goodbye summer

September be gone. Well not at this very moment but in a few hours it will be goodbye September and hello October. We're having excellent weather today but tomorrow we're expecting rain. So what does a guy do when it's time for the oncoming deluge?

Clean the goddamned gutters!

and of course only one creature was willing to help me;

well, she didn't really help me. as a matter of fact she drove me crazy while i was on the roof. i'm not sure if any neighbors heard me telling her to shut the fuck up a few times as she started barking at every goddamned fly that landed in the yard. but the dirty job is done for the year. every month or so i'll clean out the corners.

on a more pleasant note, the insurance company gave me $1500 to go away. they told me that the bicycle accident was my fault and that i wasn't eligible for any compensation.  i hadn't even bothered calling them until the ambulance bill arrived in the mail and it said to call the insurance company if it involved a car accident. i told the insurance adjuster that in my opinion the accident wasn't 100% my fault and we left it at that with her agreeing to pay the ambulance bill. then lo and behold i received a call from the insurance company offering me $1000 to go away. i said make it $1500 and we have a deal.

it's actually peanuts considering that i really was injured and countless people get thousands upon thousands for claiming bullshit whiplash from accidents with virtually no damage. my knee still hurts, my neck still aches and i'm afraid to bite into a crisp apple but so it goes.

as my old buddy unk (malachi constant) was so fond of saying;

i was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

billy says he loves you sons of bitches.

blue screen of death

I got fed up with the blue screen of death and called ASUS product support. The guy on the other end of the line treated me like a child and had me to a reset, everything was wiped out and it was time for a fresh start. Since I did the reset, I've had one blue screen of death so I checked my drivers and one was no good.

I truly hate windows 10. Microsoft can stick their fucking cloud up the arse as far as I'm concerned. But what's the alternative? A friend spilled a tiny amount of water on her macbook and the thing is basically worthless. She paid about $2000 for it about 3 years ago and the apple store told her that it would cost about $1600 to fix it.  My ASUS/windows 10 toy might be a pain in the ass but it's only a $400 pain in the ass, so things could be worse.

On a positive note, the pair of duck shoes I bought were an outstanding investment.

It is so nice being able to walk rip in the wet weather and not have to worry about getting my feet wet. I had always bought so-called waterproof leather boots in the past and those sieves usually ended up giving me cold wet feet.

In summation:

Windows 10 bad.
Duck shoes good.

Billy's brain had an unexpected shut down and his tongue paid the price. He mumbled something about loving you sons of bitches.

asus and helmets

when i bought the new helmet it became apparent that flat black is the popular color.  the helmet i purchased was on sale for less than half price because it's white. the flat black helmets weren't marked down at all but the glossy black helmets were marked down about 25%. checking online i found that flat black helmets are less visible than white helmets, in other words, white helmets are safer. style trumps safety when it comes to motorcycle helmets. so it goes.

the white helmet is a bit dorky looking compared to the flat black but as an old man on a scooter, dorky fits right in.  after a applying a little art, the white helmet is now uber cool:

if that isn't cool, what is?
i now love my dorky white helmet.

the new asus computer kept getting the blue screen of death so i called product support. the young man on the other end of the phone had me do a reset. i'm told this will take a few hours and when it's complete, everything i put on it will be gone forever!  so it goes.

the procedure was amazingly simple. turn the son of a bitch off and as soon as you turn it back on just start hammering the shit out of the F9 key until it goes black. then you get about 10 warnings saying, do you really want to do this?  do you really really want to do this? do you really really really want to do this?...................

after you convince the son of a bitch that you really want to do this it starts wiping every thing out. so it goes. it's a good thing that i kept the old hp up and running.

billy says asus computers are junk and i'm not going to argue with him.

oh yeah, one more thing. i've decided that donald trump is total fucking asshole. but what the fuck, i've been wrong before so i won't get bent out shape if any of you vote him.

why? because i love you sons of bitches.

change in the air

Man oh man, the weather can certainly change quickly.  One week ago the weather was almost uncomfortably warm and now it's goddamned cold! Those carefree days of hopping on the scooter with just a t shirt and flip flops are over. It'll be a goretex jacket and leather sneakers for the rest of the season. bummer.

The onset of fall means one thing rosewaterville, it 's time to begin thinking about deadwood! I just finished watching Planet Earth with David Attenborough. It's a great series but it can also be quite depressing. Most segments focus on some darling little animals where you get emotionally involved with their struggles to survive a hostile environment and the never ending quest for food. Then almost every segment ends with some rat bastard predator killing the poor creature that you'd just formed an emotional attachment with. So it goes.

I enjoyed the episodes which focused on the planet rather than the creatures. Caves and the deep ocean were probably my favorites. It takes a special type of adventurer to explore some of those caves. The only thing that bothers me about these fantastic BBC natural wonder series is the shared footage. I realize how difficult and expensive it is to film most segments but I wish they'd briefly display a little caption below segments that have been used in different series.

Why? Because it might stop me from thinking that my senility is running amok! I kept asking myself, have I seen this before? Fuck me, it seems familiar but I don't remember watching this episode.

I had something clever and insightful to say but son of a bitch, I can't remember what it was.

Was Chet a cool dude or was Chet a cool dude?

Chet was a cool dude.

Billy's feeling kind of blue, but I guess he was born to be blue.

scoot, scoot, scootin....

The scooter continues to be the apple of my eye. (but Rip is still my true love)

I've decided to stick with the pcx150 and not press my luck with something bigger and faster. But like I said before, it only takes one moment of weakness to do something foolish. Never underestimate the power of a slick commissioned salesman.

The new helmet arrived and it's a big thick clunky thing. When I first put it on I thought; son of bitch, this thing's too tight. But reading the little two bit manual told me that it was supposed to be tight and would mold to the shape of my head. The manual was correct, it's slowly adapting to my square head and if it was any larger the wind would push it up while riding.

A few days ago it was so hot and sunny that I used an umbrella while walking Rip in the afternoon but today it's turned cold and it started to drizzle as I was scooting back from the bakery. The summer fun will soon be over. So it goes.

The new computer is working well but it seems getting windows 10 just swapped one problem for a different problem. Windows 7 often disconnected from the net and I had to run the wizard to resolve the problem, "restore local gateway connection".  Now windows 10 is giving me the "blue screen of death" with the message "THREAD STUCK IN DEVICE DRIVER".  Sonny will be dropping by to check it out and re-install some drivers.

One good thing about windows 10 is the ESPN baseball box scores always come up right away. For some funny reason I always had to refresh the baseball home page before the box scores would come up when using windows 7. I love the box scores. If the games on TV are crappy, I'll spend more time monitoring box scores than watching tv.

One of the best baseball songs:

Billy says he loves you sons of bitches.

is that all there is?

the new computer is up and running.  it was exciting for the first 10 minutes but overall it's not really a big improvement.  it's faster but i'm not crazy about windows 10.  it'll take me a little while to get over the invasion of my privacy by microsoft.

it seems like yesterday that most people i knew were running bootleg copies of windows but now microsoft gives the operating system away. they ended the free windows 10 promotion but i think it's all a marketing gimmick. they signed up all the innovators and the free sign ups dwindled so they ended the promotion making people think they missed out on a good deal. i'm pretty sure microsoft will wait a few months and begin a new free promotion.

tomorrow i take the scooter in for the warranty service. about all they do is change the oil and then charge over a hundred bucks. i'm planning on taking a few big bikes for a test drive while i wait. i'll be taking a honda phantom/shadow out for spin and if the mood strikes i might take a crotch rocket out for a ride. the scooter is much more practical for zipping around the city but having all that power between your legs can be magical. maybe i'll find the fountain of youth.

and hey , let's be careful out there.

gas prices

most people love to complain about the price of gas, myself included.  i don't mind paying the oil and gas companies for the fuel, but i do get a little tired of all the taxes.  what really galls me is the fucking carbon tax on natural gas. with the current low prices on natural gas, the carbon tax was greater than the cost of the commodity. to add icing to the shit cake, the carbon tax just goes into general revenue for our provincial government. it's just another tax.

and here in the great white north we pay a goods and services tax to the federal government on almost everything we purchase. and if that isn't enough, we pay a goods and services tax on the fucking carbon tax.

TAX ON A TAX!!!

this is all leading to the best interactive chart on global gasoline prices that i've ever come across:

Gasoline Prices Around the World: The Real Cost of Filling Up

go the map of the world and click on the country of your choice. better than just giving you the price of gasoline, it will give you the price in the global currency of your choice  in either imperial or metric volume. it then will give you the percent of a days wages that it costs to buy a gallon of gasoline and the percent of your annual salary that you will spend based on average consumption.

of course average consumption can be misleading just as the consumer price index is an incredibly poor index of inflation for poor people. but it's fun to compare.

when i gassed up the scooter today, i calculated the mileage to be 138 miles per imperial gallon. i've only been purchasing premium gasoline for the scooter thinking that the premium gasoline didn't contain ethanol. but lo and behold, i recently discovered that all premium fuel is not created equal. and the sons of bitches don't really tell you. at least chevron clearly stated on the pump that the ultra premium is ethanol free. esso (exxon) just says that their gasoline may contain up to 10% ethanol.

that goddamned ethanol caused me nothing but headaches with my dad's gasoline lawnmower. it's fine if the gas is always fresh but leave that shit sitting in tank over the winter and you're up shit creek.

and hey, let's be careful out there.