2012 was a crappy year for riding

I tallied my annual BMW motorcycle mileage this evening and am embarrassed and depressed.

I only rode 5,198 miles in 2012 – the lowest mileage since I started keeping records in 1986. I haven’t qualified for the Indianapolis BMW Club’s 10,000-mile award since 2004.

WTF?

I only made it to two rallies in ‘12 – the European Riders Rally in June in southeastern Kentucky and the BMW MOA rally in July in Sedalia, Mo. – both of them less than a day’s ride from home. And I rode up to Indianapolis in August with Charlie Parsons for MotoGP.

I had hoped to make it to the Falling Leaf Rally in Potosi, Mo. in October, but stayed home because of a rainy forecast.

It is my fervent hope that I can make up for lost time in 2013. There are lots of possibilities, starting with Daytona Beach Bike Week, the BMW RA rally at the Biltmore in Asheville, N.C., and the BMW MOA Rally in Salem, Ore. Throw in the Euro Riders Rally, the new Return to Shiloh Rally venue, and Falling Leaf and I could have a pretty good year.

At last, I have something to be optimistic about.

Happy New Year and good luck

I’m looking forward to 2013 with dread.

All of my optimism drained away on election night when it became apparent that the forces of evil had stolen the election through massive voter fraud.

Now they will move to consolidate their power and, as the past year has shown, we can’t even count on the Supreme Court to protect and defend the Constitution and us with it.

I’d like to hope for a miracle, but I fear we are truly fucked.

Front door panorama

Shot from our front porch at 9:57 a.m. It’s now 1:18 p.m. and a significant amount of snow has melted, revealing large patches of bare ground.

This was shot with the panorama feature of my new iPhone 5, which impresses the hell out of me. The embedded specs are ISO 50, 1/1500 sec. at f/2.4. This is a significantly better result than I can get with the panorama feature of my Olympus Stylus 850SW point-and-shoot that I carry as a matter of routine. Looks like I can start leaving the Olympus at home.

New phones for everyone in the house

Maria, her daughter Morgan and I were long overdue for new phones.

Morgan’s phone fell apart yesterday at work and had to be taped back together. She’s been using that phone since she was a student at Indiana University.

Maria got her phone shortly after we arrived in Arkansas five years ago and mine was only slightly newer.

Since we’re all on the same Sprint account, we rendezvoused at the Sprint store this morning, decided we all wanted cool smartphones and ended up buying three iPhone 5 phones. Maria and Morgan got white 16GB models and I got the black 32GB.

Photographic thoughts

I returned to JPG Magazine (jpgmag.com) a few days ago to share some of the photos I’ve been taking lately.

That’s what an attention whore does, you know. Put stuff out there and hope people will say nice things about it.

The feedback has been pretty good, but I’ve noticed something.

A lot of the contributions remind me of stuff I shot in my 20s when I had a camera and lenses but no idea what to point them at. I must have shot a million frames of crap – fortunately I was buying my black and white film in bulk and processing it myself.

An awful lot of the contributions to JPG Magazine online are themes I thought were cool when I was in my 20s and didn’t know shit about life. Stuff like:

• Flowers
• Abandoned buildings
• Young people looking pensive and pretending to have profound thoughts
• Abandoned cars
• Cemeteries, especially statuary
• Alleys in cities
• Bare trees
• Still lifes
• Detail shots of cars, trucks, motorcycles, etc.
• Public restrooms
• People with tattoos and/or piercings
• Grizzled looking old people
• Homeless people
• Rusty objects or things in decay (youth has a fascination with decay and death)

With a few happy exceptions, I don’t think I started taking decent pictures until the late 1990s when I bought a Nikon N90S to keep up with Maria, who had also become a Nikon shooter. Maybe I’m still not taking good pictures, but I’m having a lot of fun. Much of the time, it feels like magic happens when I start shooting and the addition of HDR has added a whole new dimension of creative possibilities.

Most of the photos I like are of people and animals doing things. I don’t know why. They just appeal to me as moments frozen in time. I don’t pretend they’re art.

You can find my stuff at jpgmag.com under johnmflora.

Oot and aboot

I’m at Panera this morning, having a cup of coffee and a free cheese Danish (courtesy of the My Panera program).

There was freezing rain in the forecast early this morning, but the rain didn’t get here until just a few minutes ago. The temperature is up to 35, so the net effect will be to hasten the snow melting as long as it stays above freezing.

No weekend plans and nothing on my agenda today beyond picking up a prescription from the Walmart pharmacy.

Just sayin’

We went to several Arkansas State University home basketball games the first three years we lived here and, while I was filling in as a staff photographer, I covered nearly all of the home games from late December, 2007 through February, 2008.

Having lived most of my life in Indiana, where basketball is the premiere sport and the Big Ten is the only conference that counts, I was used to watching college basketball played and coached at a very high level.

It didn’t take me long to notice that ASU and the Sun Belt conference don’t play the same kind of basketball that you find at Indiana University or Purdue University.

I often joke that on any given night there are probably three or four Indiana high school teams that could beat a Sun Belt team.

So I was interested the other night to see how the Sun Belt Conference’s Florida Atlantic would fare against I.U.

Indiana won 88-52 over the Florida Atlantic team that beat ASU 72-65 back on Dec. 1.

But then basketball isn’t a big deal around here. If you don’t believe it, look at the tiny high school gyms here and then visit Indiana high schools. Indiana has 13 of the 15 largest high school gyms in the nation, including the spectacular New Castle High School gym that seats 9,325. That’s only slightly smaller than the ASU Convocation Center which seats 10,563 for basketball.

No, this is the South and football is the favored sport.

And when it comes to football, ASU just might be able to beat I.U.

I’ve got to admit it’s getting better…

I stayed hunkered down at home most of today, whipping up a pot of chili for lunch, and settling a dog dispute over a hapless bird that got trapped on our screened porch.

I responded to serious barking and snarling to find Jack with a dead bird in his mouth and Samantha, the American bulldog, glaring at him for taking her prize. Sam dreams of catching birds and sits under the bird feeder, a picture of comical optimism.

I chased Jack around the yard for awhile – which is what he wanted me to do - trying to get him to surrender the dead bird before he ate it. I finally distracted him and snatched it up, tossing it over the fence and out of his reach.

Thinking I might see something worth photographing, I took my camera with me when I went to the post office in mid-afternoon. I stopped at the Dollar General to restock Maria’s supply of Coke Zero 2-liter bottles and as I prepared to get back onto the highway, I noticed this Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department grader northbound on U.S. 49. So I shot a bunch of frames and sent one downtown for possible use in the paper. The driver, just for the record, was Heath Eubanks with the department’s Greene County maintenance crew.

Our little subdivision county road, on the other hand, isn’t likely to get plowed or graded before the sun makes the snow disappear. That’s the most common form of Arkansas snow removal.

Learning, learning…

It’s a sunny 36 degrees and the 5” of snow from last night’s blizzard is rapidly turning to slush, so I decided to see how the Lexus could handle our unplowed subdivision streets.

I promptly got stuck at the end of our driveway, a gentle uphill right turn.

Then I noticed the button to the left of the shifter marked ECT SNOW. Out came the inch-thick owner’s manual and I quickly learned that there is an ECT light on the instrument panel that confirms when the ECT mechanism is engaged.

Our ‘03 Lexus RX330 is front wheel drive, so I knew there was no chance of ECT involving 4WD.

That in mind, I pushed the button, checked the ECT light on the dash and gingerly applied pressure to the accelerator. Voila! The car moved forward and never faltered over the 2/10 mile of snow and slush between our house and the well-plowed county road.

Online research later informed me that ECT minimizes wheelspin by starting off in second gear and making the accelerator a little less responsive to foot pressure.

Hardly 4WD or all-wheel drive, but it worked and spared me some embarrassment.

Yeah, it snowed

The Blizzard of ‘12 is gone and I measured 5” of snow in our driveway just now. There are drifts of 10”-12” in places.

It was snowing hard – hard enough to create the rare phenomenon of thunder snow – by the time we crept home in the all-wheel drive Subaru Forester around 9:30 p.m. We only met about a dozen vehicles on our drive and saw no one going north in front of us or behind us.

This may have been a spectacular weather event by Arkansas standards. As a veteran of 62 Indiana winters, I look at it as just another snowstorm.

The big difference, of course, is that snowfall of an inch or more is so uncommon that it would be foolish for state, county and city officials to invest in snowplows. I’m told that this county has two.

So the strategy is for everyone to just stay put for a day or two until it melts.

Forget the Mayans, we’re stuck in the middle of Kali Yuga

Just in case you thought we were off the hook since the world didn’t end on the 21st.

Merry Christmas. Here comes a blizzard.

I’m driving Maria to work and carrying a camera in case she needs another shooter. Early deadlines, so we hope to get home before the roads drift over – only two snowplows in the county. But we’re taking sleeping bags and air mattresses just in case.

From the National Weather Service office in Memphis:

Updated Dec 25, 2012, 9:30am CST

... BLIZZARD WARNING IN EFFECT FROM 3 PM THIS AFTERNOON TO 9 AM CST WEDNESDAY... ... WINTER STORM WARNING IS CANCELLED...

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN MEMPHIS HAS ISSUED A BLIZZARD WARNING... WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 3 PM THIS AFTERNOON TO 9 AM CST WEDNESDAY. THE WINTER STORM WARNING HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

* VISIBILITIES AT TIMES DOWN TO LESS THAN A QUARTER OF A MILE.

* SNOW ACCUMULATIONS... 6 TO 10 INCHES... WITH LOCALLY HIGHER AMOUNTS.

* TIMING... RAIN WILL CHANGE OVER TO SNOW THIS AFTERNOON AND INTO THE EARLY EVENING HOURS. SNOW WILL BECOME HEAVY AT TIMES TONIGHT.

* WINDS... SUSTAINED WINDS AROUND 25 TO 30 MPH WITH GUSTS OF 35 TO 45 MPH.

* IMPACTS... SNOW AND BLOWING SNOW WILL SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE VISIBILITIES. TRAVEL WILL BECOME HAZARDOUS.

.PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

A BLIZZARD WARNING MEANS SEVERE WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. FALLING AND BLOWING SNOW WITH STRONG WINDS AND POOR VISIBILITIES ARE LIKELY. THIS WILL LEAD TO WHITEOUT CONDITIONS... MAKING TRAVEL EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. DO NOT TRAVEL. IF YOU MUST TRAVEL... HAVE A WINTER SURVIVAL KIT WITH YOU. IF YOU GET STRANDED... STAY WITH YOUR VEHICLE.

&&

More Information

... BLIZZARD CONDITIONS EXPECTED TO IMPACT PARTS OF THE MIDSOUTH FROM LATE TODAY... THROUGH CHRISTMAS NIGHT AND INTO EARLY WEDNESDAY...

.A STRONG UPPER LEVEL LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM CURRENTLY ACROSS TEXAS WILL TRACK INTO THE MIDSOUTH BY THIS EVENING. RAIN WILL SPREAD OVER MOST OF THE MIDSOUTH THIS MORNING AND AFTERNOON. RAIN WILL BEGIN TO CHANGE TO SNOW OVER NORTHEAST ARKANSAS AND THE MISSOURI BOOTHEEL LATE THIS AFTERNOON... BEFORE CHANGING OVER TO ALL SNOW BY EARLY EVENING. PERIODS OF HEAVY SNOW WILL BE POSSIBLE DURING THE NIGHT WITH THE ADDED POSSIBILITY OF AN INITIAL ICE PELLET MIX. IN ADDITIONAL TO THE HEAVY SNOW... STRONG NORTH WINDS GUSTING UP TO 45 MPH ARE EXPECTED... CAUSING SEVERE REDUCTIONS IN VISIBILITIES... ALONG WITH BLOWING AND DRIFTING CONDITIONS.

Flashback

I was searching for another photo this morning when I came across this shot of me at work in The Indianapolis News city room, circa 1967, while the ceiling got a fresh coat of paint.

Pay attention

Apparently the folks at Beck’s got complaints from beefwits who can’t tell a twist-off cap from a pry-off cap.

So they tell you on the cap so you can avoid shredded fingers.

My son Sean once opined there is no such thing as a twist-off cap. That approach saves you a lot of pain.

Opinions

I achieved a minor milestone of sorts this week.

I reached the rank of Top Contributor on tripadvisor.com, a site that invites customer reviews of hotels, motels, restaurants, tourist attractions, etc.

You have to write 50+ reviews to reach the exalted level of Top Contributor – the highest level of travel commentary on the site. Until this week, I was merely a Senior Contributor.

It wasn’t hard. All you have to do is have opinions.

Almost over

What better way to mark the end of the Mayan calendar than with Leinenkugel Snowdrift Vanilla Porter in my Mayan calendar-themed Boscos mug?

With less than three hours left of 12.21.12, it looks like we’re gonna make it.

Good work, Sandra!

I got this in an email from my mother-in-law this morning:

I almost got phone scammed ten minutes ago by a man pretending to be Austin.  I should have known when he pitifully said "Grandma is this you?" and I said "Austin?" which is how it works.

Austin would never call me Grandma.  But it went on a minute or so with some outrageous story that he wanted kept "just between you and me."  Then the light bulb went on (Duh) and I said "Austin Honey, what is your mother's name?"

Silence.

Close call, but I think even on a bad day I would have come to when he asked for money sent to his account.   I would never do that.

The scammer usually poses as a grandchild who desperately needs money to get out of jail or some other predicament.

Good job shutting him down, Sandra!

Extra points

My stepdaughter, who is a world class couponer, alerted me last week to this trick to get an extra 10 points for every bottle cap code you enter on mycokerewards.com, a site where Coca-Cola products consumers can earn prizes.

The prizes are mostly cheap and cheesy, but we keep piling up points because we’re heavy users of Coke Zero.

Here’s how it works:

1. Log into your MCR account
2. Enter a Cap code (just one!)
3. Then, enter the code GIFT – you should receive 3 points PLUS 10 bonus points = 13 total points
4. Sign out of your account and then sign back in again
5. Repeat steps 2 thru 4 continually until you run out of caps or until you’ve entered the weekly max of 40 caps (ex. 120 non-bonus points)

Oh, hell yes!

Make mine a 1911 with Crimson Trace laser sights.

Buca! Buca! Buca!

At Buca di Beppo in Orlando, moments before the best meal of the trip showed up on our table.

(Well, the name of the blog tells you who this is all about.)