Scared of Santa!!!!!!

Christmas may be six months away, but it's never too early for The Scared of Santa Gallery.

Good news in the mail

Finally! Some good financial news in the mail. Because of an escrow adjustment, our house payment will be $33.69 a month lower for the year beginning in August.

A Picture Share!

A vente moca frappuccino at Starbucks.

Back to Plan A

My decision to forgo the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America national rally in Vermont in order to ride with my friend Skip and his buddy Bill got reversed today.
Turns out Bill is adamant about wanting to go to the Smokies, which is not all that bad. BUT, he envisions getting a bed & breakfast room southeast of Knoxville, Tenn., and doing day rides of no more than 150 miles a day.
As soon as Skip heard him say it, he knew I couldn't buy into a plan like that.
He was right. I feel guilty if I do less than 500 miles a day while touring and I'd find that routine absolutely stifling.
I was ready to compromise with a series of 300-350-mile days in a ride around Lake Michigan or a tour of the Southeast, but Bill's idea of a motorcycle vacation sounds a lot like sitting at home and flipping channels.
Rather than try to impose my tastes on them - after all, it is Bill's vacation and he's the only one of the three of us with a job - it makes more sense for me to beg off and re-set my sights on Vermont.
The MOA rally will be less expensive, since the rally fee includes camping and - weather permitting - I can camp en route to and from the rally.
Besides, the Northeast is the only region of the contiguous 48 states where I've never ridden a motorcycle.
If I take an extra day to cruise through New England, I'll return home with only New Jersey left to do in the lower 48.
I also suggested to Skip that he and I plan a Colorado trip later this year or sometime next year and, as I expected, he is up for it.
Interesting how he and I are both in our 60s, yet we have a greater appetite for motorcycle miles than the younger guy.

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Sent from my Treo

Wedding Music

Blogger friend Totsie over at Malachi Crunch asked for suggestions for wedding reception music.
I can't get her comment feature to work, so I'm responding here.
Check out this site:
http://www.topweddingsites.com/wedding_reception_music.html

A Picture Share!

Vanity plate on a white Camaro.

Powerless

I managed to stay relatively dry on the ride home.
I got lucky and shot the gap between two thunderstorms with lightning flashing on the horizons to the east and west of me.
It was an exhilarating feeling which I'm sure was lost on the car drivers with whom I shared the road. They probably barely noticed the weather that had my full attention.
Here and there, I'd encounter wet pavement where rain had fallen minutes earlier. My pants were wet with spray from the knees down, but otherwise I was dry.
I pulled into the garage just as the storm to the west arrived and began pelting me with fat raindrops.
I quickly discovered that the electricity was off, which explained why the local banki's time and temperature sign was dark when I rode into town.
That was about two hours ago and we're still without electricity.
The storm that hit as I arrived home was a noisy one and a couple of lightning bolts a short distance to the southeast sent Ruthie into a frenzy of barking and Pete into a state of profound terror.
Morgan, who had arrived home from her restaurant job a few minutes earlier, said Pete seemed to sense the approaching storm even before the first rumbles of thunder. He was holed up in his kennel, burrowed deep into the ratty gray blanket that represents safety to him.
Now, with the storm long gone, he's very subdued. His ears are back and his usual Aussie playfulness is gone.
I'm sure he's suffering with memories of the night some weeks ago when he and Ruthie were stuck on the back deck when a thunderstorm swept through and sent him fleeing in terror into the night - a blind run through strange territory that left him lost and wandering our little town for the next 36 hours until we found him and brought him home.
In the meantime, we're stuck without electricity. Morgan just phoned her grandmother on the north end of town to confirm that we're not the only folks without power.
It's getting on toward dinner time and, without the means to cook, we'll likely be forced to drive until we find a restaurant that isn't blacked out.
I suppose I should give Maria a call and see when she expects to get home, so we can make some plans.

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Sent from my Treo

A Picture Share!

Dog treats on a motorcycle seat in front of PetSmart. A good excuse for a Wednesday afternoon ride.

I feel like I'm starting to get back up to speed in terms of comfort on my/our motorcycles.
It always takes a few hundred miles every spring to blow out the cobwebs and get back to the point where I'm riding relaxed, but alert.
I'm still a bit tense riding with a passenger. Maria and I rode up to Lafayette for dinner at a barbecue place and I had a heightened awarness of the way a passenger affects handling and performance and was hyper-alert everytime I came to a stop. I supposed that beats the hell out of overconfidence and falling down.
I rode Maria's K75S up to Lafayette this afternoon. The official excuse for the ride was to pick up dog treats at PetSmart for Ruthie and Pete, but we all know it was just to go for a ride.
I left raingear at home and, naturally, I ran into a rainshower at the south edge of Lafayette.
Fortunately, it wasn't a deluge and I rode through it in about 2 minutes without getting soaked. But it was a useful reminder that no summer ride in Indiana is guaranteed to be 100% dry.
I'm riding Maria's bike whenever possible because it doesn't get much use and because I want to save the tires on my K1200GT for long-haul trips.
I need to call Skip later today to arrange a planning session for our upcoming ride to the Smokies.
I also need to fire up the lawnmower and harvest the lawn.
I find the job goes a whole lot easier if I use my in-ear monitors (earplugs with speakers) and my Sony MiniDisc player. They pretty much eliminate the annoying noise from the mower and make it feel a bit less like work. Still, I remember longingly the days when I was an apartment - and later a condo - dweller with no yard work to do. That was always a big point of contention with my first wife. She seemed to have an unnatural fascination with yard work, particularly for me doing it, and I detested it.

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Sent from my Treo

The call of the road

I've been hearing the call of the road lately.
It's been several months since I went anywhere interesting on a motorcycle - not since late last summer when I did a week in the Colorado high country with friends from the Indianapolis BMW Club.
My longtime Newsie friend Skip called Saturday to invite me along on a trip he and a buddy are planning for the second week in July. They're heading for the Smokies and they're motorcycle touring rookies. Well, Skip did some touring on a small-displacement Honda back in the 1970s before he drifted away from motorcycling. His younger friend Bill has ridden ratbikes and dirtbikes and recently bought a Honda ST1100, which is sort of Honda's version of my BMW K1200GT. Skip's on a large-displacement Japanese cruiser - I think it's a Yamaha, but I'm not sure.
Anyhow, they are looking to me for some guidance and tips on touring and I'm pleased to offer them the benefit of my experience.
I just wish we were headed west instead of east. I'm not all that crazy about touring in the southeast because of the high polulation (i.e., traffic) density and the increased likelihood of rain. Plus, I like the scenery of the west better.
Anyhow, I'm due for a ride.
I'd also been considering the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America national rally the following week in Vermont. I'd love to do both, but finances and our photo business may force me to choose one or the other.
We shall see.

$2.48.9/gallon for mid-grade (89 octane) gas!!!

An Admiral station about 2 blocks from Maria's newspaper office consistently has some of the lowest gas prices in the state.
And, they usually price the mid-grade gas the same as regular. When I rode past around midday, the rock-bottom price was $2.49.9 for regular and mid-grade.
When I returned this afternoon, they'd dropped the price another cent.
At the same time, the stations out by I-74 were selling regular for $2.73.9/gallon.
Naturally, I seized the moment and filled the tank of Maria's BMW K75S motorcycle.
I made two trips to town today, having to abort the first mission because an powerful storm system swept in from Illinois much faster than I had expected.
When we emerged from the courthouse where Maria had photographed a wedding ceremony, my plan was to go to lunch with her.
But an ominously black sky to the northwest made me reconsider and bolt for home.
As I rode out of town, the wind whipped up to 30 mph or more and the temperature suddenly plummeted 21 degrees from 88 to 67.
The road home is a twisty one, but I flogged the K75S unmercifully, urged on by vivid lightning strikes a mile or so to my left.
I managed to outrun the weather and reached our garage 13 minutes before the storm hit - just in time to offer reassurance to the dogs.
Pete, you may recall, went missing when left outside during a thunderstorm a few weeks ago and freaks out when heavy weather rolls through.
He spent the time during today's storm curled up in a ball at my feet under the kitchen table while I had lunch and used the laptop wifi connection to check the weather radar.

A double wedding

The groom uses his cell phone to remind one of the groomsmen of Saturday's wedding and the need to pick up a rental tux on Friday. The bride and her friends relax in rocking chairs in the circuit court jury room while they wait for the county clerk to perform the marriage ceremony.

We're shooting another wedding this weekend.
But we photographed the couple getting married today at noon.
The deal is that the officiant at Saturday's affair has no legal standing to marry anyone - he's just a friend.
So the couple showed up at the county clerk's office at 11:45 a.m. today to get their marriage license and to be married officially by the county clerk.
Maria got the call, about 15 minutes before they appeared at the clerk's office and hustled over with her camera gear to record the occasion.
We're going to the rehearsal at 4:14 p.m. tomorrow and the lavish faux wedding on Saturday.
Fortunately, the 90-degree heat is supposed to be gone by Saturday. Good thing, since the wedding venue isn't air conditioned.

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Sent from my Treo

Netflix – WTF?

On the recommendation of Maria's parents, we signed up for Netflix a few months ago.
In case you haven't checked it out, Netflix is a mail-order movie rental outfit that charges a flat monthly rate. They send you a DVD with a postage-free return mailer. You keep the movie as long as you like, then mail it back and by return mail they send you the next DVD that you've chosen.
You go online and create a queue of desired DVDs and then work your way down the list. We chose the deal where we pay $15.89 a month for two movies at a time.
The only thing limiting the number of movies you can get in a month is the turnaround time in the mail.
And that's where I'm starting to think they're taking advantage of us.
It's only one mail-day from here to the nearest Netflix distribution center in Indianapolis, but it's taking a lot longer than it should for them to turn the movies around.
I got e-mail from Netflix on Monday that our next two movies should arrive in Tuesday's mail. They did not. They weren't in Wednesday's mail, either.
Since the mailers don't have postmarks, there's no way to know if they really got mailed when Netfilx said they did, but if you multiply an extra couple of days by the number of movies requested, it becomes obvious that we're not getting the number of DVDs that we expected to get each month.
We'll probably stick with them, though, because they have a considerably larger selection than Blockbuster, which is our only real alternative for DVD rentals.
Or, I could run a phone line to our DISH satellite TV receiver and check out their pay-per-view selections...

Grandma Maria sews for Lisa

Maria's grand-maternal feelings are strong and resonant and she's been dying to make something for granddaughter Lisa to wear.
The last time we were down to Cincinnati to visit Lisa and her parents - on the occasion of Lisa's second birthday - Maria took measurements.
She bought some patterns and some fabric and when Steve stopped by here Monday night en route home from his Uncle Bob's funeral in suburban Chicago, Maria gave him her first creation - a yellow and blue sundress - to take home to Lisa.
Always the dutiful son, Steve e-mailed this and three other photos of Lisa in the dress today with the report that it's a perfect fit, albeit a bit snug in the tummy because Lisa has been eating well lately.
Maria shrieked with delight when she opened her e-mail and saw the photos.
"She's so cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuute!!!!" was the appraisal.
So get ready for more dresses, Lisa. Now that Maria has the precise size information, your parents may not have to buy you any new clothes for the rest of the summer.

A Picture Share!

NOT a fishing vest.

Powers of observation

I stopped at a convenience store Friday evening for some Gatorade after Maria and I spent a sweaty couple of hours scoping out the un-airconditioned venue for Saturday's wedding.
I was wearing the fabulous, exotic and no-longer obtainable Willis & Geiger Skeleton Coast photographer's jacket with the zip-in sleeves removed.
The lumpy youth behind the counter rang up my purchase and inquired, "Goin' fishin'?"
Yeah, for morons.
And I just caught one.

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Sent from my Treo

The Pros and Cons of Wedding Photography

We shot the bejeezus out of a wedding last Saturday.
The groom is a police officer and the bride works in a city office and they opted for our $750 package which includes two shooters (Maria and me) for eight hours and all of the images on CD-ROM. (Our $1,299 package includes two shooters for unlimited time, all images on a CD-ROM and a hard-cover bound album with the photos printed on enamel stock magazine-style paper. The album typically has about 50 pages and more than 200 photos.)
Like most weddings, it was a fun gig. The bride’s parents are divorced. Her dad has remarried and her mom was there was a date and there were some slightly awkward moments. There were also plenty of relatives who tried to commandeer our shot setups with their point-and-shoot cameras and all of the attendant chaos that you come to expect at a wedding.
But it was a straightforward business proposition in which we required one-third of the fee at the time of booking, the second third two weeks before the wedding and the final third on the day of the wedding.
Last year, when we were still not quite in business as wedding photographers, Maria offered our services free to a girl who had been her protégé at the newspaper and had since moved to a larger nearby paper. Our photography was to be Maria’s wedding present to her friend.
I groused and told her this was the last freebie because, while I enjoy photography, shooting a wedding is a full day of intense work and pressure. Plus the preparations, ceremony and reception took place in buildings without air conditioning on an insanely hot day.
A short time later, another young woman in her office announced her engagement and expressed a desire for us to shoot her wedding. Implicit in the request was the assumption that it would be a freebie.
No fucking way, said I, reasoning that we are now officially in the wedding photography business, have our rates set and don’t want people thinking they can work a special deal.
Nevertheless, Maria caved in and offered them a shoot for $500 - $250 up front and $250 the day of the wedding.
At the same time, this young woman has adopted an increasingly casual attitude about her job at the paper, taking time off for her second “job” as a cosmetics distributor and making a habit of taking three-day weekends by calling in sick on Fridays and Mondays.
She’s also blown off tasks that were requested by the publisher, created her own hours by misusing sick days and compensatory time off and proved to be increasingly unreliable.
It came to a head yesterday when she showed up late and left early, having accomplished little of value to the paper.
Oh, and I should mention that she comes to work in pajama pants, fuzzy bedroom slippers and a t-shirt.
The situation had become intolerable and it was made even more awkward by the fact of our photographer-client relationship with her.
So we decided to sever that relationship in order to clarify Maria’s employer-employee relationship with her. I wrote a $250 check refunding her deposit and Maria plans to snap things into focus for her when she comes in today.
For myself, I’m tremendously relieved. It’s a gig I never wanted, even at our going rates, because I think she’s an immature, manipulative user and her fiancé is an utter moron.
I like making money, but not that much.

Mom's Ham Loaf

My mother was an okay cook, but there were a couple of things she made that were world class.
One was her pumpkin pie and the other was her ham loaf. Here's the recipe for Eileen's Ham Loaf:

2 pounds of cured ham and 1 pound of lean fresh pork ground together
½ C milk
1 C cracker crumbs
1 egg
1 can tomato soup
1 t lemon juice
Shape into a flattened half-football configuration, cover and baste with glaze

Glaze: 1 C brown sugar, ¼ C vinegar, 1 C water: boil together for 3 min before basting

Bake at 350° until the glaze is bubbling and the top starts to brown, or to your liking. There's a wide range of okay here.
It's spectacular served hot and pretty damned tasty cold from the fridge.

Adios, Bob

I got the official word on Thursday and the details from my ex yesterday about the death of my former brother-in-law, Bob.
And I searched my archives for a photo of him and came up with this from about 1972 when he would have been about 21. That's Bob sitting in the grass on the hill behind my ex-wife's parent's house with her parents at the end of the table. That's my ex, Diane, in the foreground, next yougest sister Janice and then middle sister Kathy, who is now Bob's widow.
We had a wedding to shoot yesterday and a lot of post-production stuff to do today, whick kept me from traveling to Chicago with son Steve to the visitation today and the funeral tomorrow.
As per Kathy's wishes, we made a donation in Bob's name to the American Diabetes Association.

Going fast

Thanks to Netflix, we received a rental copy of "The World's Fastest Indian" on the day it was released in DVD format.
That was Tuesday. We found time to watch it last night.
Several of my BMW-riding friends had seen it earlier this year when it was in theatrical release and raved about it, so I was eager to see what I'd missed.
For those who don't already know, it's the story of New Zealander Burt Munro and his obsession with tweaking an outrageous amount of speed and power out of a 1920 Indian Scout motorcycle that he bought new when he was 21. Munro perseveres in his shed in Invercargill, the southernmost city in the British Empire, to the point where he's ready to take it to the Bonneville Salt Flats in 1962 to assault the world speed record for bikes under 1,000cc piston displacement.
He gets there with the help of friends and strangers and manages to rack up the first of a series of speed records, the one set in 1967 still standing today.
At one point, he gets the bike - largely rebuilt with homemade pistons and other parts - up past 200 mph.
And he was in his early 60s when he did it.
One of the things I like about seeing films in DVD form rather than in a theater is that you get lots of supplemental materials, like the documentary made featuring the real Burt Munro back in 1973.
Among Burt's memorable observations is a statement that you live more in five minutes at speed on a motorcycle than some people live in an entire lifetime - or words to that effect.
I know a little about speed on a motorcycle, enough to be in awe of Burt Monro.
My personal best is 146 mph, according to the speedometer on my old '91 BMW K100RS. I did it on U.S. southwest of Tonopah, Nev. It was a stretch of road that ran laser-straight across a shallow bowl of a desert valley that gave me a good view of the road for miles. The landscape was devoid of any vegetation large enough to hide a deer or other large animal, the sky was clear and there was no traffic on the road.
So I gave the bike her head and watched the speedo needle swing to the right past 100, 110, 120, 125, 130, 135, 140, 145...
The mile markers were whipping past at a rate of one every 20-some seconds and my Shoei helmet was generating enough lift that it felt like the chinstrap was going to choke me. The wind was a river of noise flowing around me and the road beneath me was a gray asphalt blur.
Finally, after a few seconds above the 145 mph mark, I decided I'd had enough. The bike had more speed left, but that was enough for me.
Backing off the throttle, I watched the speedo drop to 120 and had the distinct impression that I was now going painfully slow. 100 mph felt like crawling, so I wicked it back up to 110 and rode the rest of the way to Tonopah.
My current ride, an '03 BMW K1200GT, not to be confused with the much-improved K1200S, which holds the world speed record for its class.
I opened it up a couple of years ago on U.S.,50 in Nevada, but only could manage 135 mph because I had a big waterproof duffle bag lashed crosswise on the luggage rack, acting like a giant airbrake. I'm still curious to see what the bike will do in a more aerodynamically clean configuration.
But that will have to wait until the next time I'm in Nevada.

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Sent from my Treo