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Friday, September 05, 2008

Escape from FAR Manor 2008, Day 0: August Reflections

Current Music: Clubber's Guide to Goa Trance

Welcome back to the hideaway.

I had a plan today: bail out of work around 4, get home about 5, pack up and leave by 6, arrive and check in a 7, then make a grocery/supper run and be settled in by 8. Mirabile dictu, I ended up only 20 minutes behind schedule for a change! I don’t remember off the top of my head whether I ever mentioned it, but it seems that getting going at the beginning of a vacation usually ends up some hours behind what I had hoped for. I suppose it helps that I only had myself to pack for — yup, once again I spend the first night by myself.

Which isn’t a bad thing at all… it gives me a chance to decompress and enjoy a little peace & quiet, or at most the noise I choose to make.

Packed upSince I was by myself, and I loaned The Boy my car (in return for him or his school fixing a couple of nagging problems), I decided to see just how full I could pack the motorcycle. Stuff to make bread with, beer (dry county, remember), clothes, a couple of tomatoes & an onion for later, bathroom items. The crate overfloweth, so I grabbed the cargo net that we rescued from The Barge and wrapped it all up. The load was secure, but it played with the handling a little bit… which I kind of expected because it was somewhat top-heavy. The laptop and accessories went into its courier bag, which in turn I slung over my shoulder.

I managed to get out just before 6, and arrived at the hideaway at 7… and the office was locked? Hunh? It’s open until 9! I found an empty picnic table, flipped open the laptop, then a car came by and parked at the office. Only a few minutes. Unpack, hop back on the bike, down to Cleveland, scarf a Dairy Queen burger, grab the milk, cereal, and coffee, and come back in for the night.

Now that we’re safely past August, and I have a week off, I get to breathe a sigh of relief. As I wrote in an earlier post, August is usually the month from hell around here. It was a fairly typical August, except for the unusually pleasant temps… usually, it’s either hot or too hot but I think we only broke 90°F the first couple of days. Now that we’ve slid into September, my ride this morning left my hands rather cold. It won’t be long before I put the first lining back in my riding jacket.

There were good things and even worse than usual things this year: The Boy started to show signs of growing up (!!!), Daughter Dearest started college, Jam fell off a horse and spent a week in the hospital, and both of Mrs. Fetched’s parents have been in and out of the hospital this summer (her mom with an aneurysm that needs to be patched up). The chicken houses were less of a problem this time around, only because the previous grow-out ended in July and that’s when we had the big problems. Warmer weather would actually have been useful with the new batch, because they would have needed less extra heat… but that's the way it goes in August.

But both August and the wind-up to vacation are done. Tonight, I will enjoy a beer (or several) and do a little writing. A bit of flash fiction has been nagging at me, but I haven’t had the chance to write it down. Now… much writing is anticipated. I had to walk down to the office to bogart the wifi; I could pick it up from the kitchen window with the iBook last year, but no such luck with the MacBook. Tomorrow, Mrs. Fetched (and maybe DD) will join me.

7 comments:

  1. And I expect plenty of pictures!

    (katiebird! where have you been? Got me. I think I'm lost.)

    Have a great vacation, FAR!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey Far! Good for you! I'm taking a mini break too! The August selling/tourist season has finally come to a close, whew!

    I just beamed with pride when I saw the "yooper basket" milk crate attached to your bike! Gee, after replacing the trottle cable on Kim, I took her for a ride down to the body shop and decided to adjust the back brake cable (with a little heat), nope, snapped the adjustment bolt..Well, that will make 3 out of four cables that have been replaced...

    I'm very pleased with Kim's performance! A gutsy 500 motorcrosser, even gave it's nod of approval on the trail!ha!ha!

    Yup Far, "once a yooper, always a yooper"! At that, I'll stay with tradition, and drink several with ya!

    Have a GREAT vaction Far, you deserve it!

    yooper

    ReplyDelete
  3. KB! Long time no type! Good to see ya back! scurries to grab coffee, bread, and pictures

    Yooper, I remembered seeing milk crates on the back of bikes in the 70s & I thought it was only fitting since Little Zook is mostly a commuter scooter anyway. Bummer about the bolt, but that should be easy to replace, right?

    So which one of these looks most like Kim? I think the MXer was approving that you were brave enough to take her on the trail!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hey Far! Yup, Kim is definitely a "road bike" (bet she'd just purr, after being called that! ha! ha!) She's just like the red ones. She's got a bicycle basket mounted on the back, but I'm going to put that in the front and have gotten a wider/longer basket for the back. She missing a few cosmetic parts but she's beautiful to me! heh! Judging by the foot peg wear, the guys at the dealership thought it to have less than 1,000 miles..

    Also those guys were just shocked to find almost every part still available. Guess, there were millions of them made.... Brake cable, no problem. Really, it was too much nut for such a small diameter adjustment bolt, poor design, find that on some 70's snowmobile track adjustment screws.

    I really like the splash guards some of the bikes had in the pics you have! I'll have to check them out!

    Have fun with Little Zook! ha! ha!

    yooper

    ReplyDelete
  5. Have a restful time, Far. I just got back from mine out west this past Saturday. So much has happened since then that I feel as if I never had a break.

    ReplyDelete
  6. "getting going at the beginning of a vacation usually ends up some hours behind"

    Yeah. Unless you have to catch a plane, you are always behind. Never heard of a case otherwise. But you are probably the first to document this phenomenom. You should consider making it a "theory." (If you don't, I will)

    Dry Country? Beer? Wrong. Try Grain Alcohol and Mushrooms...oooh, sorry, kid-friendly site. Just delete that.

    -Sarah's Husband

    ReplyDelete
  7. Yooper, looking at that Bikepics page, some of those are 2008 models... so I suspect that they still make 'em, which is why they can still get parts!

    Boran, I can relate to what happens when you get back. Seems like if you're so important that they can't do without you, you should have a title & salary to match, right?

    Sarah's Husband, welcome to the free-range insane asylum! I think the FARfetched Theory of Travel Schedules would, at least in part, go "the amount of time behind schedule is directly proportional to the number of people going." Since it was just me, the multiplier was only 1. ;-)

    ReplyDelete

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