Improving the McDonald's Experience

I'm sitting in a McDonald's in Southport, Ind., a southern suburb of Indianapolis, where I just finished lunch and am killing time until my 1 p.m. dental appointment.
Lunchtime at a McD is usually pretty chaotic, especially when the place is full of kids like this one is.
However... I'm on my motorcycle and brought along my in-ear stereo headphones that I use while riding to listen to XM satellite radio.
I'm also carrying my iPod.
So I stuck the earphones into my ears, plugged into the iPod and am listening to a Leo Laport podcast from Aug. On KFI radio in Los Angeles.
I've been a Leo Laporte fan for a few years now, ever since I was helping Tim Balough move stuff to his new home in the Colorado high country. He had a satellite dish of the old variety and we spent hours upon hours watching Leo and his friends on Tech TV.
Unfortunately, TechTV got bought by some greedheads who wrecked it. Now, the only place you can see Leo on TV is Canada and Australia. But he's on the radio in LA and has lots and lots of podcasts.
Leo is a genius when it comes to explaining all of the arcane details of computers, software, cell phones and other such technology in a friendly, understandable way. If you haven't heard him, Google him up and see what you've been missing.

--
Sent from my Treo

A smiling Pete

I just had to post this one too.

Climbing the learning curve

We've had the Nikon D200 for a few months now, just getting used to it and exploring the features but it wasn't until this afternoon that I got around to checking out some of the elements of the Nikon Creative Lighting System (CLS). The SB-800 speedlights we've been using for a couple of years are CLS-capable, but the D100s we were using were not, so it wasn't until the D200 showed up that it became an issue.
We shot photos for a furniture store ad earlier this week in which I tried to get the SB-800s to act as remote/slave flashes without success.
I downloaded a primer on the subject from the internet this afternoon, read and re-read the pertinent passages in the flash and camera manuals and discovered that I needed to change a camera setting so it would tell the flash what to do. The results were encouraging and I convinced Pete the Aussie to sit for a few portrait shots, one of which is posted here.
Maria just called to say she's on her way home. We have to be at a wedding rehearsal in a couple of hours and tomorrow will shoot our third wedding in three weeks.
Fortunately, we have nothing booked for next weekend, but the weekend after that is yet another wedding. If we're not careful, this could turn into a real business.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Summer yields to fall this week and my world is full of changes.
My mortgage lady friend says we could conceivably close on the sale of my parents' house late next week.
That house has been in my family since April, 1954 when my parents and I moved in. I was in the third grade and it was a very big deal to move from the only home I'd ever known to this neat new house where I would have an upstairs bedroom.
I last lived there in the months between my discharge from the U.S. Air Force in early November, 1965 and when I returned to college in January, 1966. So that makes it more than 40 years since I called the place home.
My dad died in a nursing home in November, 1997, and we moved Mom to a retirement community in April, 2000, after she injured her leg in a fall.
It stood idle until the late summer of 2001 when my first tenant moved in. It's been a rental property every since and I've known from the start that I was never meant to be a landlord. So I'm only a little sad to part company with the place, very relieved not to have to worry about flood or fire or other calamity theere and delighted to have the money from the sale.
The additional cash will make it possible for us to make a lot of long-delayed improvements at our own house and pump some much needed revenue into our photography business.
Plus, we desperately need a vacation together and I hear Colorado calling ever stronger with each passing day.
--
Sent from my Treo

Great free image viewer

Tim Balough turned me on to Irfanview several years ago and I've used it as my principal image viewer and slideshow program ever since, going through more periodic upgrades than I can recall.
It's freeware and it's amazingly diverse.
It was created by a Bosnian-born programmer named Irfan Skiljan who lives in Vienna, Austria and it shows stills, plays movies and music and includes some basic photo editing tools. There are also tons of plug-ins that can also be downloaded for free.
If you haven't tried it, you really should.
Check it out at www.irfanview.com

Not all that bad

Saturday's wedding shoot turned out to be closer to normal that I'd expected.
Yes, the bride had the dry heaves at the hairdresser's on Saturday morning and was on prescription drugs much of the day.
And there was a flying trip to the tux rental warehouse some 80 miles away because of a size screw-up for one of the groomsmen.
And the tent/chair rental guys showed up to collect their stuff a couple hours before the wedding. (It was a mistake - they had misread the pick-up time.)
And the bride arrived more than 90 minutes later than originally planned.
But the ceremony went ahead on schedule, nobody freaked out and the wedding party rode motorcycles bareheaded the three miles or so to the reception without incident.
We only charged them $500, which was hideously cheap and I have decreed that it's the last of the cheapies for friends or coworkers. This is too much work to let it go that cheaply.
And yes, the aisle runner was white fake fur and the bride and her attendants all wore flipflops.

Bizarro World

Shooting what promises to be a world class clusterfuck wedding today.
Clue: the aisle runner will be white faux fur & the bride will wear flip-flops.
We gotta raise our prices & get out of this social niche.

--
Sent from my Treo

A Picture Share!

Lunch at White Castle - 5 cheese and a large Diet Coke.

Schloss Weiss

That's German for White Castle and that's where I am at the moment, having polished off 4.5 cheesburgers.
White Castle is funky and no-class, but I love the taste and have to have them every now and then.
I've been hooked since around 1964 when college friends introduced me to the little square burger in a box.
I was a student at Indiana State University - well, actually, it was still Indiana State College at the time - in Terre Haute, Ind.
The nearest White Castle was in Indianapolis, which was nearly a two-hour drive east on U.S. This was years before the Interstate highway system existed around here in any major way, so it was down the old National Road to the White Castle.
Naturally, after driving so far, we stuffed ourselves stupid on these White Castle runs.
Burgers were a mere 12 cents then, compared with today's price of 49 cents. But today's White Castle hamburgers and cheeseburgers still taste the same - greasy and tangy with onions. They still start with square little hamburger patties with five holes in them - arranged like the spots on the five side of dice - presumably to make them cook faster on the grill.
I remember visiting a White Castle in Jeffersonville, Ind., with a college friend back in the late '60s and being dazzled by the speed with which the girl at the grill could flip, bun and box the burgers. It was a beautiful thing to see, made even more beautiful by the fact that I've only seen that kind of White Castle expertise a few times since.
Today's WC burger flippers approach their work with a nonchalance and indifference that borders on being an insult to the customer.
When I started my career at The Indianapolis News in 1967, there was a tiny little White Castle restaurant with maybe 10 counter seats and three booths up Delaware Street by the Indianapolis Public Schools Education Center. Bob Basler, now of Reuters fame, and I used to make the two-block hike on a regular basis for lunch.
They used to have a stainless steel pocket-type rack by the door stocked with copies of the White Castle House Organ - a regularly published magazine filled with articles and letters written by WC employees around the United States. Bob and I thought it was somewhere between funny and pathetic, but we always read it. I haven't seen one in years and can only suppose it went the way of the motivated employees like the girl in Jeffersonville.
The service may have gone to hell - I spent 20 minutes sitting outside the drive-up window of the Lebanon, Ind., White Castle a few weeks ago waiting for my order (and I was the only person in line) - but the burgers and cheeseburgers still call me back.

--
Sent from my Treo

Memory enhancement

We shot a wedding last Saturday night and a portrait assignment the next day, generating something like 3,500 big digital images in a single weekend.
We have three more weddings lined up over the next four weekends and probably another portrait job or two in the works.
All of this is heavily taxing our combined hard drive capacity - the 80GB on our Sony VAIO laptop and Maria's and my desktops, both of which have two hard drives.
It's also a big hassle to burn usable CDs or DVDs to transfer the images from the laptop, where we dump them in the field, to a desktop computer for final editing, client CD burning and album composition. I've tried doing a copy/transfer via the wireless router, but it's too slow for my taste.
Plus, we've been concerned about how to create a portable storage medium that could be relocated offsite as insurance against distaster.
I stumbled upon the solution the other day while browsing through the aisles of a Staples office supply store - an external hard drive.
The one that caught my attention is the My Book unit by Western Digital. I've used WD hard drives for a long time and have been pleased with their reliability. The My Book I bought today for $158.98 (sales tax included) has a 250GB capacity and takes up very little desktop real estate. It's 6.71" tall, 2.25" wide and 5.55" deep and looks like, well, a book standing on the desk.
This model connects to the computer via a very robust cable and USB 2.0.
I've just now copied last weekend's images and will now take My Book up to our office and copy the images to my desktop computer.
I love technology.

Frühstück

That's breakfast in German and that's what I'm doing at the moment, although you won't find much German food on the menu at Denny's.
It's Friday again and I've come to the county seat to pay what I fervently hope will be the final $100 child support installment to Maria's ex.
With any luck at all, her son will find his spine and move out of his dad's house during the coming week. He's been under tremendous psychological pressure from his father and stepmother, but I have confidence that he'll find the strength to get out and be a man. Especially when he realizes his girlfriend is watching.
It's a glorious sunny September day and reminds me of Sept. 11, 2001 - along with all of the news/talk shows today.
I was en route to the BMW motorcycle dealership in Indianapolis when the first plane hit. When I arrived, the head mechanic - the only mechanic I've ever known who listens to NPR all day - growled about some assholes flying a plane into the World Trade Center.
The only TV in the place was a small portable that was used to view promotional videotapes and they didn't have a cable connection. So they pulled up the rabbit ears antennae and got a passable over-the-air signal. Good enough that we were able to watch the second plane hit and the two towers collapse.
I remember Tom Brokaw saying exactly what I was thinking: "This is war."
And it still is.
Too many Americans never really got their brains around that. Maybe they are so conditioned by stupid disaster movies that they unwittingly think of the 9/11 attacks as some kind of unreal TV show.
But those were real people raining down from those towers and, for them, it was as real as it gets.
They thought they were safe that morning, just as we think we're safe today. But as long as there are wacko dirtbags like Bin Laden out there, none of us is safe.
So, five years into this war on terror, I'm delighted that the battleground is in Iraq and Afghanistan and not in New York or Los Angeles or Chicago or Indianapolis.
End of rant.

--
Sent from my Treo

A Picture Share!

Breakfast at Denny's.

My home town

This is about the town where I grew up, not where I live now.
I'm selling my parents' house - funny how they've been dead for years and I still think of it as their house rather than mine - and rode my motorcycle up to take a sales contract to the woman who has rented it for a couple of years.
Riding down the leafy streets of my childhood, I recalled seeing those streets and houses from the saddle of my bicycle.
About a block from the house, I passed a guy watering the lawn in front of a low one-story frame house.
He was about my age, dressed in shorts and an untucked sport shirt.
I looked a little closer and realized he was in my high school graduating class.
John, like me, was an only child. But he was an athlete - a gifted basketball and baseball player who was short on academic ability but long on boyish charisma.
His parents gave him pretty much everything he wanted, including a new Plymouth Fury when he turned 16.
He was a kind of golden boy in high school and doubtless expected the rest of his life to be equally charmed.
He went off to Ball State University, but didn't finish, and married his high school girlfriend.
I remember bumping into hiim on a street corner in Indianapolis a year or two after I'd begun my career as a reporter with The Indianapolis News.
He made sure I knew he was doing well and had earned "5 figures" ($10k or more) the year before. Yeah, that was more than I was making.
I lost track of him over the years, reconnecting at five-year intervals at class reunions and getting the occasional scrap of gossip from friends.
He got divorced and drank a lot. I heard a rumor that he was a professional gambler. Pretty much every time I saw him at a reunion, he was drunk and hiding out from his ex, who was also in our class.
Over the last 10 years or so, I heard he was living with his widowed mother and there he was, at the house of his childhood, watering the lawn with little to show for the 43 years since we collected our diplomas and began our lives as grownups.
John is, for me, emblematic of that town. All of the real achievers left and only come back to visit.
Ou friend Jack is an executive with major trailer manufacturer.
My friend Lynda is obscenely wealthy, living in Louisiana with her hometown husband who got rich closing banks after the Louisiana oil economy crashed.
I'm sure this pattern was repeated by every class since mine and a lot before it and it created a growing intellectual vaccuum in the little county seat town of 2,500.
I was reminded of that later when I stopped at the town's McDonald's - my nomination for the worst-run McDonald's in the world.
As I tried to enter, I found the inner door blocked by an oblivious woman who was chatting with an equally oblivious McD employee. With another customer standing impatiently behind me, I finally shouldered my way past them, but neither gave any indication that they realized they were blocking a doorway and inconveniencing others.
So I wasn't particularly surprised when my request for an M&M NcFlurry was answered with a dull stare and the explanation that the "McFlurry machine is broke down."
Of course it is.
I was reminded anew that my local attorney friend who has lived in that town all of his life, told me he has never set foot inside the McDonald's.
I seem to be doomed to re-discover the wisdom of his attitude everytime I go there.
--
Sent from my Treo

Wendy's observations

This must be job applicant day at Wendy's.
I'm sitting in a corner booth watching the hapless fucks maxing out their reading and writing skills to complete the Wendy's job application.
Nearest me is a couple - he's a skinny little twerp in his 30s with jeans, a wifebeater and an Indianapolis Colts blue cap.
She's maybe 10 years younger and twice his weight, but looks significantly brighter. I find myself wondering what they've been doing with their lives that brings them into the job market at this level. I'd bet that he can't pass a drug test.
A young woman in her early 20s is hunched over a job app at a table over by the window. She looks pretty intense about it, with her glasses and wild black hair. She's wearing jeans, a black tanktop and lots of silver jewelry, including a big boxy silver cross. She also has tattoos - big ones - on her chest and right bicep.
Now Mr. Colts cap has advanced to the interview stage.
"Have you ever worked fast food before?" asks the manager. I can't catch his answer but it hasn't occurred to him to take off his cap.
He's smiling a lot and seems to be maintaining good eye contact, so he may have some people skills after all.
He's nervous. Has his hands clasped as he leans on the table on his elbows. Hands clasped - opening to gesture - clasped again.
"Did she break up with him?" asks a woman talking on a cell phone, ignoring the man sitting across the table from her.
Neil Young's "Heart of Gold" plays on the ceiling speakers and the manager dismisses Mr. Colts cap. He and his woman friend step outside for a cigarette.

--
Sent from my Treo

Zen and the Art of iPod Maintenance

My 60 gig iPod (with video) has been giving me trouble this week.
At some point, it stopped responding to the Turn Off procedure of holding down the Play/Pause point on the control wheel for a few seconds.
Consequently, it was perpetually on. That was no big deal when it was docked because it was getting recharged through the USB 2.0 connection.
But when I carried it around, the fact that it couldn't be turned off meant the battery was getting needlessly drained. I was starting to worry about possible damage to the battery, which is not user replaceable.
I decided to attack the problem last night and went to the iPod support site. I downloaded v1.1.2 of the operating software (it came with v1.1.1), installed it and then wiped the memory clean with a Restore procedure that put it back to the factory settings, albeit with v1.1.2 in the driver's seat.
This all occurred after 11 p.m. I was tired, so I decided to let it restore the 17.3 gigabytes of music and other data while I slept.
So I was delighted this morning to see the welcome "fully charged" symbol on the display. And the Turn Off feature is functional once again.
O, frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

Crikey!

It sounds like a bad joke, but it's true.
Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, was killed this weekend when a stingray he was filming put its tail barb into his heart.
It kinda figures, considering the level of risk-taking he enjoyed, but it's still a bit of a shock.
He was 44.

Lisa Lisa

We made a long-overdue pilgrimage to Cincinnati yesterday to visit my son Steve, his wife Nicky and, of course, our granddaughter Lisa.
We haven't seen them since shortly after Lisa's second birthday at the end of May, so naturally Lisa has grown in every dimension.
She exudes wisdom beyond her years and seems to have the ability to recognize when a bad mood is overtaking her and pull away from it.
Maria and Steve and I took her to a park near their home where she had a great time climbing and sliding and swinging and running. When it came time to leave, her face clouded up and she stuck out her lower lip in what - for a lesser child - would have been the prelude to a crying fit. She was riding on Steve's shoulders at the moment and Maria stuck out her lower lip in challenge. Lisa apparently realized how she looked, decided that was not cool and then flashed a sunny smile, proclaiming, "Now I'm happy!"
She also spontaneously used her fingers to pull her mouth out of shape, a move her dad and his big brother Sean did when they were kids. (See lower picture of Steve when he was her age.)

Patriot Guard Riders mission

PGR mission for the funeral of State Police Lt. Gary Dudley in Brownsburg, Ind.
Dudley and another officer were killed last week while on a charity bicycle ride to raise money for the wives and children of officers killed in the line of duty.
Their support truck was rammed from behind by a box truck and lurched forward striking Dudley and a former Lake County police chief.
It was the largest police funeral I've ever seen in Indiana.
The weather was overcast with mist and occasional sprinkles. Consequently, only 16 of us were present, but we got plenty of thank-yous, including from Gov. Mitch Daniels who came over to greet and thank us and shake each man's hand.

Betcha didn't know this...

Hoosier Journalist William Herschel's "Ain't God Good to Indiana?" meshes perfectly with the tune to Schiller's "Ode to Joy" from the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Let's all sing along, folks:


"Ain't God good to Indiana?
Folks, a feller never knows
Just how close he is to Eden
Till, sometime, he ups an' goes
Seekin' fairer, greener pastures
Than he has right here at home,
Where there's sunshine in the clover
An' honey in th' comb;
Where the ripples on th' river
Kinda chuckles as they flow--
Ain't God good to Indiana?
Ain't He, fellers? Ain't He, though?

"Ain't God good to Indiana?
Seems to me He has a way
Gittin' me all outta humor
Just to see how long I'll stay
When I git th' gypsy feelin'
That I'd like to find a spot
Where th' clouds ain't quite so restless,
Or th' sun don't shine so hot.
But, I don't git far, I'll tell you,
Till I'm whisperin' soft an' low:
Ain't God good to Indiana?
Ain't He, fellers? Ain't He, though?

"Ain't God good to Indiana?
Other spots may look as fair,
But they lack th' soothin' somethin'
In th' Hoosier sky and air.
They don't have that snug-up feelin'
Like a mother gives a child;
They don't soothe you, soul an' body,
With their breezes soft an' mild.
They don't know th' joys of Heaven
Have their birthplace here below;
Ain't God good to Indiana?
Ain't He, fellers? Ain't He, though?"

Farewell, Blackie

Maria wrote this last week and I'm posting it here with her permission:

Blackie died last weekend.
I cried when I heard and I've avoided writing this column because, sure enough, as soon as I wrote the first sentence, the tears came again.
I adopted Blackie, a wire-haired terrier of some sort, about 13 years ago from the Animal Welfare League. She was a tiny pup and I was told she wouldn't grow much bigger. The saucer-sized feet should have been a clue.
She was whip smart and potty trained in a couple days. Blackie would rather have exploded than disgrace herself in the house.
Blackie took care of me when, at age 30, I had a tonsillectomy. I was convalescing in bed upstairs and just about every hour, on the hour, I heard her toenails on the hard wood floors, up the farm house stairs, through my daughter's bedroom and into mine.
Click, click, click, reassuring and steady.
She'd rest her head on the mattress next to mine, doggy breath in my face, wait for me to whisper something reassuring, lick my nose, and go back downstairs until the next check-up.
Maybe she thought she owed me. We suppose she was hit by a car on our gravel road once while we were gone. Whatever happened, half her side was laid open and she was in shock when we returned. I took her to a veterinarian on Sunday, I think, and he had me help him. He couldn't get her all the way sedated. I sat at her head and reassured her the whole time. The vet wasn't sure she'd survive. I brought her home, sat her in a beanbag chair, and we watched television while she made a remarkable recovery.
Blackie had lots of tricks. She was one of those dogs who could bark something that sounded like “I love you,” and other words we pretended to hear.
We weren't sure what she was doing at first when we saw her walking in the harvested fields, cats at her heels. She was hunting for mice. She'd find one, dig it up, and wait for the cats to get it. Then she'd walk on and do it again.
But her silliest habit was rock chasing. Blackie was a rock chasing maniac.
Our neighbor discovered it when we were on a walk. Blackie was in front of us, but backing up and watching our feet. Something had her interest. Debbie kicked a piece of gravel and off Blackie flew to get it and drop it back at Debbie's sneaker. From then on we kicked rocks for miles when Blackie walked with us.
I haven't lived with her for years, but still kick rocks out of habit when I walk.
Blackie collected and chased any rock, even if they were too big. The kids made sure to throw the really big ones in the opposite direction so she wouldn't break a tooth trying to catch it.
I left her on the farm when I divorced. She was at home there and she loved her new mom and the kids who came to live with her.
We got lonely at our new house and went to the shelter for a smaller, short-haired dog. We came home with Ruthie, who is medium sized and has long, woolly blonde hair.
She is also very silly and is a maniac for laser beam chasing. Ruthie barks too loudly and too often. She's mouthy, demands treats and won't be left out of a hug between humans. She makes goofy guilty faces when she does bad things like ripping into the trash - as if we won't know she did it if she turns her head away. We wouldn't trade her for anything.
Ruthie was a great bridge when I re-married. John went with us to choose her when we were still dating. Ruthie loved the kids and she loved John, which made the kids feel better about John until they got to know him better.
Ruthe was a safe conversational topic for everyone. She entertained us by fetching and eventually gutting, stuffed monkeys so she could kill their squeakers. All her toys are hard rubber now.
I don't think anyone should get a dog just to entertain themselves or to help blend a family. That would be selfish if you can't afford veterinary care and keep them confined to your property. But if your home is adequate and you have time for them, dogs sure make life nicer.
And I think shelters are fine places to get them. I'm sure dogs know they are close to doom when you get them there and they are appreciative. Walk through the shelter one time and you'll know what I mean. If I hadn't found Blackie and Ruthie there I wouldn't have all the memories I've shared here and too many more to tell.
We were getting ready to move my daughter to Bloomington for school again this weekend when she called her father. He told her Blackie, who was apparently hard of hearing in her old age, had been hit by a car at their farm.
She crawled to my son's car and waited for him to come out on the way to work. He found her broken, but in good spirits and calm. His father and step-mother sat with Blackie until she passed calmly.
They buried her with a rock in her mouth. It was a choice rock she'd recently brought to the yard.
Rock on, Blackie.

States I've visited on a motorcycle

create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

I've traveled in all 48 contiguous states, but I have this little New England gap in my personal motorcycle map. I'd hoped to fill it in when I went to the BMW MOA national rally last month in Vermont, but time and weather interfered.
I've also ridden in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario.

Howdy from HA, via QC, HH, DC, AA, SA and AB

I was putting a fresh pad of checks into my checkbook the other day when an age-yellowed card dropped out and reminded me of something a lot of Hoosiers have forgotten or never knew.
Indiana’s passenger car license plate numbering system is pretty straightforward, making it easy to tell where a car was plated. The first digit or digits correspond with the issuing county’s name in an alphabetical list of Indiana’s 92 counties.
Adams County plates are 1A, 1B, and so on, while Whitley County – the 92nd in the list, starts with 92A. Since there are more cars in Lake and Marion counties than the 45 and 49 prefixes can accommodate, there’s an overrun with Lake County getting 94 and 96 and Marion County taking 93, 95, 97 98 and 99.
Of course things get more ambiguous when it comes to specialty plates because they don’t indicate county of origin.
But for the most part, it’s a logical, understandable system.
Not so before 1963.
Which brings me to that card that fell out of my checkbook.
It’s a little pocket reference to Indiana license plate prefixes, published by Robert Hall’s IGA Foodliner in my hometown of Delphi circa 1961.
Look over the listings and you’ll realize immediately why there had to be a change.
The old system used double-letter prefixes that were assigned without any particular rhyme or reason, other than the fact that Marion County being the most populous got all of the “A” prefixes. After that, it was pretty much random.
Old timers around here will recall that Montgomery County plates had TA and TB prefixes. Neighboring Fountain County was XJ, XK and XL, while Boone County drivers got to laugh it up with HA and HB. No correlation with county or county seat names, population or alphabetical sequence.
Here is the pre-1963 Indiana license plate prefix scheme, courtesy of the late Bob Hall:

AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, AH, AJ, AK AL, AM AN, AP, AQ, AR, AS, AT, AU, AV, AW, AX, AY, AZ, BX, BY, BZ - Marion County (Indianapolis)

BB, BC, BD, BE, BF, BG, BH, BJ, BK, BL – St. Joseph (South Bend)

CA, CB, CC, CD, CE, CF, CG, CH, CJ, CK, CL, CM, CN, CQ, CR, CS, CT, CU – Lake (Crown Point)

DA, DB – Whitley (Columbia City)

DC – Tipton (Tipton)

DD, DE, DF, DG, DH, DJ, DK, DL – Allen (Fort Wayne)

EA, EB, EC – Hendricks (Danville)

ED – Union (Liberty)

EE, EF, EG, EH, EK, EL, EM – Vanderburgh (Evansville)

EJ – Jefferson (Madison)

FA, FB – Clay (Brazil)

FC, FD – Vermillion (Newport)

FF, FG, FH, FJ, FK, FL – Madison (Anderson)

FM – Martin (Shoals)

GB, GC – Wells (Bluffton)

GD – Switzerland (Vevay)

GF – Jasper (Rensselaer)

GG, GH, GJ, GK, GL, GM – Elkhart (Goshen)

HA, HB – Boone (Lebanon)

HC, HD – Posey (Mt. Vernon)

HE – Warren (Williamsport)

HH, HJ, HK, HL, HM – Vigo (Terre Haute)

JA, JB, JC – Adams (Decatur)

JD – Scott (Decatur)

JF – Warrick (Booneville)

JJ, JK, JL, JM – Delaware (Muncie)

KA, KB, KC – Johnson (Franklin)

KJ, KK, KL, KM – Wayne (Richmond)

LA, LB – Jay (Portland)

LC – Decatur (Greensburg)

LD – Jennings (Vernon)

LL, LM, LN, LP – LaPorte (LaPorte)

MA, MB, MC – Greene (Bloomfield)

ME, MF – Newton (Kentland)

MG – White (Monticello)

MM, MN, MP – Tippecanoe (Lafayette)

NA, NB – Gibson (Princeton)

NC – Putnam (Greencastle)

ND, NE, NF – Benton (Fowler)

NN, NP, NR – Grant (Marion)

PA, PB, PC – Noble (Albion)

PF – Dubois (Jasper)

PP, PW, PZ – Howard (Kokomo)

PY – Perry (Cannelton)

QA, QB, QE – Lawrence (Bedford)

QC – Carroll (Delphi)

QD – Pike (Petersburg)

QP, QQ, QR, QS – Henry (New Castle)

RA, RB, RC – Shelby (Shelbyville)

RD – Pulaski (Winamac)

RN – Owen (Spencer)

RR, RS – Kosciusko (Warsaw)

SA, SB, SF – Hamilton (Noblesville)

SC, SD – Ripley (Versailles)

SE – Orange (Paoli)

SG, SH – Dearborn (Lawrenceburg)

SJ, SK, SL – Jackson (Brownstown)

SP – Spencer (Rockport)

SS, ST – Cass (Logansport)

SU – Steuben (Angola)

TA, TB – Montgomery (Crawfordsville)

TC – Fulton (Rochester)

TD – Franklin (Brookville)

TT, TU, TW – Knox (Vincennes)

UA, UB, UC – DeKalb (Auburn)

UD – Hancock (Greenfield)

UE – Parke (Rockville)

UT, UU, UV – Huntington (Huntington)

VA, VB – Wabash (Wabash)

VE, VF – Rush (Rushville)

VK, VL – Starke (Knox)

VV, VW – Monroe (Bloomington)

WA, WB – Clark (Jeffersonville)

WD – Washington (Salem)

WF, WG – Morgan (Martinsville)

WW, WX – Floyd (New Albany)

XA, XB – Clinton (Frankfort)

XD – Harrison (Corydon)

XE – Ohio (Rising Sun)

XG, XH – Daviess (Washington)

XJ, XK, XL – Fountain (Covington)

XX, XY – Porter (Valparaiso)

YA, YB – Marshall (Plymouth)

YD - Lagrange (Lagrange)

YE – Brown (Nashville)

YF, YG, YH – Sullivan (Sullivan)

YX, YY, YZ – Randolph (Winchester)

ZA, ZB, ZF – Bartholomew (Columbus)

ZC – Fayette (Connersville)

ZD, ZE – Blackford (Hartford City)

ZG – Crawford (English)

ZX, ZY – Miami (Peru)

The passing scene

Sitting at a window table of a downtown coffee shop watching the passing scene.
Dark-haired young woman in a black SUV stopped at the light, left arm danging out the window with a cigarette and right hand holding a cell phone to her ear.
Older couple on bicycles waiting for the light to change.
Old woman in a gray Buick stopped at the light. Glasses, both hands on the wheel at 10 and 2 o'clock. Nervously glancing left and right before making a left turn.
Guy in early 30s in a dark gray business suit, dark blue tie and light blue shirt. But wearing brown shoes.Carrying a briefcase and heading for the courthouse. Must be an attorney with a flawed sense of style. Hey, buddy. BLACK shoes with that outfit.
Woman in late 60s in a red Plymouth. Staring straight ahead waiting for the light.
Guy in twin-cab silver Ford pickup truck with the name of local dealer on the door.
Bald guy with glasses and wife at his side driving a silver Dodge diesel pickup with red stripes and a horse logo on the side. Wife just tossed a small bit of trash out of her window.
UPS guy in summer uniform (shorts) stacking packages on a handcart on the sidewalk outside a jewelry store.
BMW sedan with heavily blacked-out windows waiting for the light.

--
Sent from my Treo

Osama likes McGyver. It figures.

This is just too rich! From the London Daily Mail:

Terror mastermind Osama bin Laden is so obsessed with singer Whitney Houston he thought about killing her husband, Bobby Brown, it was claimed last night.

The suggestion is made by Sudanese poet and novelist Kola Boof, who claims she was bin Laden's sex slave for four months 10 years ago.

In her autobiography, Diary of a Lost Girl, she writes: "He told me Whitney Houston was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen."

Boof, 37, who claims bin Laden raped her and held her prisoner in a Moroccan hotel, says he could not stop talking about the songbird, even though he disapproved of music.

"Osama kept coming back to Whitney Houston," she says in the book, excerpted in the magazine Harpers' Bazaar. "He asked if I knew her personally when I lived in America. I told him I didn't.

"He said that he had a paramount desire for Whitney Houston, and although he claimed music was evil he spoke of someday spending vast amounts of money to go to America and try to arrange a meeting with the superstar.

"It didn't seem impossible to me. He said he wanted to give Whitney Houston a mansion that he owned in a suburb of Khartoum.

"He explained to me that to possess Whitney he would be willing to break his colour rule and make her one of his wives.

"Whitney Houston's name was the one that would be mention constantly.

"How beautiful she was, what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and by her husband Bobby Brown, whom Osama talked about having killed, as if it were normal to have women's husbands killed."

Boof, who once claimed she had to take her son out of a Los Angeles school after rumours surfaced that bin Laden was his father, also claims the Al Qaeda mastermind read more than the Koran.

"In his briefcase I would come across photographs of the Star magazine, as well as copies of Playboy," she writes.

She also says his favourite television shows were The Wonder Years, Miami Vice and MacGyver.

Traction

When it comes to getting things accomplished, I've felt like I was spinning my wheels lately.
But today I got some traction.
I finished a wedding album I've been sweating over for a couple of months. Yeah, I know. I'm going to have to get faster and more efficient if I'm going to keep up when business picks up. This one is really deluxe, with lots of cool graphic design elements and has 243 photos on 100 pages. I'm confident it will blow their socks off and that both sets of parents will absolutely have to have a copy. The $1,300 wedding photo package included one album. Additional albums are $300 each, so there is probably a bit more money to be had from this gig.
Anyhow, I finalized the work - we use MyPublisher.com - and transmitted the album.
My other imperative to-do item today was to collect all of the returnable components of our DISH satellite TV setup, pack them in the box the DISH sent us over the weekend, and send them home to Georgia. Besides the remotes and the tuner box, they wanted the sensor gizmo that uses the dish to collect the satellite signal. That involved dragging a ladder out of the garage and removing three screws from the dish that's mounted about 15 feet up the side of the house.
It's their policy to leave the dish attached to the house, presumably as advertising and an enticement for the next occupants of the house to sign up with their service.
I think it'll be better advertisement sitting at the curb waiting for the trash collectors. I fact, I may yank it back just before they get here, so I can put it out on several successive Fridays to make sure as many passersby see it as possible.
Why do I dislike DISH? I'll spare you the trouble of searching for the previous post that addressed this issue and just say my rate was about to go up and I was tired of losing the signal everytime it storms - rain or snow. That's precisely when I want to be able to check with Indianapolis TV stations on weather conditions.
So it's back to basic cable.

C'mon, ladies... Smile!!!

Freak Out!

I've been loading my CD collection onto my new iPod and rediscovering a lot of music I haven't listened to in years.
This album is a perfect example.
I hadn't listened to the vinyl version for years when I bought the CD to update my library. I think I played the CD once.
Just now, I floated through "Return of the Son of Monster Magnet" and suddenly I was back in the autumn of 1966.
I was in my first newspaper reporter job in a small north central Indiana town, making $65 a week and living in a $20-a-week mobile home about a block from the newspaper office.
My college friend Steve Power had recently returned from wandering the West and introduced me to what passed for the drug cluture of the period.
Steve would show up at my trailer on a Saturday evening with an armload of record albums, including this one, and we'd smoke a few joints and down a bottle of Romilar cough syrup each. The active ingredient, dextromethorphan, is a semisynthetic derivitive of morphine and it produces an LSD-like experience. It's not addictive, especially considering that everytime we slammed down a bottle of the stuff the taste became more and more of a barrier. If someone walked into the room with an open bottle of the stuff today, I'd have to leave.
Steve also brought a supply of amyl nitrite capsules - made to relieve the symptoms of angina pectoris, they cause an instantaneous rush made all the more intense by Romilar and pot.
I remember having what I thought was a powerful insight during one such rush and hurried to write it down in one of my college notebooks that were lying around. The next morning, I opened the notebook and discovered I'd written, "There's no bad. It's just a different kind of good."
True enough from a cosmic perspective, but hardly practical advice for day-to-day living.
There were moments while listening to this album and others on my RCA console stereo system when we felt like we'd actually merged with and become the music.
Far out, man.
Anyhow, Freak Out! was an obligatory part of the Romilar trip soundtrack.
And I'm still getting a buzz out of it 40 years later on my iPod.

Bogus photos

It's episodes like the bogus photos coming out of Lebanon and sometimes make me wish I could diasssociate myself from the news media.
The first one to come to light was a photo showing smoke over Beiruit carried by Reuters. Why in the hell none of the Reuters photo editors recognized the telltale signs of clumsy tampering is a the mystery of the year. The plumes of heavy smoke bear the repetitive patters that can only come from sloppy use of the rubber stamp/cloning tool in Photoshop. The photographer's excuse that he was just trying to get rid of dust in the image, but was hampered by bad light just doesn't wash.
I'm reluctant to go so far as to accuse Reuters, the New York Times and AP of deliberately trying to build sympathy for Israel's enemies. I'm more inclined to blame over-competitive and unethical photographers and lazy, careless photo editors.
But the result is the same - a growing perception that the news media can't be trusted to tell the truth or get the story right.
Here's an overview:
http://www.aish.com/movies/PhotoFraud.asp

Indiana State Fair

Maria and I spent about seven hours tramping around the Indiana State Fair yesterday afternoon and last night.
We did the obligatory tour of the Home and Family Arts Building to check out the quilting and photography exhibits and were already kind of tired by the time the sun went down and the real reason we were there cranked up.
The Midway - that noisy, dirty, garish preview of Hell that draws kids and their captive parents like moths to a porch light.
It was the first really extended night shoot I've done with the Nikon D200 and I'm very impressed with how well it sorts out the white balance problems and how little noise there is at the higher ISO settings, like 1600. I shot available light all evening with startlingly good results.
This is one of my favorite photos of the night. Darkness had fallen, but there was still enough light in the western sky to spread a beautiful rich blue across the horizon. It was shot at 1/80 sec, f/4.5 at 1600 ISO. If you click on it, you can see a larger version and judge the quality a little better. The photographer in khaki by the railing is a freelancer from California who is putting together a book of photos of carnival and fair midways.
Several of the people we photographed wanted copies of the pictures, so we gave them our business cards with our photo sales site URL and posted an assortment of shots. The gallery went online at 10:30 a.m. and now, about 12 hours later, there have been about a dozen hits but no sales. You never know who's going to buy what, so I don't get my expectations up.
We've sold about $200 worth of wedding photos from the site in the last six weeks and I never expected to sell any, so who knows?
Anyhow, it was the first time I'd been back to the state fair in several years. I handled The Indianapolis News' state fair coverage from 1975 through 1985, spending the entire run of the fair at the fairgrounds, so I know/knew the place pretty well. Not much has changed in the 20 years since I was immersed in the fair. Probably the most significant difference, to my sensibilities, is the whoring out of the building names. The Coliseum is now the Pepsi Coliseum and various other buildings now have some corporate sponsor's name tacked on.
It's so hopelessly cheesy. Just like the monstrous cheese sculpture in the Pioneer seed corn building, formerly the Universities Building.

A Picture Share!

Chocolate, thank you.

Vanilla?

Wendy's - at least the ones around here - now offer their famous Frosty in two flavors: traditional chocolate and new vanilla.
Being a confirmed chocoholic, I can't get interestested enough in a vanilla Frosty to actually invest in one.
So I'm having a chocolate Frosty to celebrate our landing another wedding job. Our September calendar is filling up and it's starting to look like we'll have a better-than-expected first year in the wedding photography business. Most of our advertising has been word-of-mouth, so I guess that means we have a lot of satisfied customers.

--
Sent from my Treo

Maria's Motorcycle

I put about 60 miles on Maria's '94 BMW K75S today and am impressed anew with what a sweet bike it is.
When I bought it for Maria back in 2000, we did a variety of things to make it a better fit for her characteristically female shorter legs. We took a little slack out of the forks, replaced the stock shock absorber with a shorter custom job, sent the seat back to Sargent to have some foam carved out and changed out the stock tires for low-profile Bridgestones.
She rode it a little, but never got comfortable with it. Then she got hit head-on by a blind woman while driving my mother's '91 Buick LeSabre. The airbag and seatbelt kept her from being seriously injured, but the crash dealt a severe blow to her motorcycling confidence. She hasn't ridden the bike in the two years since the crash.
So it fell to me to keep the battery up and generally make the bike feel cared-for.
I've been riding it a fair amount this year on short local trips, trying to save the tires on my BMW K1200GT for touring.
There's a 11-mile stretch of road west of town that has lots of twists and turns through the undulating west-central Indiana countryside and the K75S is a pleasure to ride there.
Everytime I ride it, I'm struck by the pure, elemental nature of the ride. None of the gadgets and amenities of my sport-touring machine - just a nimble little motorcycle that feels right at home being flung into one turn after another.
And I like the one-of-a-kind custom acid green paint job more and more as time goes by.
Getting back into motorcycling isn't particularly high on Maria's list of priorities right now. She has her hands full with projects at her newspaper and our calendar is starting to fill up with wedding photography jobs, plus she has developed a painful hip problem.
So I guess I'll just have to keep her bike in good shape by riding it regularly.

A Picture Share!

I wonder why I never noticed this odd little motorcycle-size half-space in the Denny's parking lot. Just the right size for a K75S.

You Passed 8th Grade US History

Congratulations, you got 8/8 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade History?

I hate mowing

It's before noon and I'm having an unusually early beer because I'm cooling off from one of my least favorite jobs - mowing the lawn.
My distaste for yardwork was a point of sharp disagreement in my first marriage and a strong factor in my choosing apartment and condo life after my divorce. I admire a nicely kept yard as much as the next guy. I just don't want to waste my time and sweat on it.
The condo where I lived a couple of years before getting married and moving to my present home had a little garden area by the front door. The previous owner had some flowers and other plantings there, which I ignored and neglected to the point that I became embarrassed by the space. I finally began telling people I was developing a wildlife refuge outside my front door.
During my early childhood, we lived in a small house with a small yard that my dad cut with a hand-powered reel-style mower. My son Sean said he uses one at his place in Portland, Ore., and I had a momemt of nostalgic reverie over it.
When my parents bought a new home in the spring of 1954 with a larger yard, Dad invested in a power mower. I think it was a Lawson. It was one of the few mechanical things he chose to work on himself, and that consisted just of sharpening the blade and changing the oil.
It was during one of those oil changes that he lost his Masonic ring when it slipped unnoticed off of his oil-slick finger into the grass. It turned up a couple of seasons later and he wore it for the rest of his life. Now it's in a little funeral home bag of his personal effects sitting on my dresser.
But I digress.
After the novelty of a power mower wore off, Dad decided I deserved a turn at mowing the lawn.
I thought this was a heady responsibility and great fun for a month or so.
Then I began to develop the attitude that persists to this day.
I don't recall whether I picked it up from Dad or developed it spontaneously, but I mow a lawn in a decreasing radius spiral, rather than the back-and-forth straight row method. It just seemed more efficient to turn a corner rather than do a 180-degree turn after every pass.
I do the first couple of circuits in a clockwise direction, so as to blow the clippings toward the center of the lawn rather than into my neighbor's yard. Then, I change to counter-clockwise, so I don't keep chopping up the same bunch of clippings. It also avoids a build-up of clippings in the center of the yard when I'm done.
The contours of our back yard when I was a kid result in a patch of grass - in the last few circuits - that resembles the shape of Itasca County, Minnesota. We went there on a vacation the summer between my seventh- and eighth-grade years and the map stuck in my mind and transferred to the process of mowing.
Most of my lawnmowing time as a teenager was spent thinking about girlfriends - past, present and hoped-for.
These days, I lose myself in music with an iPod and custom molded earplug stereo speakers that I mostly use for long distance motorcycle trips. It saves my hearing from the racket of the mower and give me a random sampling of more than 3,600 songs.
I envy the guy down the street who has most of his acreage in wild prairie grass and actually gets a property tax break for it.
Unfortunately, I am surrounded by neighbors whose lawns make mine look bad.
They're both named Mike and they both have riding mowers. Mike to the north has a Dixie Chopper that can probably attain speeds up to 35 mph. His son takes about 5 minutes to mow their lawn, which is more than twice the size of mine.
Mike to the south seems to see his lawn as a hobby and keeps it meticulously manicured.
I can't hope to keep up with either of them. I just pray for drought and get out the lawnmower when I can't stand the embarrassment any more.
I bought a new mower last year after a wheel fell off of the one Maria had from her previous home. I had the good sense to put fuel stabilizer in the gas tank last fall, so it started right up this spring.
I've used it maybe four times this year.
I'd hoped to get out before the heat of the day this morning, but in doing so I found myself bogged down in tall, wet grass that stopped the machine in its tracks.
I set the wheels up a notch, scraped the accumulated grass out from under the blade and got it done, but not before I'd sweated about a gallon.
So that beer tastes pretty damned good.

Beach Boy cameo

Just saw Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and thought it was outrageously funny.
Wasn't that Brian Wilson on the right side of the screen holding the champagne bottle in the final podium scene?

Dumping the DISH

Today's to-do list includes the following item:
"Cancel DISH TV, re-start cable"
Seduced by the lure of more channels for less money, I converted from cable to DISH satellite tv last summer.
Now, after a year of inconvenient outages, I've had enough and I'm going back to cable.
(The satellite signal drops out everytime we get heavy rain or snow - precisely the time when I'd like to be able to get weather information from Indianapolis TV stations. This happens to every DISH customer I know in this area, so I know it's not just us.)
The triggers for this switchback are the fact that our roofers knocked our dish out of alignment early this week, making our TVs useless, and the arrival of the August DISH bill that is substantially higher than the previous 12 months' bills. That's because the promotional period is over and we will now be billed at the regular rate.
Which, it turns out, is higher than what we were paying for cable.
I spent about an hour on the phone yesterday afternoon with DISH technical service working through the diagnostic programs to confirm what I already knew - the problem was a mis-aligned dish. Their fix is to send a repairman out next freaking Tuesday and to charge me $29 for the service call.
My fix is to tell them to pick up their electronic shit, get their dish off of my house and cancel my service.

Mexicans on a hot asphalt roof

Our new roof is nearing completion. A crew of three insanely hard-working Mexicans has spent two dangerously hot (heat index of 101-106) days ripping off the old shingles and nailing down new ones. They started about 11 a.m. yesterday and worked until about 9 p.m., taking advantage of what passed for the "cool" of the evening.
They were back on the roof at 7 a.m. today.
Now at 5:45 p.m., I can still hear them hammering.
They're working over the kitchen, which is freaking Pete and Ruthie out. Pete won't go out onto the back deck because there is a lot of scary-looking shingles and the hammering has him hunkered down in his kennel looking very intimidated.
Ruthie responds by barking hysterically, although she readily went out to the back yard to whiz.
I got a call from a prospective wedding photography client today - said she saw our work in a recent bridal tabloid insert in Maria's paper that we provided all of the photos for. So we're meeting her for lunch tomorrow to show her more of our work and try to clinch the deal. Her wedding is July 14, 2007, which is my 62nd birthday and the day I can start drawing Social Security.
I got my stepdaughter's cell phone number changed today, thwarting the efforts of her dirtbag ex-noyfriend to reel her in again.
Now, if she'll only forget to give the new number to her current dirtbag boyfriend...

Delayed Report

I sent this from my Treo about 1 p.m. July 19 - two weeks ago tomorrow - and Blogger.com posted it this morning. WTF?

I'm taking a lunch break at a McDonald's on I-90 northeast of Cleveland and about an hour from Erie, Pa., which is about an hour from Buffalo, NY.
Nice weather and no construction delays. At the risk of jinxing myself, I gotta say I'm making better time than I expected.

--
Sent from my Treo

Heat, Height and iPods

Today is the day the roofers come to rip off our hail-damaged shingles and replace them with insurance-paid 30-year shingles.
But the temperature is headed for the mid-90s and the heat index will be between 100 and 105.
It's going to be a day like the one Dave Barry wrote about where birds burst into flames in midair and nuns cursed openly on the street.
George, the foreman, (not George Foreman, the boxer and grill shill) told me last week that the only things that could stall the project would be rain or extreme heat. Besides being a health hazard for the workers, he said, extreme heat can damage the materials and compromise the water-tightness of the new roof.
Nevertheless, he just called to say the crew is on its way. So we shall see.
I spent a fair share of the weekend uploading music to my new iPod. The song count stands at 2,563 with five music videos, all of our prepped stock photos and some podcasts and I haven't even used the first 10 gigabytes of the 60-gig capacity.
I have to repeat my thanks to my sons and Maria for a fabulous birthday gift that I never would have bought for myself because I didn't understand how cool it is.
I'm rediscovering my CD collection in the process of ripping CDs to the iTunes software and it's a real treat to set it on "shuffle" and hear stuff I haven't heard in years.
I don't expect I'll take it on any hot weather motorcycle trips, though.
The owner's manual says temperatures over 113 will cook it and it shouldn't be operated in temperatures above 95 degrees. An extended period in a black motorcycle tank bag on a day like this would almost certainly kill it.
I don't find any mention of the effects of altitude in the manual, I've heard that devices that use a hard drive - like my iPod - can fail at altitudes above 10,000 feet.
I did a Google search for "ipod" and "altitude" and found this post by an iPod user named David Charlap:
Hard drive based iPods can be expected to fail if operated at high altitudes. In a hard drive, the heads do not contact the recording surface. They float above the surface on a small cushion of air, produced by the spinning platters. If the air is too thin to create this cushion, the heads will contact the surface, possibly even damaging it.
This isn't a problem in shipping, however. When the drive is not powered, the platters don't spin and the heads are "parked" on a region of the disk where contact with the surface won't cause damage.
Hard drives actually have "breather holes" in them. Small holes covered (internally) by filters (to keep out dust). This is necessary to equalize the air pressure between the inside and the outside of the drive. (See also "Air Circulation and Air Filtration")
On some drives (like an IBM laptop drive I'm looking at now) there is even a sticker next to the hole saying "Do not cover".
If you seal a drive, then changing temperature and altitude would create substantial pressure differentials between the inside and outside of the case. This would lead to drive failure (just like pressing on the upper cover while it's operating can cause failure), and maybe even physical deformation of the case.
I'm sure a drive manufacturer could design a specially-reinforced sealed case to work around this, but that would add significant weight, size and cost to the drive. If anybody makes such a drive, it would be intended only for extreme environments and would not be used in a typical consumer device.
So it looks like I'd be pushing my luck if I used it extensively at the home of my friends Tim and Linda who live at 10,500 feet in Alma, Colo., the highest town in the U.S.
Tim does a lot of computer consulting and I've not heard him speak of this kind of problem, so maybe you have to go farther up the mountain for it to become an issue.

Sonny Landreth

Sonny Landreth, an absolutely astounding blues guitarist and the best I've heard, will be at the Tall Stacks Festival in Cincinnati on Oct. 4.

--
Sent from my Treo

Home Again, Home Again

Ready to ride after breakfast at the Erie, Pa., Cracker Barrel.
I dropped my sidestand in my garage at 4:32 p.m.
It was the best-attended BMW MOA rally I've been to in 20 years - more than 9,000 riders there - which makes sense given the population density of the East Coast.
We packed wet tents and left in cold rain and fog Sunday morning, breaking into sunshine around the Ticonderoga bridge to New York and spending last night in Erie, Pa.
Again, my friends wanted to take backroads across northern Ohio and Indiana, so we parted company at Cleveland and I burned up the superslab running for home. I find I enjoy riding solo more than in a group - I can set the electronic cruise control and enjoy the scenery instead of having to keep my eyes on the bikes ahead of me.
Now I have to drag that wet tent out and set it up to dry so as to avoid losing it to mold or mildew.
The bike ran perfectly, but I have developed an intermittent fault in the electrical circuit powering my MotoLites driving lights. Even though the switch was in the "on" position throughout, both lights were dark when we left the rally. Then they both came on, then one, then the other. For most of the ride home, the left light was on but the right one was dark.
Oddly enough, Dave Bernhardt, who rode with me from Burlington to Cleveland, was having a similar malfunction with his MotoLites.

Rallying

The Grandstand stage at the 6 p.m. awards ceremony. It was mercifully short. Nobody I know won anything.

Can you believe nobody is selling BMW apparel at the BMW MOA rally?
I needed a replacement pair of BMW AirFlow summer gloves and ended up riding about 6 miles to Frank's BMW Motorcycles - the local BMW dealer. Nice ride anyway.
It's 2:30 p.m. and it's been raining steadily for about an hour and promises to continue through midnight.
So we're hoping for clear weather by the time we strike camp tomorrow and head for home.
More later.

Greetings from Vermont

I've been posting regularly with my Treo but none of the text or photos are getting onto the blog - I suspect it's a Blogger.com issue, because all of my other e-mails are getting through just fine.
So much for my grand plans to blog from the road.
At the moment, I'm at the BMW MOA rally in Burlington, Vt., having arrived yesterday about 4:15 p.m.
The ride was reasonably pleasant. I pulled into a service plaza on the New York Thruway south of Buffalo, NY, to find three Indianapolis BMW Club friends in the parking lot. I rode with them the rest of the day and we ended up sharing motel rooms in Seneca Falls, NY. They planned a more circuitous route for Thursday, so I split off and made best speed for Burlington.
I took NY Highway 8 through the Adirondacks and would recommend it to anyone looking for a fun ride. The Essex ferry across Lake Champlain was a nice 30-minute ride, followed by a hellishly slow, hot slog through a 3.2-mile-long construction zone on Route 7 coming into Burlington. By the time I got through the construction, I was low on gas and even lower on bodily fluids. I gassed at a Gulf station and slammed down a quart of Gatorade before getting onto I-89 and zooming up to the Route 15 exit and on to the rally.

My Indy friends arrived a couple of hours later, called me on the cell phone and I directed them to the campsite I'd chosen for us.
I was sufficiently dehydrated that I ended up drinking 7 beers in the Beer Garden last night before staggering back to my tent.
So it was no surprise that I awoke with a headache this morning.
I plugged my cell phone into the bike's accessory outlet to charge and rode out for a breakfast at McDonald's, where I found a table next to a wall outlet for more phone charging.
I'm able to blog today only because there's a cyber cafe at the rally.
The weather is overcast and there is a 90% chance of rain forecast. I felt a few sprinkles as I rode back from breakfast, so it looks like I'll just spend the day hanging out and cruising the vendors.
The MOA issues a commemorative patch and pin for these rallies and some blockhead misspelled "Burlington" on the pin.
My friend Wayne, who with his wife Peggy, also rode to the BMW RA Rally in Boise, and the Top 'O the Rockies Rally in Paonia, Colo., the two previous weekends, showed me the commemorative t-shirt he got for the rally trifecta. It references the "MBW" Motorcycle Owners of America rally.
Absolutely incredible.

McIdiots

(This is a post I sent from my Treo that never got through to Blogger, so I added it after the fact.)
I'm a the Dewitt Service Plaza on the NY Thruway a short distance west of Syracuse.
After parting company with Webb, Cindy & Dave, I headed east on the Thruway and pulled off at the first service plaza for a quick breakfast.
I knew I was in trouble as soon as the surly black woman behind the counter looked at me.
"Bacon, egg and cheese biscuit breakfast," I said.
"You want the meal?" she asked, correcting my failure to use McDonald's Official Terminology.
"Yes."
"Is that for here or to go?"
I'm standing in front of her in full motorcycle gear. It's glaringly obvious that I'm not in a car. Of fucking course it's for here.
"For here," I said.
"That's $5.28."
I stepped to the right with my empty tray so she could share her sunny personality with the next customer.
Presently, a girl behind the counter put a cup of coffee, sleeve of "hash browns" and a steak, egg and cheese bagel on my tray. Noticing the print on the wrapper, I peeked inside and confirmed it was, indeed, a bagel.
"I ordered a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit," I told Ms. Sunshine. "This is a bagel."
"You said bagel," she said belligerantly, oblivious to the principle that the customer is always right.
"No, I never say bagel," I replied, my anger rising.
"...we can change it..."
"No," I said, resigned to my bagel. "Forget it."
She also forgot to ask about cream and sweetener for the coffee - an omission I took to mean that they were available at the condiment station. No. And I'm fucking not going to ask her for anything now. So I'm eating my bagel and drinking my very hot very black coffee and looking forward to getting the hell out of here and back onto the road.

--
Sent from my Treo

In a NYSOM

I'm in a New York state of mind this morning and have just a few minutes for a quick entry before I have to roll out of an overpriced Microtel Inn.
I pulled in to a service area on the New York Thruway (I-90) about 30 miles south of Buffalo yesterday afternoon and noticed three BMWs in the parking lot. As I approached, I was startled to see Indianapolis BMW Club friends Webb & Cindy and Webb's brother Dave.
We rode together the rest of the day and finally went to ground in Seneca Falls. It was a 661-mile day for me - nothing spectacular, but the longest ride I've done this year.
They fancy a backroad route in to Burlington that will likely take all day and I'm keen to get to the rally and find a campsite in plenty of time for tonight's predicted rain.
I transmitted several photos from the road yesterday and none of them got posted to the blog. Damned Blogger.com!
Ok, I'm outta here.

--
Sent from my Treo

Roadfood

I'm taking a lunch break at a McDonald's on I-90 northeast of Cleveland and about an hour from Erie, Pa., which is about an hour from Buffalo, NY.
Nice weather and no construction delays. At the risk of jinxing myself, I gotta say I'm making better time than I expected.


--
Sent from my Treo

Rolling

It's 6:15 a.m. and it's an alarmingly steamy 70 degrees. The sky is beginning to lighten and the bike is packed and ready for Vermont.
I must be off.

Riding

This is Sgt. Maj. Jeff McLochlin. He was an Army Ranger and a member of the Indiana National Guard and he was killed July 5 in Afghanistan. He's shown here in his uniform as a Plymouth, Ind., police officer.
I participated in a Patriot Guard Riders mission to support his funeral in Rochester, Ind., on Sunday.
It was beastly hot - a humid 94 degrees by the time we escorted the hearse from services at Rochester High School to the cemetery - but I'm glad I went because he and his family deserved the recognition.
Riding up to Rochester that morning, I found myself next to a young guy on a sportbike at a stoplight on U.S. 31 at the south edge of Kokomo.
The kid was pretty much at the other end of the motorcycling spectrum from me - sneakers, jeans, t-shirt, North Carolina baseball cap, no eye protection, no gloves, no jacket and an array of tattoos on his arms that made it clear he had spent a shitload of money trying to look stupid. Oh, and he was smoking a cigarette while riding.
I experienced enough painful spark burns from smoking in an open convertible when I was in my teens to tell me that smoking while riding a motorcycle involves several layers of idiocy.
I pulled up in the lane next to him on my '03 BMW K1200GT, wearing boots, gloves, BMW AirFlow jacket and a fullface Schuberth helmet. He glanced over and I nodded in greeting.
That was apparently all it took to trigger a flood of testosterone in the poor dope. When the light changed, he felt compelled to pull a wheelie and rocket up the road - a high-traffic commercial area lined with restaurants, motels and retail businesses.
I accelerated like a normal, rational rider and naturally, I caught up to him at the next light and the one after that. Each time, he whacked the throttle to stand his bike on its back wheel, startling the shit out of the car drivers around us. He did some highspeed weaving through traffic that was guarantee to alarm and enrage everyone around him before he finally made a right turn and sped off on a frontage road.
All I could do was shake my head in amazement.
I'm often tempted to offer to race kids like that - to Denver or Seattle. They disgrace motorcycling by using it as a form of masturbation. They also do real harm to the image of motorcycling.
That said, I'm taking a brief blogging break here before I plunge back into the frenzy of getting things squared away for my ride to the BMW MOA national rally this week in Burlington, Vt.
I plan to leave early tomorrow morning and hope to make it to somewhere east of Buffalo, N.Y. before I bag it tomorrow night. That should make for a relatively short ride on Thursday to the rally site.
This will be the first time I've ridden a motorcycle in the Northeast and I hope to be able to put my tires in every New England state, plus New Jersey, by the time the ride is over. That would let me boast that I've ridden in each of the 48 contiguous states.
I'll take my Treo and keyboard and will blog from the road whenever possible.
Now, it's off to the bank to shuffle some money around to cover bills that are due in the next week.

What a birthday!

Maria has been smugly secretive all week about my birthday present.
She took today off and would tell me only that we were going to Indianapolis on a mystery birthday mission.
First, we had to stop by the county clerk's office and hand over $1,200 in support money to be channeled to her ex for keeping their son. (See earlier rants.)
Then it was off to the Fashion Mall at Keystone at the Crossing.
Still clueless, I followed Maria's lead and we went up to the food court for a quick lunch.
Then we headed down to the mail level stores. I guessed we were headed for a clothing store, but secretly hoped I was wrong because I don't especially want any new clothes.
We had visited the Apple store on previous occasions to drool over the spectacular big screen monitors and she suggested we stop in again just to remind ourselves of how cool they are.
So we went into the store and were ogling the stuff - I'm a dedicated Windows user, but I have to admit there are some pretty cool things about Macs. I just don't like their operating system.
Next thing I know, Maria has buttonholed a salesguy and tells him, "I want to buy a 60-gig iPod,"
Holy shit! I never saw that coming.
She got me up to speed by telling me that my sons Sean and Steve were in on the surprise, explaining that Sean suggested the iPod and Steve signed on without hesitation.
So I picked out a black one, an AC charger, car charger and impact resistant black rubber case. Maria used my Treo camera to snap a photo of me being blown away with iPod in hand and I e-mailed it to Sean and Steve. I also phoned them, getting Sean's voicemail and having a delightful conversation with Steve during which granddaughter Lisa wished me a happy birthday. Next stop was an Office Depot where we picked up a USB 2.0 card reader so I can use the iPod for image storage with a digital camera.
Sean returned my call and gave me some cool iPod tips, including the advice not to buy the expensive Apple TV cord, since a cheaper standard cord works just as well - they're just not color coded the same.
I spent most of the afternoon and evening loading music and finally hung it up with 825 songs aboard - hardly scrating the surface of the 15,000-song capacity.
To say I was stunned would be a serious understatement.
Damn fine way to turn 61.

On this date in 1945

...The team of scientists and engineers headed by Robert Oppenheimer hoisted the world's first atomic bomb to the top of a 100-foot steel tower in the New Mexico desert, two days prior to detonating it.
The USS South Dakota became the first U.S. warship in WWII to shell the Japanese homeland.
And I was born.

Sweating with the PGR

I was short on excuses when I woke up this morning, so I rode over to Sharpsville for a Patriot Guard Rider mission.
The occasion was the funeral of Matt Thompson, a member of the Tipton County Sheriff's Department and a candidate for sheriff in the November election.
Thompson was killed last weekend in a motorcycle-van collision. And, yes, he was wearing a helmet but got killed anyway.
I rolled out about 8:10 a.m. in humid thick fog and spent a lot of time wiping the moisture off of my visor.
I got to the site - the Tri-Central High School parking lot - in plenty of time and volunteered to be part of the flag detail, holding an American flag near the school entrance for about an hour while mourners and guests filed in. I had misjudged the weather and was wearing a long-sleeved black t-shirt commemorating the 2004 BMWMOA national rally in Spokane.
The sky was partly cloudy and the atmosphere was very soupy with only an occasional breeze, so we sweltered as we stood at parade rest.
There were about 60 of us PGR types there and we were told that the widow wanted us right behind her car.
Unfortunately, things got crossed up and the PGR contingent ended up falling in behind about 100 other motorcyclists who had shown up.
We rode the 6 miles south to the Tipton County Jail, and then began a ride of 8 miles or so to the cemetery at Windfall.
It was kind of a trip riding through Tipton under these circumstances, since that's where I began my career in newspapers 40 years ago this fall.
The old Tipton Tribune building is gone and a new police and fire headquarters stands in its place. I'm not sure where the newspaper office is now.
By the time we got to the McDonald's on the east edge of town, it was about 90 degrees and I was in desperate need of a restroom, so I peeled off and rode south on Ind. 19 to Cicero.
That's where I am now, blogging from a McDonald's and finishing my lunch.
An over-zealous McFlunky just tried to clear my table and take my tray, but I'm not done with my fries. Take a hike, kid.
Oh, by the way.
The hearse was a cheesy looking affair pulled by a Harley-Davidson that had been converted from 2 wheels to 3. Most of my H-D riding companions thought it was way cool.

--
Sent from my Treo

A Picture Share!

A Harley hearse. Good grief.

More Photoshop Phun

I had to drive up to Lafayette to deposit a check, so I stopped by the Barnes & Noble to browse through some Photoshop technique books and have a mocha frappuccino.
I found a couple of tricks that looked useful, but I didn't feel like paying $29.95 + tax for a book, so I whipped out my Treo and fold-out keyboard, copied the instructions and e-mailed them to myself.
This one is adapted from an example of a swan with its head and beak overlapping the right side of the frame with a drop shadow.
Cool, huh?

Hoooooooooooosiers!

Maybe it's because we're the smallest state west of the Alleghenies or maybe we just have this thing about Indiana, but Hoosiers (and we can't understand why that term is a perjorative for some people) have an inordinate pride in their home state.
So, small wonder that the movie Hoosiers is a staple in every Indiana video collection.
This is your classic David vs. Goliath tale based on a true story that's at the core of Indiana basketball mythology - the magic year of 1954 in which tiny Milan (pronounced MILE-un, not like the city in Italy) in southern Indiana went all the way to the Indiana State High School Basketball Finals and emerged state champ.
I grew up in small town Indiana in the '50s. The characters, the places, the fervor surrounding the local basketball team are instantly recognizable and dead-on. These are my people and my places and the filmmakers got it exactly right.
The opening scenes showing Gene Hackman driving through the Indiana countryside probably don't mean much to folks from outside Indiana and the midwest, but they almost bring a tear to my eye.
As a side note, there's a little white country church where Hackman pauses to get his bearings. It stood at a crossroads in Boone County just northwest of Indianapolis. It was one of several churches that went up in flames in the late 1990s at the hands of a church arsonist. It's part of the local lore.
As far as the characters go, Hackman did a credible job, but the real star of this film is Dennis Hopper. Barbara Hershey's character is an unwanted digression from the plot line and adds nothing of value to the film.
And how many people realize the heart attack-prone principal of Hickory High, Sheb Wooley, is the guy who had a hit in the late '50s with the novelty record "One-Eyed, One-Horned, Flying Purple People Eater?"
Also, for those with home theater sound systems, the Dolby Surround Sound on the DVD is spectacular. The stereo imaging really makes the picture come alive.
As a footnote, my friend Scott Miley, a reporter for The Indianapolis Star at the time the film was made, has a bit part in which he plays a newspaper reporter and delivers the memorable line, "How'dja do it, coach?" He still gets a royalty check for a dollar or two evertime Hoosiers is shown on TV.
If you like small town stories where the underdog triumphs, this is your kind of movie. You don't have to be from Indiana to love Hoosiers.

Phun With Photoshop

I used to think these Photoshop tricks were cheesy, but then I learned how to do some of them for inclusion in the wedding albums we do for clients and now I think they can be cool.
We just booked a wedding for Oct. 7. The bride found us online, which makes it the first non-referral wedding we've booked.

Fashion model Lisa

Children and sewing are two of Maria's favorite things, so it's only natural that she should make things for our granddaughter Lisa.
The most recent project was a sundress with a blue hat and matching bloomers.
Here's a photo my son Steve shot the other day of Lisa in dress and hat, sans bloomers, on the deck behind their home.
Steve's comment about the outfit: Another masterpiece! She won’t take it off.
Naturally, that made Maria's day.
She's collecting more fabric and patterns and her Bernina is getting a vacation from quilting.

Selling the old homestead

I'm going to sell my rental property.
I'm tired of being a landlord - the role never suited me - and I would rather have the cash to invest in our place here at Pearl's End.
The house in question is a three-bedroom frame home on a quiet street on the far eastside of Delphi, Ind.
It's the home where I did most of my growing up. We moved into it in the spring of my third grade year (April of 1954) and I lived there until I went off to college in September of 1963. My parents lived there until their death - dad in November 1997 and mom (seen here just to the left of her Buick) in October 2000.
I tried to sell it during the first six months of 2001, but got no offers despite the low appraised value of $92,500.
I then hired the Realtor as a property manager and turned it into a rental property.
Go back to my archives to read about the tenant from hell who was my first renter.
The current tenant is a single mother with a young son and she's been extremely low maintenance and pays her rent on time.
When the lease came up for renewal last year, I offered to sell the house to her at the appraised value, even though I believed the value had increased since the appraisal was made. I did the math and showed her how she could save between $200 and $300 a month with a mortgage, compared with her current rent, and I explained how she would also be able to deduct all of her mortgage interest on her income taxes and how she would be building equity, rather than just throwing away $750 a month.
But she declined and opted to continue as a renter.
This time, I'm clearer about my objectives and will tell her I have decided to sell the house. I'll tell her I would prefer to sell it to her because she seems to like it there and I think she's a good fit for the place. But whether she buys it or not, I'm going to sell it.
If someone else buys it, they may choose to use it as a rental property and keep her as a tenant or they may want to use it as their primary home.
But the bottom line is, she'll have to become a homeowner or move.
So what will I do with the proceeds?
I plan to raze the two crappy, dilapidated garages we have - one of which was illegally built in an alley by the previous owners - and erect a two- or three-car structure with an upstairs photo studio/office. I'll also rip out the rotting wooden deck between the house and the garage site and put in a concrete patio surrounded by a privacy fence.
That just for openers. I'm still chewing on other possibilities.

Pete repeat

Pete is home with his family again after 43 hours of roaming.
We searched Sunday night and much of yesterday without success. I mentioned Pete's disappearance in an e-mail to my friend Skip and he and his wife Gloria insisted on driving up this morning to spend their Fourth of July looking for the pup.
We equipped ourselves with two-way radios and binoculars and set out in separate cars. Maria and I patrolled the south half of town and Skip and Gloria took the north half.
A little after 11 a.m., I decided to stop by the house to use the bathroom. Before we could get out of the door, Maria's mother called and while they were talking, I glanced at our caller ID box to see if anyone else had called.
I noticed a call logged in at 11:02 a.m. from someone here in town who I don't know and suspected it might be about Pete. As soon as the line was free, I checked voicemail and found a message from a guy who lives five blocks north of us saying our dog Pete was on his porch.
I called him, verified Pete was still there and we sped to the guy's home where we found a very excited, burr-encrusted Pete.
Maria shot this photo when I picked Pete up to carry him to our car.
Pete's only ID is a rabies vaccination tag from the local vet and a tag from Frontline flea treatment that has a serial number keyed to www.getmehome.com
The guy said his wife got the information from Pete's tag and they must have looked him up online because the guy called him Pete before I even mentioned the dog's name.
What a great program. What great neighbors.
Maria is baking a batch of fudge brownies to take to the couple who made our day.
And we took Skip and Gloria to lunch to thank them for their efforts.

Grumpy Old Man Rant #4,942

My doctor put me on a once-daily diabetes drug called Actos last December and my Caremark prescription insurance has covered it every month when I go to the local pharmacy for a refill.
Until today.
I took my last Actos yesterday.
Today, the pharmacist informed me that Caremark will no longer pay for Actos refills at the drugstore level. From now on, I have to get it in 90-day quantities by mail from Caremark.
This is what they did with a couple of other drugs and in both cases the mail-order arrangement represented a fairly substantial savings.
My complaint is that in none of these three cases did they give me advance warning. No e-mail or even a notification to the pharmacist saying, "This is your last pharmacy refill. After this, you have to go mail-order."
No, they just shut the client off with no advance notice.
And, since I've switched doctors in the past month and my new doc refuses to phone prescriptions in for mail-order, I have to snail-mail his prescription to Caremark and wait for them to snail-mail my Actos to me, which involves a turnaround of maybe a week or two.
In the meantime, I'm twisting in the wind.
Fortunately, I'm not sufficiently fucked up that this idiocy would put me into the hospital, but it would serve the morons right if their policy resulted in them having to pick up the tab for an expensive ER visit or hospitalization.

Time to say Thanks

It was 20 years ago this month that Tim and Linda Balough set off the Big Bang that expanded my motorcycling universe.
They invited me to ride along on to the BMW MOA national rally at Laguna Seca racetrack near Monterey, Calif.
I can remember every road and every stop we made on that trip.
They introduced me to a style of motorcycle touring that's light years away from what I would have learned from Muthuh - earplugs, big mileage and big smileage days and, of course, no beer stops along the way.
Still luminous in my mind are:
The rainy pre-dawn ride out of Russell, Kans.
My first mountain ride - an after-dinner jaunt up from Idaho Springs to the Echo Lake Lodge and the flanks of Mount Evans
The late-afternoon ride along the Colorado River on a backdoor route to Moab, Utah.
Racing thunderstorms across the Utah desert
A 120-mph Autobahn-style romp across Nevada on U.S. 50
My first ride up the Pacific Coast Highway to Big Sur
Riding through dense fog along Monterey Bay on the way back to Laguna Seca from San Francisco
Crossing California's Central Valley in 100+ degree heat as I watched the odometer on my '81 R100RS roll over 30,000 miles
Staring death in the face when a moron in a pickup pulling a horse trailer blocked both lanes of the highway south of Reno as Linda and I approached at 80+ mph. Thank God for the MSF course and its braking training
My introduction to KOA camping at Elko, Nev.
Learning about U.S. 36 as a pleasant alternative route across Kansas

Up to that point, the only touring I had done was a couple of two-up short jaunts to Michigan and a little loop through southern Ontario - in at Windsor, out at Sarnia. That 5,000+ mile ride with Tim and Linda was a college education in motorcycle touring and a mind-expanding experience. It's not an exaggeration to say it changed my life. It showed me I could aspire to the continent-spanning travels that made the Baloughs and guys like Wayne Garrison stand out as some kind of BMW motorcycle gods. It gave me the confidence in myself and my bike to realize I could ride anywhere and anytime. It also gave me the confidence to expand other areas of my life and to throw off limitations and fears that I had unconsciously picked up from my parents and others.
I owe much of the good parts of my life over the past two decades to Tim and Linda and what they taught me by word and example on that trip.
I've put more than a quarter-million miles in my mirrors since then, but that trip remains the benchmark against which all of my subsequent travels have been measured.

Thanks Tim. Thanks Linda. And thanks to everyone who's shared a ride with me since.

A tip for Brides

Note to brides:
If you have enough class to hire a real photographer, for God's sake don't put a bunch of disposable cameras on the tables at your reception.
Why?
Because the pictures you get back from your wedding guests are going to be 99% crap and it encourages your guests to interfere with the work of the official photographer(s).
We have a clause in our wedding photography contract that says:
It is understood that no other photographer, amateur or professional, shall be allowed to photograph at the wedding or reception while... (we are) working, and that any breach of this agreement will constitute a reason for non-completion of the job with no liability to... (us) and loss of initial deposit by the signing party.
We have yet to invoke this clause and walk out on a job, but as our experience in the business grows, we are increasingly aware of the importance of this understanding.
When you put disposable cameras on the tables there is a very high probability that they will fall into the hands of children who will use them to annoy other guests and get in the way of the wedding photographer(s) you paid anywhere from $500 to $3,000 or more. These cameras will cost you anywhere from $3.50 to $15 each and you will be lucky to get 5 photos from your guests that you'll want printed.
And there are few things more infuriating to a professional wedding photographer than an aunt or uncle or other guest jumping in to commandeer a set-up shot or, even worse, blocking the official photographer's shot at a critical point, like the bouquet toss or the cake cutting or a spontaneous emotional moment.
Once that moment is lost, it can't be recaptured and I can guarantee you that Uncle Fred's point-and-shoot photo will never be as good as the one Maria or I would shoot.