Fierce / Grind
Friday:
It is a beautiful day and I stuck at the office. My progress with WPF has been notable, but I still have a lot to learn to create good apps. It is a very different way of thinking about things. All of this gets shelved next week. I need to slide back into the WinForm world and finish up a data validation screen that I had been working on weeks ago. Now, I need to rework a few things and finish it up.
My ride home from work was amazing.
Everything flowed. I had almost no traffic and when I did have traffic, it moved along at a reasonable pace. It was a really nice ride.
Everything was ‘fierce’ in those moments. The bike handling was fierce. The music in my headphones was fierce. The blue skies… fierce. Everything worked so well. I didn’t push, but it still made great time with minimal effort. The KTM is a… wonderful machine.
When I got home, I had an even bigger treat. I got a date with the woman! We had dinner at one of our usual places. During dinner, she mentioned that if I didn’t doddle we could go see Star Trek at 20:00. Cool. It was very entertaining. I thought it was a really good mix of the old and new.
Once I left work, my day kept getting progressively better.
Saturday:
Scott came over around 10. I was still fiddling with things in the garage. We rolled out at 11:10. I got home around 22:30.
We rode Klickitat as planned, then headed east for the desert. The weather was perfect with temps in the low 80s. When we neared the new wind farms, I missed a turn and we ended up in Goldendale, WA.
After a few minutes to remap and discuss our options, we continued north to Yakima, then west on Hwy 12 to I-5. There was a frozen lake near White Pass and the ski slopes appeared to be active, if not open. In other words, it was still very cold at the pass. We stopped at a closed gas station within yards of the summit. I closed all of my vents, put on my vest and wired everything up. Back on it, my bike registered an ambient temperature of 44 at one point during our decent.
We zipped through the low lands at a good clip and reached Castle Rock before a few minutes before sunset. When we restarted I realized that I didn’t have a working headlight. My low beam was toast and I had just replaced the bulb with a new PIAA Super Plasma or so I had thought. I put in the wrong bulb, an old damaged bulb. So that was an issue, but we worked it out. Scott would lead when we caught traffic and I’d swing into another lane when I could use my high beam. When we parted at the I-5 / I-205 split, I flipped on my high beams and tried not to run up on anyone.
I covered over 460 miles. Genius that I am, forgot to reset the trip meter before I rolled out. Oops. Scott traveled farther because he rode to my place to meet up and then get home after we split up.
Doing these long distances, it all becomes a grind. I wasn’t wasted when I got home. In fact, I laid in bed reading until after 1:30. It’s just a lot of miles and at a certain point I simply want to stop and be done with the journey. Having only completed about ½ the required distance for the cert, I wonder if it isn’t too much or simply not worth the effort. Is it really that important to me? I don’t know. To compound matters, I’m now wondering if we should ride a loop or do a ‘there-n-back’ to simplify things. My headlight issue would have been a much bigger deal if we were on the real run and then being 1000 miles from home with a mechanical is never fun. If we do a loop, we’re never more than 500 miles from home. Right?
In any case, we’ve got time to iron it out. The trip weekend isn’t until June 12th.
