The reluctant landlord

I hate being a landlord.
I found myself playing the role by default. After the deaths of my parents, I found myself with an extra house on my hands. I got an appraisal as part of the estate settlement process and put it on the market. The Realtor showed it to a handful of people over the six months of the listing, but there were no offers. Operating under the mistaken assumption that the Realtor was a solid citizen - after all, he grew up the small town that was my home for my first 17 years - I took him on as a property manager and turned the house into a rental property.
The ensuing nightmare is chronicled in the archives of this blog, so I'll just sum it up by saying I fired the property manager and still ended up with the tenant from hell who sued me and then fled. I won the initial suit, then countersued for lost income, had to garnish her pay and finally recovered. Now I have a responsible, sane tenant who pays her rent on time and is pretty low maintenance.
But I still have the burden of owning the extra house, paying ever-increasing property taxes on it and spending money on surprise maintenance issues. Of the $700/month I get in rent, I figure I get to keep about $500 of it after property taxes and other expenses, but that's before the IRS takes its cut.
So this week when it came time to renew the lease for another year, I mailed her a renewal contract reflecting a $50/month rent increase to cover higher property taxes, and an offer to sell her the house at the appraised value at the time of my mother's death in 2000.
I briefly explained how her house payment would be about $150/month less than her rent if she got a 30-year mortgage, plus she'd get a bunch of money back on her income tax and would be building equity.
I rather doubt that she'll take me up on the offer because she's probably intimidated by the whole idea of home ownership and mortgages and property taxes. It's often hard to get someone to think a new thought.
If she doesn't take me up on it, I may list it with a more reputable and reliable Realtor and sell it anyway.
The whole thing is more hassle than it's worth.

My fraternity brother Bill Broadstreet, with my first wife on the left and one of his girlfriends on the right. It was early 1967 and I think we were smoking pot and playing with my slide projector. 

Bill Broadstreet being a ghost in front of my apartment in the spring of 1967, along with one of his girlfriends. He really is a ghost now. He died about 9 years ago after struggling for years with drugs and alcoholism. 

Being an orphan has its advantages...

Larry, who lives in the big yellow farmhouse three doors south of us, is also a BMW motorcycle rider. He's my age and just retired as athletic director at the local high school.
I ran into him weekend before last and he proposed we ride together to the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America national rally this Thursday in Lima, Ohio.
While I do most of my riding solo, I occasionally enjoy some company, so I agreed, suggesting we talk closer to the day of departure to work out times and routes.
He left a voicemail this afternoon saying he can't go to the rally because of problems with his elderly parents who live about a half-hour north of here.
Been there, done that.
My dad died in '97 and mom died in 2000, but I spent a lot of my Sundays with them from around 1995 on. One of the things about being an only child is that you have no one to help you carry the burden of aging parents. The upside is that you have no one second-guessing the decisions you make about, and for, your parents.
I spent a lot of time being angry about my parents' decline. Time and advancing age were turning them into people I didn't recognize and found hard to like.
Dad spent his last couple of years in a smalltown nursing home. Even though it was fairly well-equipped and well-staffed, it was a depressing place. I remember one afternoon when my frail father looked at me with watery eyes and croaked, "Get me out of here!" It broke my heart.

He was a fragile diabetic and was confined to a wheelchair at this point and my mother, even though she had been a Registered Nurse all of her adult life, was beyond being able to care for him at home.
They were getting ready to take him to a nearby hospital to replace a feeding tube when he died in a few days before Thanksgiving, 1997. I think he decided he'd had enough medical abuse and simply checked out.
Likewise, my mother had been in an extended care facility near my home for about six months, pleading daily to go home, when she died in her sleep.
It's hell watching your parents fall apart. For most of us, it's completely uncharted territory and I count myself very lucky that I had Maria in my life to help me through it.
I hope Larry's wife Bev is the supportive type. He's going to need it.
In the meantime, I'm looking forward to four days of immersion in the BMW motorcycle culture with about 5,000 of my closest friends. A lot of my local club member friends rent motel rooms for these affairs, but I prefer to camp on the rally grounds and get the full experience.
This will be the 15th 'MOA national I've attended, starting with LaGuna Seca, California, in 1986.
Here's the list:
2004 - Spokane, WA
2003 - Charleston, WV
2002 - Trenton, Ont.
2001 - Redmond, OR
2000 - Midland, MI
1998 - Missoula, MT
1996 - Morganton, NC
1995 - Durango, CO
1993 - Oshkosh, WI
1992 - DuQuoin, IL
1991 - Flagstaff, AZ
1990 - Rapid City, SD
1988 - Madison, IN
1986 - Laguna Seca, CA
Lima is hardly a glamour destination and it's only about a four-hour ride from here, but it should be well-attended because the center of gravity of BMW MOA membership is east of the Mississippi and north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
I'll hang out with friends, cruise the vendors in search of some new gadget to refine my touring kit, stare at and listen to hundreds of BMWs, knock down plenty of beer at the Biergarden and complain that the Saturday night awards ceremony is too long and heavy with self-absorbed rally organizers. Then I'll strike the tent, pack my stuff and ride home Sunday.
I might even wash my bike for the occasion. It still has some California bugs on it from last summer.

One out of three ain't good

I just couldn't do it.
My wife bought a DVD copy of Phantom of the Opera - she and her daughter were blown away when they saw a stage performance of it some years ago - and was keen to have me watch it with her.
I lasted about halfway through it before I excused myself to go back to my Photoshop CS tutorials.
Yeah, the music sounded pretty spectacular on our Dolby 5.1 home theatre audio setup, but I just couldn't get into the sung dialogue and I couldn't make myself give a damn about any of the characters.
And the look of it reminded me of Moulin Rouge, which I absolutely detested for its incomprehensible mix of cultures and periods. Pretty movies? Yeah. But devoid of anything I think of as substance.
It was part of a three-DVD rental-purchase deal we did yesterday at Blockbuster. Besides buying Phantom, we rented National Treasure and The Ref. Nicholas Cage is one of my favorite actors, but I found my mind wandering during scenes that were supposed to be riveting action. The Ref, a relatively unnoticed comedy with Kevin Spacey, turned out to be a much better crafted, better acted movie and the only one of the three that really impressed me.
Not that anyone cares.

Hello 60

When I got started in journalism in the mid-1960s, we marked the end of every story we wrote by typing -30- at the bottom of the page.
The explanation, as I learned it, is that the -30- mark was meant to tell the typesetter, i.e. Linotype or Intertype operator, that there was no more to the story. Presumably, journalists originally wrote “no more,” which got shortened to “no” and finally the cursive “n” got turned on its side to make a “3” and the “o” mutated into a zero.
At any rate, I was taught in college to end my stories with -30- and that was the practice at the small town daily where I got my start and later at the state’s largest evening daily where I spent most of my career.
But sometime in the 1970s, when we traded our typewriters for the first of the big clunky primitive computer terminals, we stopped using the -30- mark. Why? Probably because we’d become the typesetters as well as the writers, so there was no need to tell ourselves where the story ended.
So the -30- mark went away, appearing only in the occasional press release sent in by some hot-type-trained newspaperman who had sold out and taken a public relations job and still used the -30- mark out of habit.
Today I am twice 30. Does that mean “no more” is doubly true?
I remember in 1975 when I marked my first 30 years on the planet with a sense of doom and foreboding. I was pretty sure that my best years were behind me and the future held little but hard work and gradual decline.
Hah.
Turns out my 30s were filled with lots of personal growth, a bunch of dumb mistakes and plenty of adventure.
So I wasn’t all that concerned in July, 1985, when my personal odometer rolled over the 40-year mark. We had a big party, the original Live Aid broadcast was going on and somebody gave me a green t-shirt with a picture of a tree on it that said, “40 isn’t old… for a tree.”
Fifty was a little more sobering, especially when I got the invitation in the mail to join AARP back before its name got shortened to the acronym for the American Association of Retired People. I resisted for a few months, but finally decided that if some businesses wanted to give me a discount just for being 50, I’d be stupid not to take it.
So I decided to embrace maturity – not old age, but maturity.
I remember sitting in a Denny’s in Salina, Kans., one summer morning when I was 54 and starting the second day of my 14th annual Midlife Crisis Motorcycle Tour. I flipped the menu over to examine the Senior Citizen selections – reduced portions at reduced prices and decided a selection from that list suited my appetite. But the threshold for the Denny’s Senior Citizen menu was 55.
So for the first time since I was a 20-year-old in a liquor store, I lied about my age and wolfed down my breakfast in the sure knowledge that the manager would appear at any moment to “card” me.
All of this is to remind me that passing these 10-year milestones is like an athlete bursting through a paper banner – there’s the momentary shock of hitting the barrier, but you’re through it before you have time to think about it and you’re still moving and everything is the same as it was before except that the barrier is now behind you.
So it is with turning 60. Other than being an occasion for a bit of reflection, it’s no big deal. I’m still me and I’m still doing all of the stuff I love to do.
Now 70 is a different matter…

Adios, 59

With any luck at all, this will be the last time you find me whining about turning 60.
Today is my last day in my 50s.
Tomorrow – Bastille Day, 2005 – is the 60th anniversary of the first breath I drew in my current incarnation. It was a Saturday. World War II was all but over. Adolf Hitler had eaten a bullet in his Berlin bunker two months earlier and Allied troops were settling down for the occupation of Germany.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was dead of a stroke and Harry S. Truman was getting up to speed in Washington.
But Japan was holding out even though it was obvious to everyone that the U.S. Navy and Army Air Forces were tightening the ring of steel around their homeland and daily raining down firestorms of incendiary bombs.
On the July Saturday that I was born, J. Robert Oppenheimer supervised the hoisting of the first atomic bomb to the top of a steel tower in the New Mexico desert. Two days later, on the morning of July 16, Oppy and his crew lit up the desert with their man-made sun, giving him a vision of the Hindu god Shiva, the Destroyer of Worlds.
Yeah, it was a heavy time.
And to those of you who came in later – some of you, much later – it must seem like an impossibly long time ago.
Maybe it was.
But I find it absolutely startling how fast 60 years can get away from you. How the hell did I get to be this old this quickly? I don’t feel old. My body isn’t falling apart. I’m at the top of my game when it comes to writing and photography. Could it be that old age is an illusion? Is it really true that you’re as old as you feel? If that’s the case, I’m somewhere around 30.
I had a bit of validation that I’m not completely old and in the way this afternoon.
I got a call from a corporate headhunter who’s looking for someone to coordinate the magazine and website of an international motorcycle organization. I’ve been aware for some time that the search is on for applicants for the position. It’s been the source of no little controversy among the membership, many of whom believe the job should go to the woman who now edits the magazine and who think the very suggestion of a search for other candidates is a slap in her face.
I listened to the pitch with some interest, but took myself out of the running when the guy said it requires relocation to a city two states away.
But it’s nice to know that somebody thinks 34 years in newspapers, 10 years as a Motorcycle Safety Foundation instructor, more than 300,000 motorcycle miles and freelance publication in a whole bunch of magazines and newspapers adds up to something useful.
So I guess I’ll look forward to tomorrow and my 60th birthday with a sense of satisfaction that I’ve done more good than bad in my six decades, maybe saved a few lives, maybe enlightened and entertained and can still enjoy a good 145 mph motorcycle romp across the Nevada desert.

Smokin' a Viceroy and cruisin' down the old National Road on a sunny day in May, 1967, as seen through a fisheye lens. I think the VW had lap-style seatbelts, but shoulder belts and airbags were years in the future. So were radial tires and antilock brakes. 

Beetlemania

I posted a photo Sunday of me with my first car and now it has me awash with memories about that Fontana gray 1965 VW beetle.
I bought it for a paltry $1,600 on Aug. 1, 1965 - the day Charlie Whitman climbed the bell tower in Texas and sniped innocent passeersby until the cops got him. I remember hearing news reports of the shootings while at the dealership - University Motors in West Lafayette, Ind.
The '65 beetle was the last model year before the folks in Regensberg added an external fuel filler door and (I think) the first model year with a gas gauge. To fuel the car, I had to pop the trunk (in front) to access the fuel intake.
The car was desperately underpowered and could only top 70 mph with a strong tailwind. I added a parcel shelf under the dashboard and a snazzy wood gearshift knob - those were my only modifications, unless you count the Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity decal on the windshield. I still have the gearshift knob.
The dashboard layout was spartan in the extreme: round speedometer/odometer, gas gauge and AM radio with knob switches for headlights and wipers.
The car had a pathetic heater/defroster apparatus that meant you had to bundle up for winter drives. But once you got moving, hardly anything could stop the thing. The rear engine and narrow tires made it the best snow car I've ever driven.
As it aged, it developed starting problems because moisture seemed to accumulate in the distributor cap.
The longest trip I ever made in it was through eastern Canada to Niagara Falls and on to Montreal and Quebec City.
Eventually, it succumbed to rust. By the time I let it go to a friend for $100 or so, it had more than 100,000 miles on the odometer (an impressive number in those days) and you could see the road through holes in the floor on the passenger's side.
I followed it up a few years later with a green '71 Karmann Ghia convertible that I also took to the 100k mark, but it was a completely different animal.
Would I buy a Volkswagen product today? Thank you, but no.
While I prefer German motorcycles, I like my cars from Japan.

Thirty-nine years ago this September, I began my newspaper career at The Tipton (Ind.) Tribune. I was 21. This 1965 VW was my first car. 

Sunrise at Monument Valley. 

Launching a startled hen at the Guffey, Colo., Chicken Fly. 

Down from the mountains

We're back home in the Midwestern humidity.
We rolled out of Alma, Colo. at 4:19 a.m. Tuesday and thrashed our way across Kansas and Missouri before bagging it at midnight at a Motel 6 in Springfield, Ill. The motel began life under another banner, since it was a cut above the standard cheesy Motel 6 layout. It didn't matter much because we immediately fell into bed and my next conscious experience was of Maria rousting me out of bed at 6 a.m. to get back on the road.
Consequently, we arrived home at 9:15 a.m. to find - wonder of wonders - a tree service crew whacking to pieces the first of the three maple trees that have menaced our house for longer than we've lived here.
If you've been following this tedious saga, you know these three trees belong to the town because they stand in the right-of-way of a dedicated alley that also serves as our driveway. It took us four appearances before the town council over a 12-month period to persuade them that the big maple trees are a threat to our home and a liability to the town.
This afternoon, with only the three trunks standing some 15-20 feet high, it is obvious that our fears were justified. All three had branches that were hollow and rotten and ready to snap if subjected to enough wind.
The south side of our house is getting more sunshine than it's seen since the 1940s, but the threat of tree limbs smashing our house, our cars, our motorcycles or ourselves is gone. Likewise, the roosting place for hundreds of birds that showered birdshit on our cars and our neighbors' cars is gone. They will not be missed.
The guy wielding the chainsaw from the bucket truck told us our roof is missing a lot of shingles and is down to the tarpaper around the chimney, so I need to start calling roofers before that problem gets any worse.
Tim and Linda showed us a splendid time during our sojourn in the Colorado high country. We roamed all over Park County, surmounted Weston Pass, dined on filet mignon at Buena Vista, photographed buffalo and fishermen on Tarryall Road and spent the Fourth of July at the Guffey Chicken Fly.
This was the 19th year for this whimsical event in which participants pay $5 each use a bathroom plunger to launch a chicken from a rural mailbox mounted some 12 feet above the ground. The object of the game is to see whose chicken travels the farthest before landing. I think the best distance of the day was something like 42 feet. While chickens don't soar, they can avoid dropping like a pumpkin by flapping their wings to slow their descent.
The animal rights types are presumably appeased by the fact that the rural mailbox is lined with red velvet.
One of the officials wore a PETA t-shirt, but rather than People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, it bore the words, "People intersted in Eating Tasty Animals."
Nevertheless, I saw no serious mistreatment of the chickens. The all seemed none the worse for their startling ejection from the mailbox into empty space. I wouldn't try this with penguins, but chickens seem to handle it just fine.
While we were in Colorado, I spent about 12 hours editing photos from the wedding we shot a week earlier and finally got them posted to our website. Even though I color calibrated our Sony VAIO notebook computer's screen with a Spyder, I worried that the images might not be spot on. Now that I've had a chance to view them on my desktop computer's CRT, I can see some room for improvement in a few, but on balance they're fine.
Even so, I think it would be a mistake to try any serious Photoshop work on the VAIO. It's good for viewing and sorting pictures, but isn't as accurate as a CRT display.

Back in the High Country again

I’m back in the High Country again, sitting on the couch at Tim and Linda’s Alma, Colo., chalet and gazing out the sliding glass patio doors at clouds gathering over Hoosier Pass.
We rolled in at 7:30 last evening, fresh from a 2,000-mile loop that took us through Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Utah again and finally Colorful Colorado.
We’ve had Texas barbecue in Amarillo, green chili breakfast burritos in Tucumcari, enchiladas in Moab and huevos rancheros for breakfast this morning in Fairplay, Colo.
Maria’s brother and sister-in-law lived briefly in a Navajo community south of Farmington, NM and we made an accidental pilgrimage there when we missed a turn on our way to Monument Valley. It’s a bleak, sun-blasted, poverty-stricken place called Newcomb and I’m astonished they could stay there more than a week, much less the few months they were there while Deb attempted to teach special needs Indian kids.
We were up before dawn yesterday morning to photograph the Monument Valley sunrise after a pleasant night in our tent at Goulding’s Monument Valley Campground. They had wireless internet (WiFi) at the campground and I was checking my e-mail on a bench outside the campstore when a French tourist with a laptop computer inquired as to whether I had “wee fee.” Maria was completely baffled, thinking it was some French term, but I puzzled it out quickly and then helped him get online.
I spent much of this morning editing photos from a wedding we shot last Saturday. It was our first paying wedding and we learned a lot, not the least of which was that we’re better than we thought.
Now, if we can just book some weddings at a serious rate of pay, we can pay some bills and justify all of this expensive photo equipment.

Attention all idiots: Get out of the gene pool

A young woman in Maria's office is dating a guy who bought a motorcycle a few weeks ago.
Even though the guy had to take the Motorcycle Safety Foundation's rider course when he was in the Marine Corps, it appears he forgot how important safety gear is. Well, from my brief encounters with him, the guy is a moron and has no judgment.
Maria and I dropped into the office a couple of nights after he got the bike and he was there visiting his girlfriend - make that distracting and interfering with her job. His bike, I think it's a Honda Shadow, was parked in front of the office. It had no license plate.
When I asked him about it, he said the temporary cardboard tag got wet in a rain shower and disintegrated. I also noted the absence of a helmet with him or on the bike.
It developed that he had a helmet, but thought he'd only use it on trips. He also planned to ride home in the dark with sunglasses for eye protection.
I worked into the conversation the fact that I've ridden more than 300,000 miles and was an MSF instructor and Bureau of Motor Vehicles motorcycle skills examiner for 10 years and suggested that the urban traffic environment is the most dangerous place he could ride.
"If you're going to get hit, the odds are it will be at an urban intersection where the car or truck driver makes a left turn into your path," I said, adding I wouldn't ride around the block without a helmet, let alone make a habit of it.
Other than the fact that his behavior will likely put unnecessary demands on the health care system when his inevitable crash occurs, I care little for what happens to him.
But I am concerned about how his stupidity can harm others. He has custody of his 2-year-old son and I was horrified to hear he took the kid for a motorcycle ride, with the bareheaded kid perched in front of him on the gas tank. In my judgment, that's grounds for Child Protective Services to take the kid away - reckless endangerment.
He also carries his girlfriend around as a passenger. I haven't had the heart to ask, but I assume she rides without a helmet too.
A friend of his was killed this week in a motorcycle crash. The victim, a 22-year-old guy, was riding helmetless when he tried to pass a car on the right at a point where the pavement narrows to two lanes. The guy ran off the road, lost it in gravel and did a face-plant on a deer crossing signpost.
Boyfriend went to the hospital after the crash but his friend had been transferred to a regional trauma center where he died a few hours later. Chances are, a fullface helmet would have saved his life.
Get the message, Boyfriend?

Canine habits and weddings future and past

Ruthie ignores her bowl of IAMS Chunks most of the time. Until someone sits down to a meal at the nearby kitchen table. Then she recognizes it's time for Her Pack to eat. So as I finished my breakfast of strawberry yogurt just now, she began crunching her way to the bottom of her food bowl. Now she's sprawled out at my feet with her belly on the cool vinyl floor, no doubt wondering if I'm going to give her the Dannon yogurt cup to clean out.
I usually have instant oatmeal for breakfast - trying to knock the cholesterol down a few points - but I switched to yogurt this week when the antibiotics sterilized my digestive system. Oatmeal can harden to concrete in a bowl, so I usually let her finish off the last few bits before I rinse the bowl and put it into the dishwasher.
Today is Maria's last pre-vacation day at work and it's a day I must spend getting everything ready for tomorrow's wedding photo shoot and Sunday morning's departure for points west.
My to-do list includes:
1. Find the missing Thermarest air mattress, buried deep in the jumble of stuff in the attic. It must be done soon, before the heat of the day turns the attic into a sauna.
2. Buy chlorine concentrate for the hot tub. We don't have enough to see Morgan through our absence and I don't want to come home to a tub full of murky, bacteria-filled water.
3. Charge all of our camera batteries.
4. Shift some cash from savings to checking to cover the bills I'll pay from the road. I hate going on vacation just before the end of the month and having to calculate when Maria's paycheck and my pension will roll into the account in relation to when various bill paymnent checks will get cashed. There's also the question of when my tenant's rent check will arrive and whether Morgan can deposit it in our account without the benefit of our endorsement.
5. Do a couple of loads of laundry.
6. Edit a few more photos for use in our community art fair exhibit that takes place a couple of days after our return. We have much of the work done, since there will be precious little time to pull this stuff together after we get home on or about July 6.
We're shooting the 4 p.m. wedding rehearsal at a rural church today. I don't think the photos are that important, but it's a valuable chance to work out the angles and lighting issues for tomorrow afternoon's ceremony.
The temperature is expected to soar into the 90s today and tomorrow, with heat indices above 100. It was hot and steamy like this on June 24, 1967, when I got married for the first time. Yes, today would have been my 38th wedding anniversary. We hung in for 26 years before the wheels came off for the final time. I lay claim to half - well, maybe 51% - of the blame for the implosion, but I know we're both better matched now. And we have two splendid sons to show for the effort.
Well, that took an odd turn, didn't it?
Now, it's off to the attic in search of the Thermarest.

Eli Ohlhausen of California BMW Motorcycles bolting a new Staintune exhaust onto my bike in July, 1995. 

Cosmic bugsplat

Rummaging through my documents folder this afternoon, I came across this little piece from 10 years ago.
Splat!
The bug was a black flash against the Wyoming desert sky as it died in a juicy splash on the chin piece of my fullface helmet. I heard the impact and felt the wet spray on my lips and chin through the slit vents.
"Shit! That was a big one!" I thought, making a mental note not to lick my lips anytime soon.
I was, after a fashion, working on my insect collection.
Racing southwest across southern Wyoming at 90 mph, I was five days into a motorcycle vacation that had taken an ugly turn.
My 1991 BMW K100RS checked out fine at BMW Motorcycles of Indianapolis two weeks earlier. I'd spent more than $700 on a 10,000-mile service, brakes, a battery and a set of Metzeler radial tires. My exhaust system – the Achilles heel of the otherwise-reliable bike – was declared sound.
But I knew better.
This was the fourth stock exhaust bolted onto the bike since it was born in the Spandau Bayerische Motoren Werke plant in early 1991. The first died of broken welds on Colorado's harrowing Mount Evans in August, 1992. The second was replaced a year later when a bumpy Nebraska road shattered its baffles. The third broke welds on the twisty Kalmath River Highway in northern California in August, 1994.
I expected exhaust trouble on this trip too. A month earlier, I phoned BMW North America to propose a deal.
“Why don't you guys put me in a Staintune exhaust right now and save us all a lot of trouble? There's no doubt in my mind that this exhaust is going to break sometime during my three weeks on the road,” I suggested, knowing in my heart of hearts I was asking the impossible.
I was right. The testy reply of the BMW service representative made it clear that I had asked him to entertain a thought he just couldn't think.
The next call was to California BMW in Mountain View, Calif., the importer and U.S. distributor of the Australian-made Staintune systems.
Eli Ohlhausen assured me a shipment of Staintunes was on a freighter headed for Los Angeles.
“We should have them in about a week,” he said.
“Well, put my name on a 16-valve sport model, because I'm pretty sure I'm going to need one,” I said, wondering where I would be when I would have to call Ohlhausen next.
It turned out, I would be in Sturgis, S.D.
On the third day of my trip, two days after my 50th birthday, I pushed the starter button in the motorcycle parking lot of Mount Rushmore and heard the telltale sound I'd been dreading. I rode the length of the parking lot, pulled in alongside a station wagon, dropped the sidestand and dismounted to have a look.
I didn't even need my reading glasses to see the crack. There it was, right where I figured it would be, in the weld where the header pipe met the muffler.
“Sonofabitch!” I muttered to myself. “Only three days out and on a fucking Sunday afternoon. I hate being right about shit like this!”
I rode back to Rapid City, topped off the tank at an Amoco station at the south edge of town and continued on to the northeastside of town where I remembered a Wendy's from my visit in 1990 for the BMW MOA National Rally.
I fished my BMW MOA Anonymous Book from the tank bag, secured my helmet to the bike and strode inside.
My research was postponed while I chatted over lunch with a BMW rider in his 60s, out on a long ride from his home in Virginia.
After lunch, I stuffed a quarter into a pay phone and called Don Leonard, a local BMW rider. Leonard referred me to Lyle Crowser, whose Sturgis shop was the only BMW dealership in South Dakota.
After booking a room at the Thrifty Inn across the street from Wendy's, I called Crowser's home. Lyle was ill, but his son Joe assured me they'd be happy to help and to be on their doorstep when they opened the next morning.
Rising at 6 a.m. on Monday, I rode the 30 miles or so to Sturgis, presented my 11-month-old exhaust system receipt and sipped a cup of coffee while Joe Crowser ordered a replacement pipe from BMW North America in New Jersey. The exhaust would be rushed out via FedEx, Crowser said, and I would be on my way by noon Tuesday.
I took a room at the nearby Star Lite Motel and set off for a day trip to Devil's Tower. The cracked exhaust held together, despite about six miles of greasy clay where road crews had ripped out the pavement.
Tuesday morning, I was up with the sun and rode the 200 yards from motel to bike shop in seconds, hoping the exhaust would cool quickly and not keep the mechanics from the task of replacing it.
The minutes and hours ticked by and, when the FedEx driver passed the shop on his morning rounds, Joe put a tracer on my missing exhaust.
“FedEx says your exhaust system is on a plane that's grounded in Memphis by a thunderstorm,” Joe said, bravely fixing me with a friendly gaze.
“Terrific!” I replied, my voice heavy with sarcasm. “Mind if I use your phone?”
I keyed in my credit card number and the digits for California BMW.
Eli came on the line and I posed the crucial question: “Have your Staintunes arrived yet?”
“They just cleared customs in L.A. and I should have them inventoried in here by close of business tomorrow,” Ohlhausen reported.
“Okay. Put my name on one of them. I'm on my way.”
“Where are you?”
“Sturgis, South Dakota.”
“You're kidding!”
“Nope. I've already wasted two days over this and I'm not staying here any longer. I'll see you Thursday,” I said, hanging up the phone.
“Well, it may hold together. You'd have to break welds on all four pipes for it to disassemble itself,” offered one of the Sturgis BMW mechanics, being careful not to endorse the 1,400 mile ride I was contemplating.
“Wish me luck. I'm outta here,” I said, zipping my Hein Gericke TKO jacket and thanking the Crowsers for their hospitality.
I headed west into Wyoming on I-90, stopping for gas at Gillette.
West of Gillette, the sky darkened and lightning arced from cloud to earth. Seeing a wall of rain approaching, I switched on my emergency flashers and coasted to the berm. I dismounted and pulled my blue-and-blaze orange two-piece First Gear rainsuit from the lower compartment of the tank bag. I struggled against the rising wind and rushed to get everything buttoned up as the deluge rolled nearer.
Then, as the fat raindrops began to spatter my face shield, I swung my right leg over the saddle, kicked the sidestand up with my heel and thumbed the engine to life.
The rain grew quickly in intensity, covering the pavement with sheets of water.
“It's only water,” I silently admonished the slower drivers as I droned past them in the downpour.
But then I noticed the hail.
Little pea-sized bits of ice, bouncing off the roadway, then bouncing off of my helmet and outstretched arms and the backs of my hands and fingers.
“Oooch! Ouch! Shit, that hurts!” I exclaimed aloud and the icy little bullets stung me through the vinyl and leather.
I slowed to 30 mph, then to 20 mph, trying to minimize the impact while still hoping to ride through the storm as quickly as possible.
Up ahead, I could see brightness – the clear air beyond the storm – and I hung on as the BMW carried me toward it.
In a quarter-mile, I was clear of the storm, riding on rain-washed asphalt. I suddenly noticed the incredible fragrance of the freshly watered desert and I instantly forgot the splash of the trucks and the hailstones' sting.
“This was worth every minute of the discomfort,” I thought as I savored the intoxicating scent of the sage and other desert plants. “This is why I ride a motorcycle!”
I turned south on I-25 at Buffalo, riding into light showers as I approached Casper.
Gassing at Casper, I phoned ahead to reserve a room at the Days Inn at Rawlins, Wyo.
Even though I'd spent a night in Casper two years earlier, I wasted about 45 minutes searching the city's southside for Hwy. 220. Humbling myself before an Exxon station/convenience store clerk, I got directions and set out to the southwest in evening rush-hour traffic.
“This is one of those ‘leap of faith’ roads,” I thought, as the two-lane highway wound through empty valleys, flanked by grey mountains. Other than the occasional semitrailer truck, there was no prospect of help for at least 30 miles. This was one of those times you trusted your skills and your equipment.
With that realization, came an exhilaration.
“This isn't exactly bungie jumping or rock climbing, but it’s farther out on the edge than I normally live,” I thought, smiling at the prospect.
That was when the hapless, juicy bug made the fatal mistake of buzzing across Hwy. 220 at an unfortunate altitude of about 5 feet.
I grimaced behind my visor as I felt the wetness on my face. I pondered briefly about the seeming randomness of a universe in which a large insect could live a comparatively successful life, feeding on desert flower nectar or whatever bugs of his species ate, only to be sent to oblivion in an instant encounter with the helmet of a motorcyclist – a motorcyclist whose journey began three days and 1,700 miles ago and, until a few hours ago, had never intended to be on this road. Who could have imagined that this bug and this rider would ever have found each other in the Wyoming wilderness. Was it pre-ordained or was it random chance?
“What the hell's the difference?” I thought.
The afternoon overcast yielded to a golden sunset as I rode into Rawlins and, following the mini-map in the Days Inn directory, located the motel.

Good advice for motorcyclists

At the rise of the hand of a policeman, stop rapidly. Do not pass him by or otherwise disrespect him.
When a passenger of the foot hove in sight, tootle the horn trumpet to him melodiously at first. If he still obstacles your passage, tootle him with vigor and express by word of mouth the warning, “Hi, Hi!”
Beware the wandering horse that he shall not take fright as you pass him. Do not explode the exhaust box at him. Go soothingly by or stop by the roadside till he pass away.
Give space to the festive dog that makes sport in the roadway. Avoid entanglements of dog with your wheel-spokes.
Go soothingly on the grease-mud, as there lurk the skid demon. Press the brake of the foot as you roll round the corners to save the collapse and tie up.
Advice from a 1935 Japanese brochure, in English,
explaining the rules of the road to foreign drivers.

Waiting for the tub man

It's 8:47 a.m. on a sunny Wednesday morning and I'm back on the upstairs balcony porch on this second day or summer, typing away while I wait for a call from the hottub service guy.
A week ago tonight, my stepdaughter and her girlfriend came in from the backyard hottub to report it was "broken." I went out to check, noticed the acrid smell of overheated electrical stuff and immediately cut the power to the tub. The motor, which carries a lifetime warranty, had somehow burned out. This is the second such motor burnout since we bought the tub in January 2001. But, since the lifetime warranty is still in force (I'm still alive), all I have to pay is the $60 service call fee. The folks who sold us the tub said the service guy would call sometime after 8 a.m. to schedule his arrival. So I wait.
If anyone is curious, the brand is CalSpa. I've always resisted calling these things spas because I feel the term is too ambiguous. Spa is the name of a town in Belgium, renowned for his thermal hot springs and to which Kaiser Wilhelm retired after Germay's defeat in World War I. Over the years, the name has come to mean any place or institution used for relaxation and the restoration of health. To condense such a broad term down to apply to a single appliance, seems wrong to me, so I'll be content to call it a hottub. Speaking of "hot," we set the temperature at the default of 100 degrees in summer, 101 in spring and fall and 102 in winter. It's surprising how much difference a single degree makes, but there it is.

ISU

My meteoric college career took place at Indiana State University in Terre Haute, Indiana. I went there for all the wrong reasons. It's a wretched little third-class state-supported college that had the poor judgment to award an honorary doctorate to drop-out Steve Hilbert, whose Conseco house of cards ruined hundreds of investors. Probably the only reason to know about ISU is because Larry Bird played basketball there.
I have no illusions about ISU's prestige and this snippet from Jeopardy makes it abundantly clear:
http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~koberd/jeo.wmv

Local royalty

A guy who owns a considerable amount of real estate in this town and who, until recently, was a figure in local government, was in the bank today when I stopped in to deposit checks. He was going on at length to the tellers about how happy his mother is at a new elder care facility in a nearby city.
At one point, his wife chimed in that it's "assistant living." She said it twice, as if to make everyone notice that she's learned a new technical term.

Doh!

So I've spent the last few days with a persistent upset stomach - the feeling of continuous heartburn that's had me gobbling antiacid tablets by the handul, to little or no avail. It's been worst at night, keeping me awake or sleeping fitfully at best.
Then, yesterday afternoon, it dawned on me. I've been taking an antibiotic in preparation for a root canal tomorrow morning. Antibiotics annihilate helpful intestinal bacteria.
So I went down to the local IGA grocery store (no way does it rise to the definition of a supermarket) and bought an armload of strawberry yogurt, jampacked with an active acidophilus culture.
Voila!
Within a couple of hours, my discomfort was gone and I slept soundly through the night.
I hate it when I overlook such obvious diagnoses and solutions.

Goin' to Guffey

We plan to be in colorful Guffey, Colo., on the Fourth of July. Here's why:
(From the Park County Chamber of Commerce website.)
On the Fourth, Guffey will conduct a chicken flying contest. For $5, people can rent a chicken. The money goes to city improvements. Those who pay are able to spend quality time boding with their fowl prior to the event. From a special containment box 12 feet above the ground, the chickens are "encouraged" to see how far they can fly. The record is 138 feet established in 1998.
The town is named for James Guffey, who was born in Pennsylvania. He got in on the ground floor of the oil business during the 1870s. Using money he earned from selling machinery, he began to lease land and sink his own wells. His oil wells eventually extended from Pennsylvania to Texas, and his name was associated with some of the country's major oil fields. In the 1890s, he bought mining property in the Freshwater Mining District on the south end of South Park, Colorado. He gave the town of Freshwater money for street improvements. For this, the town honored him by changing its name to Guffey.
Gold was discovered in Cripple Creek during the 1890s and prospectors were drawn to the Guffey area by its similar geology. As word got out, more than 1,000 prospectors came into the area. The town of Freshwater was founded in 1895, and it soon grew to over 500 residents.
Freshwater's main street was lined on both sides with false-front stores. Businesses included three grocery stores, four saloons, three hotels, four restaurants, a couple of bakeries, three hardware stores, two clothing stores, a couple of assay offices, two barber shops, a fruit store, two meat markets and a furniture store.
The residents of Freshwater applied for a post office in 1895. Because there was a Freshwater post office in California, application under this name was denied. Residents then decided on the name Idaville for Ida McClavery Wagner, owner of several mining claims. The following year the name was changed to Guffey. The post office remains active today.
Metallic ore in the area also included some silver, copper, iron and lead. One of the rarest metallic ores, yptotaritralite, was also found. Its main use is as an alloy.
As with many other Colorado mining towns, there wasn't enough ore to sustain a mining industry. Several tunnels were drilled and shafts were sunk mainly northeast of the town. No large lodes were discovered and within several years Guffey was almost deserted. Its economic base became ranching.
Today, Guffey is best known for its mayors. In 1988, Park County officials in Fairplay lost the town plat. A new map was drawn and zoning changed what was once residential property into commercial at a substantially higher tax rate. As part of a protest, Guffey residents created a new zone called "ET" for "existing transitional." It applied the ET zoning liberally to town lots.
They also elected a feline mayor, a cat named Paisley. She died of natural causes and was replaced by Smudge le Plume, also a feline. Smudge died mysteriously in 1991 and was believed to have been eaten by an owl. Whifley le Gone, a calico cat, took over the mayoral duties. In 1993, Whifley moved out of town to a ranch.
Shanda, a dog, inherited the position when her master, Bruce Buffington, bought the general store where the mayor's office was situated. The two appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show. During the interview, Shanda preferred to let Buffinton do all the talking. Guffey's two political parties are the "Democats" and the "Repupkins".
Some residents felt the mayor should be an elected position, and on Halloween, 1998, there was a general election. Monster, a solid black cat, was elected, beating out Lars and Luke, both dogs, and a cockatiel. Monster's office is on an old sofa in front of a stove in the Guffey Garage (an antique shop).

Since today is Father's Day, here's a photo of my dad. It was taken in his office - he was a smalltown insurance agent - in late 1945 or early 1946. There's a small baby photo of me propped up next to his desk calendar. The multi-drawer steel cabinet in the background to the right is now in my home office. Dad died in 1997 at the age of 87. Yes, I miss him. 

Maria and I went on a benefit motorcycle ride Saturday for a kid who has undergone two brain tumor surgeries and faces a third operation. There were 170 motorcycles and about 300 people. It as almost entirely Harley-Davidsons, with maybe a half-dozen Japanese motorcycles. Our K1200GT was the only BMW present and we were the only people there in complete riding gear - helmet, jacket, pants, boots, gloves. I've been to Daytona Bike Week and a lot of ABATE events, so I was prepared for the scene, but it kinda weirded Maria out. Even so, we're glad we went. The organizers raised more than $23,000 for the boy's medical expenses. Here I am, showing the colors in a group photo. 

Ahhhhhhh!

This is dangerously close to at least one version of my perfect morning.
The sun is shining brilliantly in a perfect, cloudless blue sky, the temperature is a comfortable shirtsleeve 66 degrees and I'm sitting on my upstairs balcony porch blogging on my VAIO via our wireless internet connection.
I have a cup of coffee at my side and Ruthie the Wonder Dog is surveying the world from her dogservation post just outside the porch railing.
The only sounds are the birds chirping, the distant hum of traffic on the highway some five blocks away and the voices of children on the playground equipment at the park a block south. Every now and then, someone - usually a farmer in a pickup truck or on a tractor - drives past. I can also hear the distant groan of the Smith Trash Service packer truck compacting someone's trash. Friday is trash day here and ours awaits the truck at the curb.
If I listen very closely through the haze of background sounds, I can hear the snap of the flag as the wind billows through it on the nearby Little League baseball field.
This is what the folks who built my house 100 years ago had in mind when they designed a small balcony porch just off the master bedroom. Of course, the view was mostly farms and forests when Pearlsend was constructed in 1905. And the builders would have found the idea of a wireless notebook computer and the internet to be completely incomprehensible.
I grew up in a town of 2,500 and remember quiet June mornings like this from when I was a kid so, despite my 34 years in the Big City, I feel very much at home here.
That said, I'm more than ready to load the Subaru Forester with camera and camping gear and head for Colorado, Utah and points west a week from next Sunday.
Even more than I, Maria desperately needs a vacation. She's been working endless hours of overtime and is fried to the point where her publisher and her editor have threatened to confiscate her key to the newspaper office if she doesn't take a vacation.
We're photographing a wedding on Saturday, June 25 and the plan is to get out of town either that night or early the next morning. I favor a well-rested morning departure, but I understand Maria's eagerness to get on the road. The VAIO will make it possible for me to edit the wedding photos and post them to our Printroom.com site where the bride and groom and their friends and families can order prints of whatever images they like. All I need is a WiFi hotspot somewhere in Missouri or Kansas to upload the images from the road. And, of course, check e-mail and blog.
We plan to return to the canyonlands of Utah - Moab, Bryce Canyon and Zion - with a foray through Monument Valley before looping back to spend time with our friends Tim and Linda in Alma, Colo.
It remains to be seen if and when I do my 20th Annual Mid-Life Crisis Tour on the motorcycle. July has filled up, August is loading up as well and September may be the only time when I can get away.
But in the meantime, I'll sit here with a dozing dog at my feet, sip my coffee and surf the internet.

Bride of Frankenstein? I found this in my archive of negatives from my newspaper days. This woman was working on a community quilt to celebrate the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976. The completed quilt now hangs in the rotunda of a courthouse. Nice hair. Nice scarf. How very '70s. 

Michael Jackson

"Not guilty" does not mean "innocent."
Would you send your kids to his house for a sleepover?

Anyone here old enough to remember Paul Revere & the Raiders? They were big in the mid-60s and they were also the first to record Louie Louie, even though another Portland, Ore., band - the Kingsmen - had the huge hit with it. Mark Lindsey (circled) was the lead singer. Paul is still performing with the latest version of the Raiders and Mark is a solo act. 

VAIO con Dios

So here I am at the Subaru dealership, having turned our ‘02 Forester over for an oil change and lube and also to have the service technicians check out a jerkiness that has developed in the transmission.
I thought I noticed a problem a week or so ago and it was particularly pronounced on the interstate drive to the dealership, which is about 30 miles from my home.
The interstate was full of cars and trucks all headed the same way I was and it made for lots of changes in speed - plenty of acceleration and deceleration. When I let off the gas at 80mph, the severity of the engine braking felt more like I was driving a standard transmission vehicle. At other speeds, the transmission seemed to be “searching” for the right gear. There was also a noticeable lag between the time I pressed on the accelerator and when the vehicle responded. This all probably adds up to something very expensive, but I fervently hope not.
That’s because of this Sony VAIO FS660 notebook computer I’m using at the moment.
Maria and I had been having notebook thoughts for a long time, but two things pushed us over the edge.
My son Steve showed us his new Apple Powerbook G4 with all of its slick software weekend before last when we visited him and his family.
Our friend Rich, a world-class photojournalist who is recently expanding his wedding photography business as a means of escaping from Gannett wage slavery, told us how he uses a notebook as a powerful selling tool. After the wedding ceremony, he downloads his photos to his notebook computer, then sets it up to play the pictures as a slideshow at the reception. He puts a stack of his business cards next to the notebook.
So after Maria’s quilt shop visit last Saturday, we went computer shopping. Fresh in my mind were an admonition from my computer guru friend Tim that all of my software investments have been in Windows format and the recollection of having seen a really killer photo demo running on Sony VAIOs on a couple of occasions.
A visit to the nearest Best Buy gave us a chance to compare notebook screens and the VAIO was the brightest and sharpest of the bunch. So we pulled the trigger.
I’m what you might call a decisive shopper. I go into the marketplace with a fairly clear idea of what I want, can assimilate the data at hand quickly and don’t take long to make a decision. I have friends who seem to enjoy prolonging the shopping process - endlessly weighing the pros and cons of various products and to-ing and fro-ing from one store to another in a protracted search for the best deal.
The older I get, the more aware I am that time is the only irreplaceable commodity I have, so I’ve become increasingly concerned about wasting time. I guess I’d rather waste money than time. Sounds like an Attention Deficit Disorder issue, doesn’t it?
Anyhow, I figured we could use the VAIO right now. We have a wedding coming up on the 25th and want to leave immediately afterward for our photo vacation in the West. The VAIO will let us do the Rich-style slideshow at the reception and, with its wifi capability, will let us edit the wedding pictures on the road and upload them to our online sales site, probably from somewhere in Missouri or Kansas.
Since there is a bit of a learning curve involved, the sooner we get our hands on a notebook computer and get familiar with it, the better off we’ll be, I reasoned. Fortunately, Maria thinks about this the same way I do and we were congratulating ourselves on our decisiveness as we carried our new VAIO from Best Buy to our car.
We were eager to see if our photos display as well as the VAIO demo shots. They do! It’s an absolutely spectacular display. Rich uses a 17” Powerbook, but we settled for a 15.4” screen after deciding that the 17” notebook is a bit unwieldy and that extra 1.6” isn’t worth the extra money to us.
So what we got is 1 gigabyte of RAM, an 80 gig hard drive and a really fast (I forget how fast) Intel Centrino processor which the sales guy says is much easier on power consumption than other processors. The estimated battery life on a charge is between 5 and 6 hours.
Maria had been agitating for a portable DVD player for her birthday (which was yesterday) and, since this plays DVDs magnificently and on a much bigger screen, she’s a happy camper and is looking forward to traveling with it.
The touchpad substitute for a mouse is a little hard to get used to, but I’m sure I can master it. I recall my friend Tim bought a mouse for his first laptop, but the last time I looked, he was no longer mousing. I miss the mouse mostly when I’m doing a lot of point-and-click fixes in Photoshop.
The ergonomics of the keyboard have forced me to take off my watch while typing for fear the stainless steel bracelet band on my Breitling Chrono Avenger will scar the area below the keypad.
On another front, I finally heard from my tenant who had asked me to hold her rent check until her next paycheck on June 10. After I called and left a voicemail for her on Friday noting that I had not yet seen this check I was supposed to be holding, she phoned on Saturday afternoon to tell me she’d spaced it - actually she was planning to give it to me in person when I came up to clean the gutters - a task I haven’t been able to perform since I haven’t been able to borrow my father-in-law’s pickup truck to haul a ladder to the house. She assured me it was now in the mail and that she had added $25 as a late fee.
I’m relieved, but I will be even more relieved if I find the check in my mailbox when I get home from Subaruland. My experience with the Tenant from Hell prior to this one has left me extremely nervous about this whole landlord thing.
Maria’s daughter bought her a new wallet/checkbook combo for Maria’s birthday because she’s a conscientious girl who takes after her mother. Her son, who takes after his idiot father, returned Maria’s phone call yesterday, but made no mention of her birthday. We’re sure he has no idea that his mother had a birthday. She misses him since he moved to his father’s house after graduation, but I must confess I don’t. I wish him well, but my goal in life right now is a truly empty nest.
**********************************
We dodged the bullet on the Subaru transmission. The service manager test drove the car and said the lack of smoothness is a common thing for Foresters with 70,000 or more miles (88,000 on ours) and he’s never seen a transmission fail as a consequence of this symptom. So I got off with just $20.80 for the oil change and lube.
However, there is a lubricant leak around the timing belt. The service guys said I should plan to change the timing belt at the next oil change - 91,000 mles - which will be on the other end of our photo trek through the West.

Feeling smarter, faster

I doubled the memory in my desktop computer today and can finally run Photoshop CS at something approaching a reasonable speed.
I have a Dell Dimension 8200 that came with 512MB of RAM. That seemed like plenty until I installed Photoshop CS a couple of months ago. It loaded like molasses and took a little short of forever to load its browser with images from our Nikon D100s.
So I went to the Dell site and determined it would cost me $349.99 to kick the memory up to 1GB.
I complained to my computer mentor Tim, who does a brisk business helping his neighors in Alma, Colo., sort out their PC problems and he suggested I shop around. He also sent me a copy of a diagnostic program that helped me determine precisely what kind of memory my Dell needed.
My shopping led me to memory4less.com and what appeared to be the very same Samsung memory Dell was offering, but for only $195. I placed the order Monday and it arrived in today's mail.
It took me all of 5 minutes to shut down the computer, open it up, snap the new memory into the two remaining memory slots and fire up the machine.
It noticed the new memory right away and put it to work immediately.
And I'm enjoying the $155 I saved by not paying Dell's price.
The bad news in today's mail was the absence of a rent check from my tenant - the one I gave a break to two weeks ago when she said her paycheck was short due to a medical absence from work.
Our arrangement was that she would send me the rent check straightaway and I would hold it until today, which is when she gets her next paycheck.
Well, here we are on check-cashing day and there's no rent check. I was even such a sympathetic sap that I waived the $50 late penalty that is provided for in the lease.
What a dope. No more Mr. Nice Guy. From now on, it's purely business.

Wondering

I wonder what it would be like to get through a whole day without a single credit card offer in the mail or a single Liberian money scam in the e-mail.
Jesus! These people never quit.

Feeling stuck

I feel stuck today - hanging out in a holding pattern and waiting for things to happen.
Our cash flow is out of whack because our tenant is two weeks late with the rent. She called me at the end of last month and explained that she'd been off work for throat surgery - possible cancer of the larynx - and her paycheck was too short to make the rent payment. I agreed to her request that I hold her rent check until June 11 so her next pay period will cover it. However, it is now June 9 and I still haven't seen the rent check I'm supposed to be holding. Considering my experience with my previous tenant, this makes me a little nervous.
Maria's birthday is Sunday and we still haven't settled on what she would like for a present. At the moment, it's narrowed down to $150 worth of quilting supplies - which comes in a special shopping bag that gives her the status of a Bag Lady at the quilt store and confers special privileges and benefits - or a personal DVD player for use while traveling.
We're also trying to blast her loose from her job for a vacation in the West. The plan is to combine a photo expedition to the canyonlands of southern Utah and Monument Valley with a visit to our friends in Alma, Colo. The only problem is that Maria is sometimes calendar-impaired and inadvertently schedules multiple activities for the same day and time. She also has a hard time asserting her right to a vacation. Since we're planning to cover a lot of ground in a short time, carrying photo gear and in probably hot weather, this will be done in the Subaru Forester rather than on the bike.
I ordered 512 megabytes of memory for my computer this week in hopes of making Photoshop CS run faster and be more manageable. I'd love to be installing it this afternoon, but it didn't come in today's mail.
As soon as I get the memory boost, I can start ascending the learning curve of the Creative Suite of programs that is the CS in Photoshop CS. It includes the tools to make the website Maria has been wanting for our photography business and I'm eager to get going on it.
We've got our first "paying" wedding scheduled for June 25. We're only charging $200 plus prints because the father of the bride is a police detective who is also an excellent source for Maria and her newspaper.
We're scheduled to have a phone conversation tonight with Rich, probably the best photographer on the major daily where I used to work, about the dos and don'ts of the wedding photography business. Rich has been doing weddings as a sideline for a few years now and seems eager to share his knowledge and experience with us.
We're also signed up to have a booth in a community arts fair on July 9 - a scant 5 days after we get home from vacation - so we need to figure out what to include and get most of the preparatory work done before we leave.
When I went out to check the mail Monday morning, I found two guys from a tree service standing in the alley that is our driveway, looking up at the three trees the town council finally admitted responsibility for. They looked pretty intimidated by the prospect of working on three 65-foot-tall maple trees that are within 20 feet of my house. At least now I know that the town council followed through and contacted a tree service about the job. I worried that they would just let it fall between the cracks until a storm puts a tree on my house. Of course, now that they see the scope and complexity of the job, they may never come back. We shall see.

Check it out

Check out the University of St. Andrews Face Transformer:
http://www.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/%7Emorph/Transformer/index.html

Not coming back

I got a letter today from Charles Piermarini, president and CEO of Harrisdirect, a stock brokerage with whom I had an account for four years.
It was, of course, a form letter intended to lure me back into the fold with glowing statements like, "To help earn back your business, we have made significant changes in our pricing structure to ensure that you get the most value for your money," and offering me 20 free online equity trades and a $75 account credit when I transfer $10,000 or more in assets.
Ordinarily, I wouldn't have bothered to open the envelope. I'm not sure why I did. But the first line - "It has come to my attention that you have closed your account with Harrisdirect..." - annoyed me so much, I sent the following letter to Mr. Piermarini:

Dear Mr. Piermarini,
I received your letter today asserting “that you have closed your account with Harrisdirect and I would like to do everything in my power to persuade you to come back.”
The fact is, Mr. Piermarini, I did not close my account with your firm.
Without consulting me, Harrisdirect arbitrarily closed my account and confiscated my 10 shares of Cirrus Logic.
Let me explain further.
I bought the stock on Oct. 11, 2000 when it was valued at $40.375 a share. That is to say, I invested $403.75 in Cirrus Logic.
Like many stocks, Cirrus Logic was hit hard by the post 9/11 market slump and I watched as my stock plummeted in value. Recognizing that the only way to lose money in the stock market is to sell short, I determined to hang onto my stock until it regained value or until the company went out of business.
Harrisdirect apparently took a different view. Citing account maintenance fees and without warning, Harrisdirect terminated my account and, in my view, stole my 10 shares of Cirrus Logic on Oct. 13, 2004.
Whether I would ever have recouped my $403.75 investment remains to be seen, but that opportunity was denied me by Harrisdirect.
Will I come back to Harrisdirect? I think not.
Will I use whatever influence I have to dissuade investors from doing business with Harrisdirect? You may be sure.

Maria gives granddaughter Lisa her first digital photography lesson. 

Insufficiently Conservative

I created a sampler wedding album as a promotional tool for the wedding photography business Maria and I are trying to build.
It has photos from both of my sons’ weddings, a wedding of an in-law and some shots of a Hispanic bride dressing at home for her wedding.
We happened to get a chance to shoot the Hispanic girl’s preparations because Maria is good friends with her parents, a delightful immigrant couple from Mexico who operate a couple of Mexican restaurants in this area.
I love the images and think they fit well with our portfolio.
During the post-graduation open house for my stepson on Sunday, the album got passed around and a couple of the aunts who are in their 70s were startled to see non-Anglo faces among the photos.
Maria told me later that she overheard one aunt saying to the other that, “I don’t think he’s as conservative as we are.”
And I overheard them going on about how alarmed they are at the influx of Mexican and other Latino immigrants, legal and otherwise.
This from a bunch of women whose parents were born in Italy.
I had to chuckle when I heard suggestion that I might be more liberal than they. Truth be told, on most issues, I’m probably too conservative for their sensibilities.
But when it comes to slamming the door on people who want to escape from oppression or crushing poverty to live the American dream, I have to part company with people like Maria’s aunts.
My own mother was of the same mind as those women. I remember Maria and I taking her out for lunch the Easter before her October, 2000, death. We were driving through the small town where she had lived all of her adult life. It’s a community of about 2,500 mostly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant folks that, in recent years has seen an influx of Mexican families, drawn by the prospect of jobs at a new pork processing plant on the south edge of town.
“Just look at them, laying around and not working,” she hissed. “I’d like to kick their teeth in.”
Needless to say, we were startled. And, the vision of my 80-year-old mother being able to kick anyone’s teeth in was hopelessly bizarre. And, why would they be working on Easter Sunday?
I reminded her that our German and Swiss forebears came here for the same reasons the Mexicans do and it’s a damned fortunate thing for us that our ancestors weren’t shut out.
The subject got a good treatment recently in an episode of South Park when the townspeople were up in arms over space aliens coming to live in their town. The battle cry was a barely coherent, “They took our jobs!”
We hear that a lot from unmotivated losers who freak out over the idea of people they think are inferior having the ambition and gumption to make a success of themselves.
Immigrants have always given this country a booster shot of vitality that only underscores the genius of our brand of democracy and freedom.

Awwwwwwk!

This sounds like an urban legend to me, but one of Maria's aunts swears she knows the woman to whom this happened.
A woman named Julie had a talking parrot whose wings were clipped, preventing it from flying. She was on her backyard deck with the parrot on his perch and a hawk suddenly swooped down and snatched the parrot up in its talons.
As the hawk carried the parrot away to its doom, the owner heard the parrot screeching, "Julie! Julie! Julie!"

Today is my granddaughter Lisa's first birthday. Here she is at 10 months with her mom, Nicky. Live long and prosper, Lisa. 

Here's how Lisa's dad, Steve, celebrated his first birthday. That's my parents in the background. My mother clearly disapproved of Steve getting to maul his cake. The rest of us thought it was great fun. 

Here's Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (on the right), shooting the breeze with lunchtime patrons of the Spartan Inn, a cafe in Wingate, Ind., that boasts the best breaded pork tenderloin sandwich I've ever tasted. Mitch was on his way back to Indianapolis after a morning speech at Purdue University. He had visited the Spartan Inn last year while campaigning for office and just had to come back for another tenderloin and fries. For the record, the governor likes his tenderloin with mayo, tomato slices and ketchup. He's also a motorcyclist. 

Walking Psycho Jack before he imploded. The guys at the shelter weren't surprised to see him coming back. Sorry, Jack. 

A belated happy birthday

Pete Townshend turned 60 last Thursday.
Since I'll reach that milestone on July 14, I feel a certain kinship with the guy I consider the greatest talent in the history of Rock & Roll and a founding member of the greatest band in the history of R&R.
Just like his creation, Tommy, Pete drew his first breaths while England was still celebrating Victory in Europe. Tommy and Quadrophenia were largely autobiographical works for Pete. I found Tommy a bit too dark and disturbing for my taste, but Quadrophenia hit me right between the eyes, or ears as the case may be. It's my "desert island" album and hardly a month goes by that I don't listen to it in its entirety. It speaks to me in ways I can't begin to articulate and I was delighted to hear Eddie Vedder cite it as a pivotal musical experience in his life.
Every now and then, I get out the Concert for New York City DVD, made in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and find myself smiling through the tears as I watch Pete thrashing and windmilling with all the fire and fury of a guy one-third his age.
"I hope I die before I get old."
Yes, Pete. Me too. But that's not going to be for a long, long time for either of us.

Psycho Jack, trying to merge with the Berber carpet on the stairway landing Tuesday night. A mopey, depressed dog is a terrible thing to see. 

Hit the road, Jack

I’m returning Psycho Jack, the red heeler, to the Animal Welfare League shelter this morning.
Jack seemed to be coming out of his shell on Sunday and Monday. His ears and tail were up a fair amount of the time and he seemed to have a spring in his step.
But yesterday, he imploded. He seemed less perky during the morning walk in the park and, as the day wore on, became increasingly morose and depressed. By late afternoon, he didn’t want to come out of his kennel and when I took him outside, he sought out secure-looking spots behind bushes and in porch corners to hunker down and hide.
By dinnertime, he had retreated to a dark corner in Austin’s room and had to be picked up and carried back to his kennel. I’ve never seen a dog so depressed and emotionally shut down.
Ruthie didn’t help any. From the moment of his arrival, she growled and barked whenever he tried to eat or drink, even though it was from bowls we had designated as his and separate from Ruthie’s. She apparently decided there was a real danger that we would run out of food and water and, consequently, all of the food and water in the house belonged to her.
We tried to give Jack a wider run of the house Sunday evening and, when we sat on the couch to watch TV, we invited him and Ruthie to hop up and join us.
When Jack tried to climb onto the couch, Ruthie barked angrily and forced her way between him and us.
Throughout his four-day stay, it was clear he was intimidated by Ruthie and he went out of his way to avoid her.
By last night, we had concluded that Jack is too emotionally fragile to make it in our home as long as Ruthie is here. If he is to be helped, I think it’s going to have to be in a home where he’s the only dog and has no competition.
Maria decided she’ll write a column about our experience with Jack, including a sympathetic photo, and hope that the right people come forward to adopt him.
I hate it that it didn’t work, but maybe we can still be part of the solution by getting him properly placed.

Chaos and a 200-mile motorcycle ride

We picked up the red heeler, aka Australian Cattle Dog, at the shelter Saturday morning and brought him home.
As expected, he was pretty freaked out by the ride, new surroundings and Ruthie: ears down and tail between legs.
We quickly discovered he was never taught not to "mark" his territory indoors when he lifted a leg and whizzed on the floor scrubber parked by the kitchen door.
Ruthie decided he posed a grave threat to her food and water supply, i.e. all of the food and water in the house. Much angry barking and growling whenever the new dog - we're calling him Psycho Jack, or just Jack for short - tried to eat or drink from his own bowls.
Ruthie also took to staying in her kennel all weekend so she could guard her supply of food and water.
We had much to accomplish over the weekend - chiefly beginning the massive cleanup for Austin's graduation openhouse next weekend and doing concrete planning for a website for our wedding photography business. We got pretty much nothing done because of drama associated with having a new dog in the house.
Maria's mother had been in the hospital for three days after being diagnosed with a viral pericarditis, an inflammation of the membrane around the heart. That explains why she's been short of breath lately. The treatment was rest, and lots of it. Visiting her Saturday evening and photographing a restaurant our neighbor is revitalizing were piled onto the plate. We got to the photo shoot but missed visiting hours.
She was sent home for a few more days of bedrest Sunday and Maria took her parents some pancakes and other breakfast food.
Having complained about yet another good motorcycling weekend being stolen from me, I proposed to go for a ride while Maria and her daughter catered breakfast.
I headed west on I-74 in glorious sunshine without any particular destination in mind. After a few miles, during which I watched the odometer on my '03 BMW K1200GT roll over 20,000 miles, I decided to find Twin Cities BMW Motorcycles in Savoy, Ill.
With the demise of my local dealership, Twin Cities at a distance of just under 100 miles, is now my nearest BMW motorcycle dealer.
The ride was pleasant, made all the more so by conversations with strangers at a couple of rest areas. At the first stop, I emerged from the restroom to find two guys admiring my bike, which led to a conversation about the various features and qualities of BMWs.
At the second stop, a guy from Peoria, Ill., who was en route home with his wife and kids, complimented my bike and mentioned he had an '04 R1150GS. He was wearing a t-shirt from my late lamented local dealership and it turns out we were both at Spokane for the BMW MOA national rally last July and know many of the same people and places.
I found Twin Cities BMW right where it was supposed to be - on U.S. 45 south of Urbana - and had a quick lunch at a Subway near the dealership. The dealer was, of course, closed on Sunday but the point of my mission was to go for a ride and locate the place.
Having done that, I headed home, somehow missing a turn of U.S. 45 through Urbana and ending up taking a local road east to St. Joseph where I re-joined the interstate.
All systems worked perfectly and the XM radio made the ride all the nicer.
But I was coming home to chaos.
Maria and I had planned to hash out wedding photography stuff after dinner. But the girl laying out Monday's edition of Maria's newspaper called as we were clearing the dishes to announce she had a serious shortage of photos and stories. So Maria ended up shooting photos of the neighbor kids on their backyard trampoline, then dragging me to the office where we prepped the photos and wrote a couple of stories to fill holes in the paper.
On the drive home, Maria sensed something was wrong and asked. I unloaded, saying the new dog in the house has put me into sensory overload, especially coming at a time when our energies need to be on other things - like making money.
She has become very attached to Jack and encouraged by the way he's come out of his shell since arriving at our place, but she especially hates the thought of having to take him back to a shelter which very obviously bums him out.
I agreed to try to give the situation a few more days.
But Jack has spent the morning locked in his kennel because I have much work to do and can't spare the time to walk him or keep him from whizzing on the furniture.
Maria, I fear, didn't think this through to the point of realizing that the burden of keeping Jack entertained, educated and out of trouble, falls on my shoulders, since I'm the one who's at home during the day.
I hope, for her sake, we can make this dog thing work, but I'm not terribly optimistic.
We shall see...

The red heeler is coming home with us for a weekend visit today. If it works out, he'll stay. We haven't settled on a name for him, but considering his abandonment issues and depression, I'm lobbying strongly for Psycho. 

Ruthie and the red heeler temporarily named Rusty. They seem to be a better match. He came out of his blue funk once he got into the play area with us and looks like he can become a happy dog with the right care. 

Ruthie, me and Reno during a meet-and-greet yesterday at the Animal Welfare League shelter. Reno is too hyper for Ruthie and for us, too, probably. 

Power. Max Power. Will he make the cut and join our pack? 

Dog tale

Maria has decided we need a second dog.
And she has decided it should be an Australian shepherd, mainly because she had an Aussie when she was a kid and was very fond of it.
I like Aussies too, but I wasn't feeling any particular desire for a second dog. , Now that she's stopped rolling in backyard poop, Ruthie the Wonder Dog is really all the dog I need.
My friend Skip, who retired from the newspaper about five years before I bailed out, has taken to adopting strays. He and his wife now share their suburban home with seven dogs and it's freaking pandemonium whenever a stranger comes to the door. We toyed with the idea of taking their most recent acquistion - a golden retriever named Belle - off of their hands, but Skip's wife Gloria isn't letting Belle go. Probably just as well, since shortly after her arrival, Belle demonstrated that she knew how to open a regrigerator and remove and devour whatever interested her inside it. She seems to favor dairy products - yogurt and cottage cheese, but finished off a pizza the other night. Skip has blocked the fridge door with planters and barstools to no avail. Belle just moves them and helps herself whenever nobody is looking.
I was taken with the novelty of having a dog that smart, but decided I have enough to fill my days without having to stay one step ahead of a refrigerator-raiding dog.
So when Belle left the picture, Maria began lobbying hard for an Aussie. She called friends with Aussie connections and she made the rounds of the animal shelters.
This week, she called me from work to say the Animal Welfare League had a year-old black Aussie they call Reno. Reno apparenly ran away from home a month ago and spent the last few weeks as a guest in another family's home. Over the course of his visit, his hosts discovered he is very smart and knows a bunch of tricks. Apparently Reno wasn't getting along with the host's dog, so he ended up in the shelter.
Maria and I went over to the shelter at noon Wednesday to meet Reno.
It's horribly distressing and depressing to walk past all of those caged dogs, all of them up on the chain-link begging you to "Get me out of here, for the Love of God! Take me home! Please! Please! Please!"
All but one red heeler, who lay in the back of his enclosure staring at the wall. Turns out his owners moved and left him behind, chained to his backyard doghouse. Neighbors gave him food and water and finally called the authorities when it became obvious the owners weren't coming back.
"He's depressed," one of the shelter workers observed. No shit. I don't think I've ever seen a dog so depressed. He gave us a disinterested sidelong glance and then turned back to his wall.
Dogs who don't appeal to visitors enough to be adopted are euthanized. That's a politically correct way of saying Executed by Lethal Injection. Unless he gets it together, the heeler is a goner.
Reno, however, is guaranteed a home on the strength of his personality. We took him and an interesting looking puppy out into the big fenced play area and he ran and leaped and rolled and had a grand time, his sleek black coat glistening in the warm May sun. He ran with me, came when I called him, jumped so high to greet me that his head was at my eye level and seemed enthusiastic about everything.
He is, in short, a terrific dog.
But he's an Aussie. They're bright, enegetic working dogs who need to herd things and have lots of room.
Our house sits on a 55x165-foot lot and we have nothing to herd, except ourselves. Since Maria works at her newspaper 10-12 hours a day, it would fall to me to entertain the dog and I don't know that I can spare the time. Reno deserves an interesting, fulfilling life and I worry that he would be bored to the point of becoming destructive if he lived here. His entertainment would hinge on how well he would interact with Ruthie. Ideally, they could become friends and entertain each other.
So we're taking Ruthie to meet Reno at noon today and romp around the play area see how they get along. If it's a good match, we can bring Reno home as early as tomorrow.
Maria didn't much care for the name "Reno" and I wasn't crazy about it either.
Standing in the shower yesterday morning, running through possible names, I recalled the Simpsons episode where Homer decides he needs a more glamorous name and has his name changed to Max Power. He also suggests that Marge change her name to Hootie McBoob.
So, if the sleek black Aussie comes to live with us, he will become Max Power.
Stay tuned.

WWJR?

This will probably be the only post you ever see here on my religious views, even tongue-in-cheek, so don't worry about being preached to. At least not about religion.
Paging through the current issue of BMW Motorcycle Owners of America's Owners News while eating my oatmeal this morning, my eyes fell upon an ad for the Missouri State Rally on page 101.
At the top of the ad was a profile photo of an R1100S and under it, in Times Roman capitals, the letters WWJR.
After a few seconds of puzzlement, I realized I was looking at a clever variant of WWJD (What Would Jesus Do). In this case, the question is What Would Jesus Ride?
As much as I'd like to believe Jesus would ride a BMW - after all, he had style and knew about taking risks - I think it's a theologically unsound assertion.
While it might make sense for the Son of God to choose the most exalted motorcycle brand in the world, that's not the image that comes to my mind. After all, we're talking about a guy who rode a donkey into Jerusalem. He wasn't affluent, hung out with the poorest of the poor on the edges of society and didn't have much to do with the rich and powerful.
As much as it pains me to say it, if you force me to pick the appropriate motorized ride for the man from Gallilee, it would have to be a clapped out Vespa or, at best (Lord forgive me) an AMC-era Harley-Davidson.

A year of blogging

I started this blog a year ago today. According to the profile stats, I posted 159 times - some text, others photos - and cranked out 53,498 words.
Like many folks in Blogland, I've had dry spells.
Looking back on what I've written, I like the travel stuff best. There's a lot of self-absorbed ranting and venting, but that's part of what this is for, isn't it?
I've seen other bloggers come and go as their interest in posting waxes and wanes. I've enjoyed reading it all and am looking for new favorites to replace some that have vanished.
Anyone have a fave they want to share?

Fountain pen in hand, Capt. Phil Kroon writes a letter home on the day of Victory in Europe. 

Capt. Kroon's V-E Day letter to his wife, Jean, written on Adolf Hitler's official stationery. 

Capt. Kroon's V-E Day letter

Sixty years ago today, Capt. Philip C. Kroon, an artillery officer with the U.S. Army's 144th Field Artillery Group, took pen in hand in the garden outside an Austrian hotel and wrote a letter to his young bride in Redlands, Calif.
It was V-E Day - Victory in Europe Day - and the young captain from Grand Rapids, Mich., had been in combat since his unit came ashore in Normandy a few weeks after the June 6, 1944, invastion. He was looking forward to coming home, but mindful that the war against Japan seemed far from finished and that he might be needed in the Pacific Theatre.
Here is what he wrote on a sheet of Adolf Hitler's personal letterhead, liberated a day or two earlier from the Führer's Berghof retreat at nearby Berchtesgaden:

My adored wife,
Finally the work of the past year for me and over three years for the nation is completed. The war here is over completely. Of course, we are glad it is over, but to us it is sort of an anti-climax. For nearly two months now, we have completely routed the Germans. During the past few days we have seen steady streams of German soldiers marching to the rear. At some places, even the super-highway is jammed. It was a sight never to forget and one that only happens once in a lifetime. I wanted to get some pictures of it, but my camera was stolen some time ago. I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to worry. I now have another very good German camera that I took from a German soldier, so am better equipped than before.
Now that we are no longer at war here, I should have more time to write you and expect to get off better than one letter every five or six days. In fact, it's now been seven days this time. I'm sorry, darling. I'll try to make it up to you.

About a week ago I went through the Dachau concentration camp. Any pictures you see or stories you hear are only a small part of the picture. The stench was indescribable as well as the actual scenes. I saw some of the toughest soldiers nauseated. I won't tell you any details for they shouldn't be put on paper. It was the most terrible thing I have ever seen.

In contrast, a couple of days ago I went through one of Hitler's palaces -not the one at Berchtesgaden, but an old Hapsburg palace that he took over. It was a paragon of beauty and symmetry. In the two main floors was not a sign of Nazi Occupation except that most of the furnishings had been looted, mainly from France.

The walls were covered with priceless tapestries, the floors with thick pile rugs. We were nearly the first soldiers in the place and looked through it by ourselves. We went snooping in the cellar and came across two storage rooms. One was nearly filled with medals, of which I have a few choice ones. I also found one silver knife (not table) in the house - the only one there, so I suppose it belonged to Hitler. In another room, we found some stationery, of which this is the choicest. His personal. I have quite a bit of it and will send it home. You can give a sheet to various people, but save some of each kind, especially this with just "Der Führer" on it. I also came across some other excellent souvenirs - One pair of field glasses - the best I have ever seen - fifteen power - this may not mean much to you, but they are two and ½ times as powerful as the ones I and Pop used to have The must be worth three or four hundred dollars. I also have a pair of Luftwaffe swords that are not in the best of shape but will look good fixed up and crossed in my den if I ever have one.

Guess what, Sweets. I shaved off my mustache today - because the war is over. No one noticed it so I guess it couldn't have been so good. I'm not making any plans for a quick return home, beloved, nor am I getting any fancy ideas about it. I would give anything just to spend a few weeks with you, but there is much to be done, both here and in the Orient and I'm sure I'll be one place or the other.

Some will get to go home on their way to the Pacific and rumors are already afloat, but I'm not counting on anything - then we won't have the disappointment.
These Bavarian Alps are really beautiful, dearest mine. They are all snow covered yet, although we are not very high and last week we had snow in Munich. Today was marvelous. The view of the mountains is similar to that from our front yard, though the mountains are much closer and not as high.

During the last mad rush we have been getting practically no mail and I'm way behind, although today I got the letter you wrote on the eve of our anniversary. Sweet - just as they all are - but why not, with the sweetest wife in the world writing them. I wish my letters would get there more regularly. You probably have had a batch since that time, but it is nicer when they come spread over a long time.

Darling, I adore you completely. I don't dream of you often, but that isn't my fault. When I'm awake I can control my thoughts and they always include you. Always I wish you could share the beautiful scenery and the old German cities - Worms, Nurnberg, Augsberg, Munich, Saltzburg and the rest with me. Maybe, in future years, after they are rebuilt we will see them together. Anything we could do together would be wonderful. One thing in particular - I miss you so, Jeanie. I'll always adore you.

Your only Phil
P.S.
A little picture of you know who.


Capt. Kroon came home six months later. He made a career of the army, taking a reduction in rank to sergeant in order to remain in a downsized postwar military. His last duty post was as an instructor in the Reserve Officer Training Corps program at Purdue University. Following his retirement, he worked for the U.S. Postal Service. He died of cancer in 1988. Diane, the first of his three daughters, was born Oct. 30, 1946, and grew up to be my first wife.