I've been pretty neglectful of my writing lately, what with the wedding and then my mom's visit. I'm hoping to take more personal time within the next week or so to remedy that. Along that same line, if you've sent me email, I probably haven't written back. Again, I'm hoping to get to it, but feel free to re-send if it's really been a while and you haven't heard back.

pacific rally updates.
We had a Pacific Rally meeting last night, in which we realized that we're actually ahead of schedule. This came as a bit of a surprise to everyone, considering none of us has really done anything substantial lately (or maybe I'm just speaking for myself). The flyers look great, thanks to Barb's artisitic ability. It's pretty exciting.

If you're interested, the flyer (in PDF form) is linked to off of the Wind Dancers website now, in the calendar section. For my part, I've been pretty busy updating our Cafe Press store to include the new Pacific Rally swag. You can see the merchandise here, as well as linked from the main Wind Dancers store.

Committee member Mary has set up a wine tasting event for us during the dinner, which should be fun. There's been some drama in the club (imagine that!) because of the whole "serving alcohol at a motorcycle rally" thing, so we have to really publicize that the wine tasting is not a Women on Wheels sanctioned activity. It's a bit of a pain; it'd be nice if we could all trust people to use common sense and not to have a big fit if someone wants to taste wine after dinner, but we all know how people can get. Sigh. There's a big difference between offering wine tasting as an optional activity at the end of the day and endorsing drinking and riding. I've been to the Pacific Rally before; no one rides after dinner anyway -- there are other events and activities, and people bring their own beer or buy it from the general store on-site if they're going to drink. Very frustrating to have to defend an optional, supposedly adult, activity.

But dramas aside, the Rally will be a lot of fun this year.

spring cleanings.
I'm cleaning out the garage, and decided to sell some old parts on ebay. I've never sold anything on ebay before, so it's a bit of an adventure. I've tried to be prompt about answering "Question for seller" emails, and am doing a relatively good job of not checking the auctions every 5 minutes to ensure that there are no bids.

I ended up lugging a bunch of crap into work today to calculate shipping costs. A woman in Georgia might be interested in buying my spare set of leathers, but I'm afraid that it's going to cost a bazillion dollars to ship it, since they're heavier than sin. So those got hauled in. Another guy in Irvine was curious about the cost of shipping my stock SVS seat. So that got hauled in. My friend Sara might fit into my old leather pants, and we're having lunch today. So those pants got hauled in.

I think I looked a little silly this morning, walking into work wearing full leathers, and carrying full leathers, leather pants, a seat, a helmet, and a tankbag. And people wonder how I get good biceps.

mini-rant.
What is with people who think that they don't need to thank me for working on their bikes (for free, I should add)? I think there's an assumption with some people that, since I love the bikes and I love working on them, that I don't need any show of appreciation for putting forth the effort. It's frustrating, and makes me want to beat people about the head with carb cover screws. There are a couple of people who are going to have to take their bikes to A Real $75/hour Mechanic real soon now if I don't start getting the abject worship, or at the very least a case of Heineken and a "thank you".

speaking of working on the bikes.
Now that the wedding is over and my mom's back in Wisconsin, I can dig into the monstrous list of "carolyn's to-do items" that have been piling up over the past few weeks. I have this optimistic idea that I'll get around to calling both Aftershocks and Fremont Cycle Salvage today or tomorrow. I'd really like to get those new forks and a wheel on the Bandit by the end of the summer.

The parts for Peter's carbs came in, so I'll have to dig up some free time to get to those soon, too. I have a feeling that my vernier calipers aren't doing the trick for measuring the float bowl level accurately, which means that I'll need to disassemble them again and find some better way to measure. The Clymers manual is -- shock -- not too helpful with explaining this procedure, so I'll be spending some time on the World Wide Interweb Superhighway and with my various books on fuel systems researching all that.

On that note, it's time to go to lunch with Sara and haul approximtely 10,000 pounds of leather gear to the post office. Maybe I can borrow a shopping cart from one of the homeless people...