drink the kool-aid.
Co-worker Ceej has joined the cult. Yay! Complete world domination is now one person closer! Bwa ha ha.

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ow.
So, the reason I've been relatively incognito recently is that the two things that really go into this journal are riding and typing, and I haven't really been able to do either very well. The slight wrist pain I had has turned into full-fledged tendonitis with an attitude. Without whining too terribly much, I'll just mention that I'm on a self-imposed bike haitus until my arm heals more. The last time I rode the SVS (about a week ago, now), I couldn't pull in the clutch lever. I have no idea how I made it home. Anyway, so, yeah. I'm not riding and it sucks. But now I will stop complaining and move on.

the nighthawk, revisited.
I spent most of the weekend playing with the Nighthawk again, which was really nice. Peter brought it back to his house (from the Apple parking lot, where it had been festering for months) on Saturday afternoon, and I did a bunch of random services to it: oil change, cable adjustments, drive chain adjustment/clean/lube, sparkplug check, that sort of thing. Chai and Kim came over while I was playing, and I idly helped Chai with his 4000-mile service while puttering around on the Nighthawk. He learned that the socket wrench is your friend when he accidentally stripped the oil drain bolt using a normal adjustable spanner wrench. Oops.

I had planned on running a skills workshop with The Grrls on Sunday morning, until my wrists revolted last week. I was feeling pretty well on Sunday, though, and decided to chance it with the Nighthawk. For the first time in about eight months, I put my gear on, got on the Nighthawk, and rode it further than around the block. It's really funny how different it felt -- not just from the SVS, but from itself eight months ago. I felt a lot more confident tossing it around and revving the enging to redline, something I never would have done before. Peter's probably laughing at me while reading this, since I used to totally pick on him for riding the Nighthawk as hard as he does, and now here I am, doing the same thing. Ah well. It's such a fun punky little bike. I'm glad I've kept it around.

So, yeah, the seating on the Nighthawk is upright enough so that my weight isn't on my wrists, so the skills practice went pretty well. Peter helped out by setting the halved tennis balls in place for us, and filming most of the drills with our new camcorder. Lusty and Ceej showed up, too, and the three of us practiced our braking, circles, and cone weaving. It was fun.

Ceej, Lusty, Peter, and our bikes (Lusty's Intruder 800, my Nighthawk 450, and Ceej's SV650S).

Ceej's freakin' beautiful brand-new silver SVS.

Ceej and I coming up to one of the drills. A still frame from the video.

Ceej doing clockwise circles. A still frame from the video.

Lusty doing clockwise circles. A still frame from the video.

Me doing clockwise circles. A still frame from the video.

Ceej swerving through the cone weave. A still frame from the video.

A stillshot of me doing the cone weave.

Lusty doing the cone weave. A still frame from the video.

Me doing the cone weave. A still frame from the video.

A stillshot of me doing the cone weave.

Me on the Nighthawk, after doing the cone weave. A still frame from the video.

A stillshot of Lusty swerving through the cone weave.

an oscar-winner for sure.
On Sunday night, I stayed up way too late, playing with iMovie and the camcorder. Here's the movie I made. It's 11.4MB, so you there with the modem, consider yourself warned.

back to the nighthawk.
Last night, I decided to do a compression test on the Nighthawk, just out of curiosity. A compression test, for the uninitiated, is simply a tool to spend money on that, when hooked up to one's sparkplug, outputs some relatively meaningless numbers. After you do some service to the engine, you run the test again, so you can feel good about yourself if the resultant data are different meaningless numbers. At any rate, one of the cylinders was rather unhappy at 115psi (the other one was slightly more contented at 175psi), so I thought I might as well do a valve adjustment. In order to remove the cylinder head covers, one must first remove the gas tank, and, therefore, disconnect the hose running from the petcock to the carb. Guess what happens when you tug on a 16-year old piece of tubing? Crack. So, looks like I've got a trip to the auto parts store for tubing in my near future, and in the meantime, no riding the Nighthawk for me. Feh!