Goodbye, CB750, Goodbye

The CB750 is no more.

Having decided that spending more money on this bike wasn't what I wanted to do (thanks one and all for your advice), I moved it on this morning.

I've got about a half-dozen high-value parts (or hopefully high value parts) that I'll try to sell on ebay or craigslist, but the rest went to the transfer station this morning.

No regrets. It was a very fun project two winters ago when I started it, and if buying a house and moving and money hadn't gotten in the way, I do think I would have finished. I learned a lot, both about the mechanical and monitary sides of motorcycle restoration, and I still know what I want next time.

If nothing else, my land looks a lot bigger and cleaner!

An Electric (and ebay) Update

I know my electric usage is of import to really no one but me, but I did get the first fully post-CFL conversion bill today, and daily consumption dropped another 8.6%, to 26.5 Kwh per day. I know that's still not great, but we recently learned that the heater in our hot tub is going out and drawing 33 amps when it kicks in. It's still under warranty and on order, so we may see even more of a drop (hopefully) when it's replaced.

To compare to last year, before CFLs and before I insulated the spa: 37.9 Kwh/day to 26.5, and $240 to $140. I like this year's better.

As for the ebay update, I decided to sell off the Honda as parts and save up for a late-70s, early-80s BMW R-series. First piece got listed yesterday and sold today - my first ebay sale.

Spanky likes melted snow, too!

As you know, Spanky likes the snow.

He also likes to swim. We took the dogs up to this little lake outside Arnold the other day, just to let him paddle around. (Idgie, of course, treats the lake much the way she treats the snow.)

Anyway, it was fun.

A Deconstructed Dilemma

So I have a dilemma.

Actually, I have a motorcycle in pieces and I'm not sure what to do about it. Remember the history: I bought this non-running 1978 Honda CB750 a couple of years ago for $250 with the idea of tearing it all down (done) and rebuilding it in the cafe-racer style. (What I really, really want is a BMW R90S.)

Here is my dilemma. The bike had 48,000 miles on it and a frozen cylinder. (Piston rusted in place.) It had also been dropped fairly hard at one point. One of the engine mounts was broken off, and when I opened the block there was one small loose metal chip inside. So I can't know for sure what's straight.

I know the rest of what's wrong with the engine. The cam is worn beyond spec, as are the valve seats. As open as the engine is, it makes sense to replace the main bearings. All in all, with the cam, head work, bearings, gaskets, rings and piston, I'm looking at $1,000-plus in the engine.

Then there's the rest of what needs to be done to the bike. Most of it I'd do myself and that's more than half of the fun. And all of the learning. And another $1,000.

I've spent time and a little money (but not really too much) getting it this far. I stalled because once I commit to the engine, I have to go all the way and I haven't really seen the logic in that yet.

And I still want a motorcycle to tool around on. Especially as the weather gets nice, going out for a spin on some of our winding back roads would be great fun.

So what should I do? Bite the bullet and keep going? Sell off what I can on ebay and try again later on a different bike? Buy something running that would be worth restoring if I wanted to down the road? Buy a beater for less than $2,000 and call it a win? Get over it and buy golf clubs?

Advice is appreciated. (Smart-alec comments are anticipated...)

Bad Movies 2, Good Movies 1

Not been too much happening lately, except dancing to an ever-changing tune called by the local First 5 bureaucrats. And since there are only so many words like incompetent, asinine and infuriating, it would be a short blog if I only wrote about that. (I did make one of them whine to her supervisor, though, because I talked mean to her...)

But I was able to watch a few movies this week, so I'll do reviews.

Children of Men - (Or, Please Kill Me Now & End This Needless Suffering)


This one surprised me. I had been looking forward to it, and I don't need happy stories or even happy endings to enjoy a movie. But Jesus Christ on a stick, this is just suicide-inspiring. Michael Caine kills his wife and dog and he's the most likeable character in the movie.

You have been warned.

Spider Man 3 -- (Wake me, and Toby McGuire, when it's over...)

Snuck into this free, so I wasn't overcharged. Didn't expect great shakes from Spidey 3, and got about what I expected. There are some good sequences, but mostly I was bored. All three villains were far more interesting than the purported protagonist, and the great inner conflict within Peter Parker boiled down to whether to wear his hair down over his forehead (bad Spidey) or combed neatly back (good Spidey.) Toby mailed it in.

Hot Fuzz (Or, When Good Zombies Get Guns)

This is the buddy-cop-movie spoof by the guys who did "Shawn of the Dead." (And if you haven't seen Shawn of the Dead, check it out. It's one of the best and funniest parodies ever.) (And it's not Scary Movie 2 slapstick scenes thrown together, either. It's has a legit narrative.)

This isn't as funny as Shawn because they stayed true to the buddy-cop genre and traded laugh-out-loud funny for clever. And it's very clever. It's the best of the three by far, and they get extra credit for pulling off a perfect - perfect - Point Break homage.

I Sing the Usage Electric

Sorry for the Bad Bradbury reference...

Today I continued my quest for electric power savings. First, I read the meter, hoping to see a big reduction even over last month and was disappointed. Depending on whether or not I count today in the math, I either show a reduction in daily kilowatt usage of 0.7% (not counting today) or 4.9% if I do count today. Since I did this about 9 a.m., I suspect the former is a more accurate figure.

I'd hoped for much better.

I my garage, (This Land) I'd installed three 8-foot fluorescent fixtures shortly after we moved in, two on the workshop side and one on the office side. I wired the one on the office side in series with an existing 4-foot fixture that's right over my desk. The short fixture worked weakly for a few days then never lit up again. Bad ballast, maybe? As the other lights are plenty bright, and I actually prefer it out, I never worried about it.

But was it drawing power?

So today I did a little experiment. I timed one spin of the dial on the meter with the lights off. 43 seconds. I timed it again with the lights on. 22 seconds. The garage lights speed the dial up by 21 seconds.

Then I unwired the old fixture and timed it again with the lights on. 31 seconds. This time the lights only speeded the dial by 12 seconds.

Now, as Diane was up and there were lights on upstairs and I can't be absolutely certain that exactly the sames lights were on or off upstairs when I did my experiment, I know these results could be meaningless. I did not control for all variables. (I could throw all the breakers but the garage light circuit, but Diane probably wouldn't appreciate it...)

But I think the same lights were on upstairs all three times, so I think my results might well matter. What the hell, if there are any savings at all from unwiring a light fixture that produced no light it's a good thing.

Torii Gate

Here's a few pictures of a Torii Gate I built to define and highlight the creek bed from the street. As you remember, the original vista looked like this:

That's not really that attractive. So I cleared the woody shooty things (which are some sort of impossible to kill willow our neighbor tells us...) and we had this:

An improvement to be sure. A couple of weeks ago, I bought a few more split fence posts (which they now sell at Lowes...) and put in a short length of fence across the front of the creek here, three posts, two sets of rails.

It was OK, but not great. It cut off the view more than I wanted, and because of the steepness of the slope I either had to put it up at street level and six feet past our property line, or weirdly low and near our property line.

Then in the end I ended up putting it right where a drain pipe that runs under our driveway empties, which is not the most brilliant thing I've ever done.

So I took the fence down, designed the gate, built a quick mock up to hold up in the space and discovered it was WAY too big. So I scaled it down and built this:

Scaled down was very nice, too, because I cut the lumber costs way down. Total cost with lumber, hardware, concrete and stain (which I'll apply once the wood dries out some) was $125. Not too bad.

Diane is planting hand-me-down vinca a neighbor took out, and even out there right now even though it's full dark!

CFLs -11, PG&E -25

Just got our first post-CFL conversion PG&E bill. It's not a full month of CFL usage, probably about 16 days worth and slightly less than that conventional.

Anyway, our usage dropped 11% over last month and our bill dropped 25%. Both were one-year lows since we've been in this house.

Next month will be a truer picture because we'll have only CFLs for the whole month. I'd love another 10 and 25 drop!

Drenched Dogs in Davis and Wattage Wows

Yesterday was Picnic Day at U.C. Davis, an all-campus open house, parade and party with a 100-year-or-so tradition. Diane volunteered to work at a Plant Science booth and Frankie was going to be there with the Cal Band, so we made a day of it and decided to take the dogs.

Did I mention it poured for a large portion of the day?

Spanky clearly didn't care. Idgie did give us those occasional "Don't you damn humans have enough sense to come in out of the rain?" looks. But it was fun, and they ride well and we all slept like the dead last night.

Haven't gotten a PG&E bill yet, but Diane is writing her column on our CFL switchover, so I did do a count and a little math: All in all, we replaced 54 bulbs with a total wattage of 3,155 with 54 bulbs with a total wattage of 658, a 79.1% decrease.

Another way to look at it, it's the equivalent of taking out every recessed bulb, every outdoor bulb, the overhead fixtures in Diane's office, the spare bedroom, both bathrooms and the garage door light.

Froggy in the Tulips

Dogs' Day Out!

Today the dogs went out to lunch.

There's a cafe in Murphys with a dog menu. Really. A turkey hot dog and two cookies and a big bowl of water.

Saw it a few weeks ago, and went today. The dogs quite liked it, and Diane's gonna write her column about the place. They have human food too, and it was OK.

Year Two and A Damn Lot of New Lights!

These are the light bulbs we've replaced with CFLs over the past few weeks. Made the last big switchover today.

The timing is very nice -- tomorrow is our one year anniversary in the house, so beginning tomorrow, we'll have a pretty accurate apples-to-apples comparison of energy usage and PG&E bills.

Today I even made a spreadsheet to analyse usage last year to this year, and month to month. Here's what I know so far: Last year, we used an average of 33.4 kilowatt hours a day and paid an average of $0.21 per kilowatt hour. When I insulated to spa last July, usage dipped significantly. I marked the months I know I changed the spa water, but obviously there were some I missed.

Anyway, we had a few rooms done a few weeks ago, and the early daylight savings time, and our bill in March was about the same as our February bill, even though we drained and filled the spa. So it's a start.

All right already!

Unfortunately I didn't take a before picture, but this is a reasonable substitute. The woody shoot things (to use the formal, Latin name...) make a pretty effective screen.


This is the after. Looking at it, when I wrote yesterday I had cleaned up the first third of the creekbed, I think I meant the first fifth. There's still a long way to go...

Raking and Hauling and Burning, Oh My!

Spring is nice. Owning four-tenths of an acre of well-forested land is nice.

Spring cleaning on said well-forested four-tenths of an acre is something other than nice.

We did expand the visible look of our land today. The creekbed that run on the left side of the house was always hidden from the street by a dense stand of trees and these woody shoot things that grow on the edge of the roadway. I had already limbed the trees up about 10 feet, which opened things up some, and removed one dead tree. (It was leaning, rotted away at ground level, held up by other trees. So I grabbed the trunk and ran opposite the lean and it fell quite nicely. Yesterday I knocked over some dead trees just over the back fence. Don't tell my absentee neighbor...) (They were dead, though...)

Anyway, today I cut down the woody shoot things and raked the first third or so of the creekbed clean of debris. VASTLY expands the look of our place, and will so even more when I find a matching two-rail fence to put up on that side.

CrawBerry

Goodbye Craw World

A (Craw) Fish Tale

Spring, Sprang, Sprung

Not a lot of explanation necessary...

Numbers

I'm not sure what it is with the movies right now, but there are a couple of numerical flicks out there. The Number 23, with Jim Carrey, which I'm not going to see (and which is redundant because once I write it stars Jim Carrey I don't need to add "which I'm not going to see"); and 300, which I will see.

I have a new favorite number: 4442.

That's the tax refund check that just appeared in my mailbox. Another happy number is 6, which is the interest HSBC is going to pay on new deposite until April 30 (after which is goes back to 5).

And in the number arena, 9 is a bad number -- my Sallie Mae student loan interest rate -- but 3.9 is a better number, and I was able to transfer most of my outstanding student loan to a Discover Card with a 3.9 fixed rate on balance transfers until 2011. I'll get the rest paid off myself in the next month of so.

The Thumbs Say "Yea!"

The Blackberry is the bomb.

I've had the 8700 for about a week now, and although it hasn't saved my life or won us any contracts all on its own, it is handy, light, cool and fun.

(It did settle a bar bet when Diane and I were out the other night, but since she was right and I was wrong I consider it a knock against the device...)

I don't know if my timing was right in buying it -- I wanted to wait until we were busy enough to justify it -- or if buying it influenced business directly, but whichever way it was, it's working. We're busy. People I've pitched in the past are calling, and for the last week or two I've been scrambling to try to keep up.

So why, might you ask, am I taking the time to write this post, when Blackberry isn't giving me a cut for this quite positive testimonial? Have you seen the post below it? Isn't it obvious?