Clubman's All British Motorcycle Show

One of my favorite events of the year was last Saturday. Lori and I headed down in the Desoto and checked out the swap meet and old bikes. It's so nice not to have to go to one of these events with a bored girlfriend. Lori said her job was to look cute and she performed above and beyond duty! I was a little disappointed by the swap meet this year but I did find some things I wanted.

All the pics
Even more pics

Buddy Skip's bike being judged


A fugging Vincent Black Shadow!




yes, she smokes, like a chimney!

C25K Week 7 Summary

Today Lori and I had our long run. I was hoping to do 4 miles, but this was one of my worst runs. At about 2 miles I just couldn't get in enough oxygen. My nose was so congested I couldn't really breathe in corrcetly. This pretty much killed my run and forced me to walk 3 times from exhaustion and a side stitch. I'm going to have to start wearing those nose strips to open up my nose more. When I breathe in my nostrils just pinched together. Anyway we ended up doing 3 miles, which I'd be happy with if I didn't have to walk.

W7D1: 2.25 miles on treadmill, 1.5 degree incline, in 27 minutes, at 5.0 mph.
W7D2: 2.50 miles on treadmill, 1.5 degree incline, in 33 minutes, avg. 4.5 mph.
W7D3: 3.00 miles on track in 37 minutes, avg. 4.9 mph.

But I did just weigh myself, 186 lbs. That means I've lost 19 pounds in about 3 months.

My pops!

My mom just sent me these pictures. I'd say they're around 1961-1962, based on the cars, Toledo, Ohio. I'm utterly floored. My dad has never spoken to me about his past involving motorcycles. When i was young he had a jap cruiser that he would take me to baseball practice on, but never in a million years did I expect to see these pics.







40 years later

Spider Walrus!

Lori and I volunteered last night with HandsOn. Basically parents at a low-income school were having skill classes, and could drop their kids off in the child care building for 2 hours while they took these classes. We played with the kids all night at the craft table and I hadn't had that much fun in a long, long time. Lori was on the glitter and construction paper table and I manned the play dough table. But really, I just asked kids all night what their favorite animal or two was and drew them for them. I also did a few Spider-men, Batmen, and a Spider Walrus. We danced, and sang, and got crazy. So much dang fun.

$211

Gets you a real nice Ford flathead starter rebuild. And shallow pockets. But I have to step back and think what he delivered. He delivered a really professional job, painted and all. The parts are Made in the USA, not crappy Chinese. He added new high torque field coils. Needless to say that $211 is well deserved. I can't wait to see the F1 turn over.

Potpourii

This would be my parents, if it was 1965.
Nostalgia on Wheels





This goes out to the spoiled cunts of society:

Save the Dates

DIY, baby

C25K Week 6

Lori and I just finished Week 6 of the C25K. Here are the results.

W6D1: 5 min jog, 3 min walk, 8 min jog, 3 min walk, 5 min jog
W6D2: 10 min jog, 3 min walk, 10 min jog
W6D3: 2-1/4 mile jog in 28 minutes, 52 seconds. Speed avg: 4.7 mph.

We're feeling stronger and stronger. We could have kept going. When I'm running I'm feeling pretty even the whole time, not getting exhausted. That means my stamina is increasing. Unfortunately I've been stuck at 191 lbs for about 3 weeks. This week I'm gonna fix that.

Next week's runs are all 2.5 miles, and it increases by a quarter mile a week.

Itchin' to Hitch

After hours and hours of work (most in the graphics), I finally got our wedding website done and uploaded. While I'd love everyone I know to show up, we are severely limited on space and only inviting wedding party and immediate family.
LORI AND JASON ARE GETTING HITCHED . COM

Behind the magic

No backflips

C25K Update

Lori joined me on the C25K schedule this week and we just finished Week 5 Day 3 which was a 20 minute jog without stopping. We actually did 2 miles in 25 minutes without stopping, which is right on my mark of 4.8mph. I honestly can't believe I (we) did it. the longest I'd run before that was 8 minutes. And honestly, i felt great. I could have kept going. The 4 mile run is in about 2 months and we're halfway there stamina wise.

Here's this week's runs:

W5D1 - 5 min jog, 3 min walk, 5 min jog, 3 min walk, 5 min jog
W5D2 - 8 min jog 5 min walk, 8 min jog
W5D3 - 25 min jog (2 miles)

Next week will be the last week with walking breaks in the runs. After that it's all non stop.

Puppy Love

Puppy Love

Camera shy


She looks so sweet and innocent, it's all a facade


The right spot


Luka kisses

Mini Leno

This is me, on money, any questions?
http://jamiewaters.com/main.html

Sputter... sputter... cough

"Hey babe, we're taking the Desoto today."
Poor Lori. At this point I think she knows she only has a 60% shot at an uneventful ride in my Desoto. Running out of gas, dead battery... she's had to deal with both a few times now. As a precaution I now carry a extra gallon of gas and 2 charged batteries in the trunk. My gas gauge doesn't work and my generator doesn't seem to be charging. Let's also not forget no heat, defrost, or windshield wipers. Hey, who needs em!?

So we take off and I'm driving her to her bus. We start heading up the hill and the Desoto starts making it's trademark sputtering "I'm running out of gas" gurgle. And blam. Out of gas. We coast a few feet and I pull over as far as I can, still in the street. We're pointed up a hill about 10 feet from the entrance to the gas station.

A busy street, too. People behind us weren't too happy. I could see Lori sinking in her seat. If she could she probably would have crawled in a hole. I calmly went to the trunk and started adding the extra gas. The angle we were at I can only imagine all the gas in the tank was shifted to the rear. Suprisingly no honking. But 2 motorcycle cops started making their way towards us.

Boy, this gas comes out slow. Glug glug glug.

I hop back in, don't make eye contact with the cops who are starting to get restless. Lori's calm yet wishing for my death. I start cranking her over. You have to be patient. The fuel pump has to suck gas all the way from the tank to the carburetor.

She finally fires up. Lori waves to cops, and we pull into the gas station. I got her to her bus 2 minutes before they left. See babe? No problem!

Ton Up Ride

My sore butt and wind burned face bare the tell tale signs of a Ton Up ride from yesterday. I took my XS650 down to Woodside area and the Santa Cruz Mountains to meet up with the Ton Up guys for their monthly ride.

On the way down my mirror flew off. I managed to catch it in midair at 80 mph and stuff it in my crotch until I could pull over. 5 minnutes later my seat brackets broke and my seat basicially shifted backwards 6". Then 2 miles away from my exit and 5 minutes before the meet I ran out of gas. I stood there like a jackass hoping a biker would go by to give me some gas. Luckily a good samaritan drove me to a gas station to fill up.

After all that I managed to get to the meeting spot only 20 minutes late. We rode through the Santa Cruz mountains like maniacs. Apparently the cops are ticketing people for anything, even 3 mph over the speed limit. Luckily for us we didn't see any. We did see a unicylist, a spooked horse almost take us all out, and plenty of other bikers. We ended up in San Jose where I jetted back home. My butt was sore, my back tired. Clip ons are fun on the twisty roads, but they are a pain on long distance runs. Here's some non riding pics.

Cataract Falls

We checked out Cataract Falls near Fairfax today. We took the dogs. Needless to say, ayone want some dogs? Based on them we will have the worst behaved children.

Invasion

Lori got her Snuggy


Her arms are free!... To hand me the remote to fast forward through the commercials.

Here's how I feel about teh Snuggy... the part at the end
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUFNs31yrYw

Republicunts

From Bartcop

Somebody is handing these things out to waitresses in Arizona instead of tips.


What kind of evil prick does a person have to be to give this to somebody working for less than minimum wage,
maybe trying to support kids, a card that basically says, "I'm going to eat out because I can't see any reason to deprive myself,
I want credit for bravely making this sacrifice for your sake, and oh, about your tip - fuck you. It's Obama's fault."
Oh wait. A republicant would do that.
WilliamC


It figures that a struggling waitress might've voted for Obama so the Rethugs get "even" this way.
But look at the bright side - next time the waitress will spit on their food before serving it.

Phew

I looked closer at the oil leak on my RD last night. It's just the oil seeping out from a loose exhaust flange. So basically it went from "Oh shit! I have to pull the engine!" to "Oh, no big woopy-doo." Or, in Lori speak, it went from being a rotten apple with a worm sticking out to an apple with just some sticker residue. That was an inside joke.

Uh Oh

I replaced the clutch push rod seal on the RD. That ended the leak coming out of their. But a new, more serious problem has arisen... I'm leaking oil from the base of the right cylinder. That means the gasket blew. Which means I have to take out the engine again and replace the gasket. Why did this happen? I don't know. I've been following all the break-in guides, warming the engine up, letting it completely cool down, and re-torquing the head bolts. Shit. Piss. Fuck!

I wish I had a media blaster

It would make work like this so much easier...and faster. And I wouldn't be pulling wire brush wires out of my skin for 3 days.

CrisisOfCredit.com

This animation puts the credit crisis into an understandable language. It's multi-layered, but as always, stems to greed.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Notes & Erata

Mark Morford wrote a great editorial piece for SFGATE today.

Ode to the unhappy
Conservatism let you down? Obama nothing more than Bush II? Oh, you poor thing

I see you out there. I know you're lurking, seething, sending me angry letters, posting nasty comments in anonymous forums across the Interweb, not merely enraged that I and millions like me dare to support President Obama's massive overhaul of the enormously flawed American idea, but that I also dare to see him as exactly the finest and most intelligent and, yes, even integrity-filled progressive visionary we could possibly hope for at a time like this.

You are fuming in disbelief. How can I not see it? How can the vast majority of the country not see it? How is it that no one but you and a few manic fringe writers seem to notice that President Obama is either A) a thinly veiled socialist commie instigator hell-bent on destroying America from the inside out, or B) nothing more than a cleverly disguised corporate-loving Bush clone because, oh my God, haven't you seen his policy on H1Bs and faith-based initiatives and his nefarious plan to take over the banks and, um, something else you can't quite remember right now but you're sure is really, really damning?

You are slamming your fists on your keyboard. Why doesn't the world get it? That it's all just the same old cronies rearranging the same old powermad furniture, a giant shell game Decepticon robot evil nightmare?

Oh, you poor dear. What utter, crushing frustration you must feel. Especially since the other side, the conservative side -- maybe it was your side? -- had its grand shot at running the show. It ran every sour idea, pushed every extreme right-wing economic scenario, wasted trillions on a failed war, spit on gays and kowtowed to the fundamentalists and shoved the country so far to the right we fell off Ted Haggard's massage table.

And alas, "unmitigated disaster" doesn't even begin to cover what happened next.

Is this the source of your terrible pain? That the brutal neocon agenda let you down? That BushCo just didn't do it right? Or is it the absolute opposite, and you are right now sneering in disgust that Obama isn't nearly radical enough, that we're all being duped into thinking he's a thoughtful, revolutionary liberal when, in fact, he's answering to the same ol' corporate interests and fellating the same ol' lobbyists and his plans merely sound grand and ambitious, despite how he's sending more troops to Afghanistan?

Perhaps this is what's so infuriating. Not merely that Obama is wrong in every possible way, but that no one on the far ends of the political spectrum can quite agree on how.

And so, the drama unfolds before you, and you are helpless to stop it. The massive, unprecedented redistribution of wealth, this "reckless" agenda of giving health insurance to children, investing in green tech, addressing global warming, pumping money into education, ending farm subsidies ... it's all such a sham. A disaster in waiting. A recipe for total anarchy. This is what you absolutely insist, be you on the far right or the far left.

But to make matters worse -- oh holy hell, would you look at this? -- it turns out Obama isn't stopping with just reversing every toxic Dubya-caused debacle, nossir. It turns out he's reaching even further back, casually wrapping his long, socialist fingers around the throat of more than 30 years of pamper-the-rich, supply-side Reaganomics, and calmly squeezing. Heathen!

This is, quite possibly, the most amusing thing I am hearing from the furious fringe: That Obama's plan will wreak hell on the deficit for generations to come. It's a bit like hearing a Catholic priest scold you on the perils of child abuse. I'm sorry, did you just say that it was fine and good to rape the Treasury for the past decade and worship Big Oil and waste two trillion on a failed and useless war, but redirecting those sums into science, health care, children and alternative energy is a terrible and costly idea?

For you, there is nowhere to turn. The neocons failed to induce WWIII against the Muslims, the libs are failing because Obama doesn't openly endorse gay marriage and won't plant hemp in the Rose Garden and refuses to even acknowledge the obvious brain-scrambling power of chemtrails.

To whom shall you turn? Perhaps the new de facto king of the GOP, Rush Limbaugh, praying aloud that Obama fails as he scrunches up his sweaty, bulbous face and scans the horizon for the slightest glimmer of a tolerable future Republican candidate who can shove us, well, who the hell knows? Not back to Bush. Not toward Obama. Maybe into China?

Ah, Limbaugh. It is worth positing: How low hath the GOP sunk when the head of the Republican party, Michael Steele, drops to his knees and kisses the fat ring of this tumescent blowhard? The serene young black president calmly reinvents the American experiment, while the rival party sniffs around the armpits of ... extremist talk radio? What a thing.

Which leads to the biggest question of all: Can Obama actually be both? Can he truly be a radical Muslim socialist dedicated to destroying the American ideal, and just another empty suit, a cleverly disguised corporate drone enslaved, like every president in history, by the great Matrix of the capitalist machine? Could be, could be.

There is one more option, of course. And that is: Obama, and the America that's following him so passionately right now, are neither of those things in the slightest. And the fact that his extraordinary, nation-altering agenda is right now infuriating the hard right and the hard left, exasperating the Wall Street sycophants and confounding armies of TV pundits and prognosticators, even as he inspires millions of "regular" Americans to get off their butts and do more with their lives, well, this is perhaps the truest sign of all.

When you piss off those kinds of people? You know you're onto something good.

------------------------------------------------

History is repeating itself, folks.

Melting

I just finished my 2nd day of Week 4 of the C25K. With warm up and warm down, I'm doing 31 minutes, which is 2 miles, and a total of 16 minutes jogging (walking at 3.4mph, jogging at 4.8mph). I'm definitely having to push myself. The last 2 minutes of the last 5 minute section all i can think about is wanting to quit, the side stitches, and how tired I am. But I've been able to push through it. Running is a totally mental game... one I never realized before. I'm still nowhere near able to do a 5K, but compared to a month ago, I'm on the right track.

I started a little over a months ago. I'm now at 191, I've lost 14 pounds in a bit over a month. My goal weight of 185 is just around the corner. Once I make it there I'm going for 175. Big props to mom and dad for getting their exercise on too!