Interesting combination today.\u00a0 I wore my winter hat and my summer gloves.\u00a0 I guess either could have gone one way or the other.\u00a0 The weather site reported fifty degrees; the various bank displays ranged from fifty-one to fifty-three.\u00a0 October is sort of the beginning of the cooler riding season here.\u00a0 My heart bleeds for those in the frozen north who are imprisoned by Jack Frost.\u00a0 We here in the eastern part of the Sunflower State have good riding days in every month of the year.\u00a0 I read recently where one posted that he reverted to fire and theft insurance for almost half of the year.\u00a0 I believe if I had to live that way I would cut off all my heads.<\/p>\n
As the cooler weather settles in the need for the two wheeled salute drops off dramatically in these parts.\u00a0 The only riders I encountered in town were two motormen.\u00a0 I am always impressed at seeing them ride in pairs.\u00a0 They move almost as if there were an invisible bar joining them together and when they approach from behind it is easy to mistake in the mirror their headlights for those of an oncoming cage.\u00a0 Around here about half of the motor officers will drop a hand in greeting.\u00a0 Come to think of it, that is about par for Harley jockeys with or without the badge.\u00a0 We did have one in Evansville shake a finger at us, but the lady was screaming and my eyes were starting to roll up into my forehead.\u00a0 We really shouldn’t have been doing that on an urban thoroughfare.<\/p>\n
I live sixty miles from my workplace.\u00a0 It’s the best reason I can think of to get out of the shower before all the hot water is gone.\u00a0 The temperature seemed really nice when I left the house, but at eighty-five indicated I did have some misgivings over my choice of hand cover.\u00a0 We chose to ride the flyway almost all the way in this morning.\u00a0 We leave in semi darkness this time of year and the prairies and woodlands have ample vermin populations.\u00a0 I do not fear the ones with short legs, but carry a concern bordering on terror for any standing taller than eighteen inches.\u00a0 I just feel safer avoiding the two lane rural roads in the dark and Velvet doesn’t seem to mind.\u00a0 Velvet doesn’t mind the cooler temperatures, in fact she revels in them.\u00a0 She just gulps down all that thick cold air and it seems to perk her up.\u00a0 She kept insisting on climbing up to ninety-five and\u00a0 I had to keep pushing the throttle to hold her down.<\/p>\n
Highway ten into Lawrence was very pleasant.\u00a0\u00a0 I try not to run much beyond the flow of traffic as I see no reason to make myself a high profile target for the gendarme, but I do prefer to hold the left side of the slab and I firmly believe that the best defense against a collision from the rear is to limit the vehicles approaching from that direction to zero.\u00a0 Running the left lane is a good thing.\u00a0 As my friend, Wayne, says, “It’s like free miles on your tires.”\u00a0 I have twenty-five thousand now on the front. The rear wore out at twenty.\u00a0\u00a0 I don’t know whether it is the size of the headlight or my massive silhouette in the rear view, but cages seem to, for the most part, move aside when I run up on them in the left lane.\u00a0 I am, after all, a huge man of almost two hundred pounds and no less than sixty-eight inches of height.\u00a0 Well, okay, maybe a little less. Now and again I had to take the initiative and borrow the right slot long enough to slip past a motorist who was either completely inattentive or greatly deluded concerning his rate of travel.\u00a0 These are tense moments for me, going past a cage on the right, as I try to be wary of any maneuver they may choose to execute without warning.\u00a0 After all, if they were capable of clear thinking they wouldn’t be riding with training wheels, now would they?<\/p>\n
West of Lawrence we climbed onto the toll road.\u00a0 They really do fly on that stretch.\u00a0 There are times when we have to blow past the century just to get around some of them.\u00a0 We topped a rise and were greeted by the sight of a host of red glowing heralds and a herd of traffic moving at the proverbial snail’s pace.\u00a0 Well, not really.\u00a0 I guess that honestly a snail that could roll along at twenty miles per hour would definitely be at the top of his class.\u00a0 There was a long empty gap behind me in the left lane and I was concerned over the exposure of my back side.\u00a0 I kept one eye nervously on the mirror and the other scanning for a spot to slip into the protective cover of the line to my right.\u00a0 Very soon I picked up the image of a tow truck that I had passed just a thousand yards prior.\u00a0 He was now running with flashing lights and coming on quickly.\u00a0 I gave him all the room I could and he used a good deal of left shoulder and a little brake as he blew past.\u00a0 There were several state highway safety practitioners on either side of the road with their rooftop lights ablaze.\u00a0 Ahead parked against the left concrete barrier I caught a glimpse of a small car whose hood was peeled back like a can of Popeye’s spinach.\u00a0 The driver was leaning calmly against the barrier with his backpack in hand apparently just waiting for a lift.\u00a0 He seemed to be okay.\u00a0 About thirty yards up the shoulder, the other participant did not seem to have fared quite so well.\u00a0 He was a young buck, appearing to be well fed and originally sporting six points, of which three had departed. He was sprawled across the shoulder with his legs pointed in three distinctly different directions, his head and neck turned oddly against the concrete.\u00a0 I believe that he will not participate in the gene pool this season.<\/p>\n
As I left behind the accident scene (we must assume that neither the slain nor the slayer intended this encounter), I noticed a couple of the troopers were joining our high velocity traffic stream causing no small amount of confusion and hesitation to ripple through the guilt ridden among our congestion of carriages and drivers.\u00a0 The toll booths were not far off and we arrived safely for our twenty second exchange of coin and conversation.\u00a0 I tend to select the leftmost open booth and then rejoin the flow of traffic with gusto and no small amount of playing the pipes.\u00a0 This morning I watched carefully and held the Dragon firmly as last week I had noticed one of the state’s uniformed representatives awaiting alongside the road at about the point where the several lanes are reduced to their previous two.\u00a0 I got the distinct impression that he was desirous of making my acquaintance.<\/p>\n
Arriving at work was fairly normal.\u00a0 I was running a few minutes late, as usual.\u00a0 I was apparently wearing the appearance that facial hair takes on when impacted by the up rush of wind from beneath a full face helmet.\u00a0 A few instances of expanded eyes and younger women diving off the hallway caused me to check quickly as to whether my zipper was in place, but no, it was just the mustache<\/p>\n
I work in Information Technology as a systems programmer.\u00a0 There have been times in my career when I have found my work exciting and rewarding.\u00a0 These are not some of those times.\u00a0 Today I will spend my time doing what I need to do; appreciating that a steady job allows me to ride and keeps my wife content;\u00a0 feeling sympathy for those who are not fortunate enough to own a Valkyrie; and thinking about how nice will be the ride back home.\u00a0 It is not really much of a mystery to me that more television dramas are not centered around the daily adventures of systems programmers in the corporate world.<\/p>\n
Thanks for taking the time to listen to my musings.\u00a0 I do apologize for the length of the ramble, but sometimes it just gets a little crowded behind my eyes and I need to spill it out somewhere.\u00a0 You all be safe, watch your mirrors, and I will hope to see you down the road.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Interesting combination today.\u00a0 I wore my winter hat and my summer gloves.\u00a0 I guess either could have gone one way or the other.\u00a0 The weather site reported fifty degrees; the various bank displays ranged from fifty-one to fifty-three.\u00a0 October is …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/willowinthewind.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/willowinthewind.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/willowinthewind.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willowinthewind.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willowinthewind.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/willowinthewind.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":169,"href":"https:\/\/willowinthewind.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions\/169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/willowinthewind.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willowinthewind.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willowinthewind.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}