet shopping in the afternoon and find a semi-stylin’ helmet for a lady friend and just chill on Sat evening. If all weekends were like this one (three days long, sunny, lots of scenic riding) life would have nothing to aspire to!

What a beautiful day! Sun was out and I got to celebrate a friend’s birthday : ) After the storm comes the calm and nice weather. I didn’t get to work any overtime for the tornadoes, so today I wasn’t tired and added another 200 miles to the bike! Only 200 more to go ’til my first service, then I can actually go fast without doing long-term damage. I’ve got to get a flickr account so I can do pictures, but it takes effort and I’m just really lethargic tonight, so it’ll have to wait. In the meantime you’ll just have to visualize… I got the windshield all bug juicy from the ride today