Mouseycat might be sick. She had a very loose canine tooth removed the other day and we found she’d lost nearly a kilogram (nearly 2.2 lbs) since the last time she was weighed. There’s a chance that she just lost the weight because it hurt to eat, but it could be something more serious; blood tests ruled out diabetes but there’s still elevated white blood cell and liver enzyme counts so the current hypothesis is cholangiohepatitis. She’s on twice-daily antibiotic pills right now (which she just loves, let me tell you) and we’re back at the vet next Wednesday to find out what’s next.

Candice and I were in Belleville for Father’s Day weekend, and we spent Saturday with Dad at a weekend-long Beatles festival, with Beatles cover bands playing one after another on a single stage. It was surreal and straight out of the Simpsons, with the site map pointing out the “All You Need Is Food” food concession, the “Hello Goodbye” entrance/exits, the “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window” outhouse row, and a Paul McCartney lookalike wandering the crowds progressively drunker all night.

I took my bike in to get the bottom bracket overhauled and bought a helmet and now I’m ready to start riding everywhere. This is what I should’ve been doing instead of the motorcycle, I think. Silly me. I found that the commute to work along bike trails is about 10 miles on mostly level terrain, so I want to try bike commuting at least a couple times this summer. I took a test ride (to U of O and back, which I figured would be a handy benchmark for this fall) which was around 10 miles and found it easy, so I think it’ll be fine.

Related to that, I’ve been hitting the gym 2-3 days a week for the last month or so. I don’t like the workout I’ve been doing much but I just ordered New Rules of Lifting to give something else a try, but I’ve still been making it there regularly, at least. I need to learn to squat and deadlift.

In work-related news, this is not so good, apparently.

New laptop is awesome and so, so light. It also lets me leave my work laptop at work, which means I don’t have to carry a laptop as well as gym clothes and lunch when I go to work, which was getting particularly annoying on the bus, which I have been trying to take as often as possible instead of driving the car an extra 25 km/day.

Speaking of the car, I replaced the water pump recently because it was very noisy and obviously unbalanced (like me!), and pretty much every other noise the car was making went away too! It’s so quiet now. I guess I could have replaced the water pump a while ago.

Last Monday, Candice and I had been together for four years! In a couple of weeks it’ll be our first anniversary. Yay!

That’s about it for now. I’ll try to post more often, especially since I’ve got so many new things going on all at once. For some reason I try to avoid “Here’s what happened today” posts even when it’s sort of interesting. I shouldn’t do that.

In other news there is a battery charging on our balcony right now as part of my project to make a bit of sense out of why I haven’t been out on the motorcycle at all this summer. For those just tuning in, I bought a 1980 Suzuki GS250T at the beginning of last summer to learn to ride on, but after a couple of out-of-town rides and a couple of very unnerving commutes I realized I needed a bike that would go over 70 km/h with me on it! While the ideal plan would have been to sell it and then buy another bike, it ran into some electrical problems and I decided that since I had cash on hand I should buy a bigger bike to get me through the rest of the season and worry about the GS after I was riding again.

I picked up a 1985 Honda Shadow 750 in running condition but not a whole lot above. It did indeed get me through the rest of the season and was powerful enough to be safe on the highway and on the commute, but it didn’t feel… right somehow. It didn’t feel like it suited me, and it was a bit of a ratbike to begin with and after I lost the (apparently irreplaceable) side panel on a long ride it was even more so.

So my plan last winter was that since the bike was in warm storage, instead of trying to winterize it in the parking garage (which is hard to work in) I was going to start it up every couple of weeks and tool around the garage for a while to keep things from gumming up. Of course I never did, and this spring with the wedding and all I just never got riding again. After we came back from Paris I tried to get it going but it wouldn’t turn over.

So the first cause of that is the battery being dead and dry, so I’ve now got a new battery on the tender out on the balcony to try tomorrow.

But that doesn’t solve the main problem with the bike which I haven’t been able to put my finger on until today, but I was talking with a friend on IRC about it earlier (and getting annoyed, because he seemed to put leaving a bike unmaintained up there with abandoning a puppy) and it sort of sunk in as to what was wrong: I’m just not into every kind of bike.

Lots of people are — they’ll have a garage with a tourer and a sportbike and a dirt bike and a cruiser and so on, and take the bike that they want to take, or they’ll try all sorts of different kinds as they progress, starting off on a standard and then getting a sportbike and later on heading back more practical with a sport tourer and so on. My friend on IRC was that sort of guy, telling me about the variety of bikes he’s owned and loved.

But that’s not me, and I feel kind of dumb for avoiding it. When I was in Montreal, the bikes I noticed were the BMW GSes and Ducati Multistradas. At the motorcycle course, I wanted to ride a Super Sherpa, but they all ended up in the advanced group. Of the instructors’ bikes I was more interested in Richard McDonald’s KLR 650 than in another instructor’s V-Max. When I was marvelling over the bikes in Paris, I was pointing out the dual-sports to Candice.

Yet for some reason I didn’t realize that I wouldn’t be happy with a cruiser. (I nearly bought a sportbike of the same vintage and condition instead of the Shadow, and I suspect it would’ve had exactly the same outcome.)

The whole thing made me think of one of my other someday projects: restoring a 70s Datsun 240, 260, or 280Z. I’d love to have a Z to drive in the summer, but I really wouldn’t enjoy a Camaro, or an RX-7, or even a 1980 280ZX. It’s not just “I want an old car”, it’s “I want this one”, and having something that’s acting as a stand-in that requires significant attention ends up being more work than having neither.

So I’m going to fix that. I’m going to get the Shadow running if it’s not throwing good money after bad to do so, and either sell it very soon or first thing in the spring. I’m going to sell the GS too, but I’m not sure if I’ll get it running or sell it as-is — it’s such a small and old bike that it might be hard to make back what I’d spend getting it going again. And then I’m going to take that and an old GIC in the spring and shop only for a Kawasaki KLR 650, and a relatively recent one at that so I’m not buying 20 years of poor maintenance — probably 2000-and-newer. And then I’m going to commit to riding lots — the general idea will be that as I accumulate enough gear and luggage to do so I’ll take the bike and let Candice take the car as much as possible for, well, everything. If possible I want to try stretching the season as late into the winter as is safe, too.

And if a year from now I’m still feeling the same? Ok, tried motorcycling but it didn’t work out. No harm there. But I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen.

Yes, yes, I hear you now, “Didn’t he just buy a bike a few months ago?” Yeah, I did, but while it was a good bike to get my bearings on, it was way to small for the sort of day-to-day riding I wanted to do. The top speed on a level road was 80 km/h, and on a steep grade I might only be doing 50-60 km/h by the top. Since even my commute to work is on country highways which average 80-90 km/h and since much of my riding has been on the highways around Ottawa instead of the streets of, that bike wasn’t cutting it.

So this weekend I bought a bigger bike, a 1985 Honda Shadow 750:

Candice drove me down to Smiths Falls (about an hour away) to pick it up yesterday and I rode it back. What a difference! I can keep up on the highways now. Candice says it fits me, where the other one was like a large bicycle (or, as they’d put it on reeky, “like a monkey humping a football”). This one’s in pretty good shape; only four owners in the last 20 years, new seat, new rubber, new paint. The pipes, once again, are off a Harley. This amuses me because I’m probably the last guy to care if I get a Harley sound, but original pipes rust out and need replacing — and since everyone who buys a Harley gets custom pipes installed by the dealer, Harley dealers always have a bunch of stock Harley pipes for sale cheap. It’s a 750cc V-twin so it’s got that cruisery “rp rp rp rp rp rp rp” sound. It’s growing on me quickly.

I wasn’t really expecting to look for a cruiser; I checked out a couple of sportbikes that weren’t in ready-to-ride condition, but more than that they didn’t feel right for me. It’s a pretty sensible riding position — feet aren’t too far out, reach to the bars is average. I’m really looking forward to the rest of the season now, where I was getting tired of trying to make the old bike keep up with traffic. Just need to get it inspected next week and move my plate over (it’s on a temporary permit right now) and off I go!

• Today is Thursday, December 20, 2001 at the nostalgic Wikipedia.
• I’m shopping for a bike again. The 250 is too small for safe highway riding. My ride here would have been a lot less great if I happened to get an angry driver behind me on one of those long hills. Looking at maybe one of these guys from the local Bike Trader. Some thoughts on why I’m moving up already here, but mostly I just bought too small the first time around.
• Any thoughts on our honeymoon ideas? Mostly looking for first-person anecdotes rather than third-person cost/benefit analysis. I think we’ve sort of decided against a cruise already.

Ontario country roads

Quebec country roads