And last month was a super score...a 2012 model of the same bike with a paltry 2800 miles for a meager $500:

"Life, don't talk to me about life."

I'm not depressed like Marvin but things are sure busy.  Since school started I'm busy every night and weekend.   I go to work to just get some down time.    I've been called upon again to be a scoutmaster and rebuild a struggling troop.  This is taking quite a bit of time but it is worth it.  Plus there is a lot of school stuff with the kids.  I've been squeezing SF in late evenings after everything else is done.  I started the Celestia Frontier project and have a lot of stuff to put in the downloads there just needing to be organized and zipped on my hard drive.  I may get to that tonight after the weekly confrence calls to Malaysia.

We are also big time busy working on costumes for halloween.  My wife is sewing, l am working on 3D print parts, and my oldest son is working with his 9-year-old brother making him a chainmail shirt.

That sounds like cool stuff to get involved in. While I've never owned a Jeep I've driven a few...just not in the terrain they're supposed to be in. I'm just not a car guy so I'm at a loss for the second one, but "show cars from the 50's" is more than enough to nab my attention. And despite not being a car guy, car shows are still heaps of fun.

Raises hand, retreats back into corner to sulk & pout...

Glad to hear you closed this chapter, I recall some of the posts you made on the matter and how miserable things were for you.

A trick I learned --- well, I heard about it, I haven't had the need to try it --- hide your phone number in the description such as "I have three kids that are the light of my life. I'm into motorcycles, I have six that I ride along with two projects I'm working on. Blah blah blah I have four cats blah blah blah"...you get the idea. Then you simply ignore the email notifications and wait for the brighter ones to call you. ;)

It's not affordable anywhere, the creators of ACA/ObamaCare designed it as such. They set up the smaller companies to fail so that only the few big boys could form a monopoly, and as of 2015 that has been the case. Rates keep going up and coverage keeps going down, I'm in my third year of the crap and I have over $5K in unpaid medical bills sitting on my table because the insurance isn't paying what they were contracted to pay. And it has already been widely covered how those rates will continue to increase while coverage continues to decrease.

But I'm still no Trekkie. ;)

More inexpensive fun with the bike. I used chrome sink tail pieces from Home Depot for exhaust extensions. 

I'll start by posting some of the numerous updates I've done on the Roadster from the opening post. I ditched the Clubman handlebar that was on the bike in favor of a drag bar along with swapping the smaller grey tank from the newer acquisition (more on that later):

I wasn't wild about the way the new shortened fender sat on the bike. First I tried shorter shocks but that only resulted in bottoming out...

..so instead I mounted it to the swingarm to hug the rear tire and move with it versus being stationary and with the tire/wheel moving up and down inside it. I also acquired a front fender and cut the leading edge back and added a sprung solo seat:

On the port side I relocated the speedometer from the handle down to the right side of the frame/below the tank, you can see it perched just below the horn:

Well, this summer has been very busy.  I think I am about through all the tasks and scheduled events.  This last month has been non-stop.  Summer has been full of scouting activities and this month doubled up with bottling fruit from my trees.  The fruit is about all done now, just one more batch of pears to bottle.  Then Saturday ends the string of weekend scout activities when we go repelling.  After Saturday the scouting slows down to one campout a month as it should be and the harvesting will be done.

The house is quieter now with the three oldest away to college.  The younger half of the family now gets to dominate their parent's time.  I'd say the funnest thing of this summer was busting away with the lower half of the family (my four kids not yet in college) and going to Universal Studios Hollywood for the Harry Potter experience. 

Well lets see: since the divorce I live with my Dad which has been a good thing from the stand point of his age and health mean he really cant keep up the property. I've had some self assigned task:

Remove all the cobblestones originally used to demark the boundaries of gardens around the yard because I kept hitting them with the riding mower and they were a pain in the butt to mow around.

That led to some paving projects and fixing up the yard a little.

but.... my selfish self absorbed sister moved in supposedly temporarily and has caused lots of destruction and its fallen to me to fix those problems. I now have a back bed room closed off while I strip out carpet, sheet rock, and insulation to abate black mold. Fun, fun fun, like I didn't have enought to do while lugging cobble stones around the yard.

In the process of that I discovered that my grandfather lined the walls of the house with card board and that over the year it did get wet and so it kind of good that I'm doing this job; I suppose I should thank my sociopathic sister for causing this problem- maybe not.

Funny, I don't seem to be able to upload any photos.

 

I think if you try editting them, you can grab the bottom right corner of the photo and manually drag it to a smaller size. 

Definitely sounds busy.

Yikes! Sounds like a load of work.

For me, I haven't been on this site or the Facebook group for nearly two months.

I had a rather long writing project for the Detroit Athletic Club's magazine, the DAC News, for October.

The DAC has this business luncheon group called the Beavers. They started 100 years ago with a bunch of pool enthusiasts who wanted to get together for lunch, have a business speaker, but do all sorts of shenanigans in the pool.

They've had speakers such as Henry Ford II, ex-President Gerald R. Ford, World War I flying ace Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, Johnny Weissmuller -- aka Tarzan, the women's columnist Ann Landers, etc. So the Beavers basically wanted a book printed in the magazine. That's what they got. A 61,000 word story in twelve chapters ... plus a short introduction and an epilogue.

Needless to say, it was a lot of writing. Then I had to scramble to finish my stories for the November issue... a story on the founding of the Belle Isle Aquarium some 115 years ago; it was one of the top three aquariums in the world when it openned in 1919. 

A story about Detroit's response to the deadly influenza outbreak of 1918... i.e. the Spanish Flu.

And then a story about the Polar Bears -- some 5,500 American soldiers, many of them from Detroit, who were sent over to northern Russia in September 1918. President Wilson sent them there on the pretext of guarding weapons and ammunition to prevent the Germans from seizing them... except after the Russian revolutions of 1917, all the German soldiers left to go to the Western Front. The British and the French wanted the Americans there to fight the Bolsheviks...

The American troops got caught up in a Vietnam like experience -- though one with subzero temperatures of minus 40 to minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit where they were ill equipped for the weather.

Again, as a result, I've neglected posting anything here or responding to some things on the Star Frontiers Alive & Well site. I have a bit of backtracking to do there.