CYCLES AND SEASONS: 1 Jan 2023

I’ve just checked my morning’s email (yeah, I’m one of those ‘old fogies’ who still prefer email to social media platforms) and gone down today’s in-box list, deleting all the hardly-at-all disguised commercial ‘warmest holiday wishes’ advertising from auto parts businesses, insurance companies, eBay, Etsy, various book stores, and even a couple of low-grade Finnish porn stars (unknown to me) who inform me (in Finnish) that they want to do certain perverse things to a certain part of my anatomy (the result of a hacked Finnish company I’ve bought things from in the past, having my email address stolen). In other words, another perfectly ‘normal’ email day. Junk and spam! Not a single close friend in evidence, anywhere. What else is new?

It''s New Year’s Day here in California’s usually sunny Suckatomato capitol and outside my man-cave window, the tiny squirrels of a newly established Sciuridae family living in my homebuilt Squirrel Hilton on the camphor tree are swarming the feeding station immediately below it, closely watched by momma (notice I didn’t use that nauseatingly over-used term ‘Mom’ here). The skies are disarmingly clear (or as we used to say in the US Air Force, “CAFB”…”Clear As An Effing Bell”), the sun is out and although the wind is still blowing cold & strong as Monica Lewinsky herself, it’s hard to believe it’s this same vista that just last night was completely cloaked in unending ‘storm-of-the-decade’ ranks of dark, rain-storm-swept bluster. The evidence of all the non-stop downpour and blasts of wind is scattered all over the place.

On the ground, leaves up the yin-yang as if all the trees had gone into an overnight strip-tease frenzy (“…took leave of their branches?”), pools of rainwater still flooding the streets and debris from the chaotic, blitzkrieg weather, and now, suddenly a tiny ‘weather window’ shows up, bizarrely squeezed between the prior week of excessively stormy conditions and the next, equally huge one which is moving in off the ocean at the moment to shortly give us another week of equally extreme meteorological conditions to cope with. More opportunities for ABC’s ‘Chief Meteorological Expert’, Rob (Studley) Marciano, to rant on and on about, on cue from Evening News Anchor David (right-profile only, pliz!) Muir, later today.

Of course, while all this is unusual for a normally sunny & dry state where rain has become increasingly scarce, it’s hardly the equal to what the US East Coast has been suffering through over the past several weeks, with massive snow and ice onslaughts, sleet, rain, 10-foot deep Brobdingagian banks of the white stuff burying cars, and temps that reached and stayed at below -40 degrees for days at a time! But before we feel any self-pity, in this context consider poor Ukraine, where the Russians (correction: Vladimir Ras-Putin) has determinedly tried to bomb the Ukrainians back into a stone age hell of frozen winter dimensions for the last 11 months!

By comparison, us ‘Mercans might as well be basqueing (sic) on a beach in the balmy Froggie Riviera! Of course, one wouldn’t think that if one faithfully follows the heart-sobbing, breathless female emotive spin that permeates the reporting of mainstream news media field people (all seemingly young women with high, Soprano Valley Girl up-talk accents and weird black names like ‘Taneeshah’…). [E.g. “My Gosh! Police rescue (extremely stupid…my italics) woman on top of her late model SUV, in a raging torrent, who thought she could navigate a 10 foot deep river (read: the nearby dam just broke) safely…”] But don’t get me started here on today’s absolutely appalling ‘conventional’ media reporting, where stubbed big-toes are usually marqueed as ‘BREAKING NEWS!’… Anyway, it’s New Year’s Day and we spent a quiet night (inside the house, where it was safe and warm and protected from the Beaufort Force 9 hurricane ravaging central California last night. Around 9PM we cracked open a marvelous bottle of Chateau Apfelspritzler Grand Cru 2022 sparkling apple juice, briefly toasted our Husky pup (who’s smart enough to be snoozing peacefully and unconcernedly in front of the hearth, while all the humans out there work themselves into a bloody frenzy with ETOH''ic salutations to the wonderful new year that awaits us all, just hours away! NOT!), and shortly thereafter turned in. Prior to that, we tucked into a lovely meal of tender Fried Baby Grasshoppers (Chinese Fu-Lan style Chow Fun) and Yorkshire (Terrier) Pudding, ending with gourmet quality Balinese Tapioca Pudding (a house specialty). Then as the wind continued to howl like Irish Banshees outside, it was off to slumberland under the lovely Euro-style Eiderdown comforter (probably filled with swine-flu contaminated Chinese duck down instead of sterilized Prime Northern European Goose Down, as the promo materials promised, but what the hey).

This morning, I shamefacedly slept in just a bit…to 4:30 AM…before rising, grabbing my early AM Hawai’ian/Chocolate/Macademia coffee, stroking the pup’s thick and luxurious winter fur coat for the obligatory 10 minutes as the coffee started to kick my arse a bit, and then grabbed the latest read I’ve been pouring through this past week by Peter Egan.

MOTORCYCLE WORLD MAGAZINE’s

premier columnist, Peter Egan (who after 50 years of writing about his motorcycles and touring adventures, is now roughly my age) is a delight to follow, whether you are a motorcclist or not. Egan, for those of you unfamiliar with the joys of motorized two-wheeled travel, is one of those absolutely brilliant and immensely insightful purveyors of storied insight into the human condition, under the guise of being a mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Motorcycle Planet. Married to the woman of his youthful dreams at an early age (and still hitched), Egan has led a charmed life on two wheels. And how charmed is that, you ask? Just to explain a bit, his wife (Barb) has personally bought him at least TWO classic motorcycles over the past 40 or so years as birthday gifts! Compare that to most wives who threaten divorce if a husband so much as casts a second covetous glance at a Ducati Desmo or a classic Laverda, in a weak moment of unguarded lust.

In fact, when Egan first met Barb (when they were both in college), she was driving a small motorcycle herself. Now lest you think she is probably the sort who could pass for a dumbed-down ‘Divine’ (think: a character in that wretched 70s vintage ‘musical’ Hair Spray) with tats all over her body, let me clarify. Barb is actually an exceptionally attractive blonde with a college degree from a respected university, who has a respected professional calling as a mental health therapist. Yeah, THAT kind of a great ‘catch’. And Egan readily acknowledges his immense good fortune in having her as his life-partner (“Behind every successful man is a…dot-dot-dot”). Not only does she understand his consuming passion for beautiful hunks of Italian motorcycle engineering, she even travels with him on his bike’s pillion seat when her work permits.

Egan himself is no run-of-the-mill ‘bad-boy’ biker, either. Fashioned in the T.E. Laurence and James Joyce mold, Egan is a cultivated, well-eddicated individual, a closet philosopher and just coincidentally an engaging writer of the sort who immediately draws you into his world of experiential perceptions and keeps you there! Like Robert Persig, whose extremely popular best seller, ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ (1972), captivated a whole generation of young people in the 70s the same way that Edward Abbey had (with his iconic ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang’ and other books), Egan both entertains and stretches one’s imaginative horizons like few others, these days. Particularly if you have been contaminated (perhaps ‘blessed’ would be a better synonym) with a passion for two-wheeled motorized vehicles (as have I and countless others).

Egan therefore both informs (on the subject of fine motorcycle design) and entertains with his ‘off-the-traveled-highway’ brand of everyday philosophizing. And he does it so well you almost think you’re there yourself in the saddle of that Ducati Monster he’s riding through the Adirondacks. He’s also a master of the witty, well-informed turn-of-phrase that so delights readers. In short, he’s one of those rare motorcycling companions you’ve spent your life wishing you knew, who could bring more to the shared roads and byways than just a few hearty ‘guy-moments’ of male bonding and shared momentary, heart-stopping road frights!

As I read through Egan’s book, ‘The Best of Peter Egan’ (50 years of motorcycle journalism’s finest insights into life on two wheels), which is divided into decades, I couldn’t help but think that he and I share so many things…except for his natural and exceptionally gifted style of journalistic brilliance, since next to him I remain, in comparison, an illiterate if aspiring Banana Slug with an IQ of minus 50, while he stands out like a two-wheeled William Butler Yeats in a gang of Hells Angels rejects!

Egan has a number of other, equally entertaining and illuminating books out, as well, so if you enjoy inspired insight into life’s rich tapestry of experience AND fine two-wheeled motorcycle engineering, and haven’t read his work in MOTORCYCLE WORLD in the past, you must take a closer look at his writings.

Egan was in college when his undergrad deferment ran out

(just like mine did in 1967) and he ended up in the US Army (my service was the Air Force, of course), where he soon found himself driving a jeep down roads infested with NVA and Vietcong guys in black jammies. He resolved, when he got back (if he got back alive) that he would buy a motorcycle and spend some time leisurely taking a personal look at what ‘Easy Rider’ tantalizingly promised my generation (all except a possible death at the hands of Southern rednecks, naturally). Seems he had just watched David Lean’s masterful screen-biography of T.E. Laurence (a man whom both Egan and I greatly regard) titled ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (based on correspondent Lowell Thomas’s heavily romanced story of Lawrence, as portrayed in Lawrence’s ‘Revolt in the Desert’ book) and he was inspired, at age 22, not just by Lawrence’s love of fine Brough Superior motorcycles but Lawrence’s keen intelligence and literary talent. And this brings us around to the circumstances of my own introduction to a life-long love of those exotically beautiful but implicitly hazardous machines called motorcycles.

I was living, back in the mid-60s,

in a small Podunk of an agricultural community in the lower California Central Valley named Wasco. It seems to have been a sort of parallel universe to Egan’s mid-west locale in many ways. The year was 1962 and I was a sophomore in high school. Sochiro Honda, the founding genius of the now world-renown Honda Motor Company, had just brought a small displacement ‘moped’ to the United States, in order to troll the market share waters for a larger number of two-wheeled consumers. This was the ubiquitous, now legendary ‘Honda 50’, an initial design that saw several permutations…one popular iteration being the step-through (“sissy-bike”, with mud flap sides) framed Honda C-100, with a 49cc engine cranking out about 4+ BHP and good for about 35+ mph on a windless road.

The version of the Honda 50 that captured my immediate attention was designated as the C-110 model, also known as the ‘Super-Cub’, but shared the same 49cc engine in a more ‘motorcycle-like’ frame (and good for a maximum road-speed of about 45+ MPH or so). To say I made life almost unbearable for my poor, overtasked and heavily burdened school-teacher mother with my unendfing pleas for a Honda is considerably understating things. When he heard about this desire of mine, my Uncle, Ma’s brother, a stern Presbyterian physician with a thriving med/surg practice in Burley, ID, was aghast and near speechless.

Since Da had died when I was only 4, Unk functioned as a sort of paternal substitute Supreme Deity for me. Whenever he spoke (on any subject) it as if I were standing on an open plain while Zeus used me as a target for lightning bolt practice! Unk at first said (in whatever passes in Presbyterianese for ‘No bloody way!’), absolutely not! NO motorcycles! After all, Brando’s ‘The Wild One’ had stirred up the gentle folks in America something fierce at about that time and the popular stereotype of rapacious ‘biker gangs’ burned holes in the forebrain of every good, God-fearing church-goer! Especially after the so-called Hollister, CA, biker ''riot'' of July 1947 (that Wm. Randolph Hearst turned from a peaceful motorcycle rally into a scandalous sensation, with his skewed ''yellow journalism'' article in the San Francisco Examiner).

Nevertheless, I persevered mightily to change everyone’s opinion on my lust for a Honda and…huzza!...not long after, Unk delivered an ultimatum that he thought would settle my hash appropriately. He had previously sent both my First Cousins to attend the Shattuck Military School in Fairbault, MN, and the subsequent transformational change in their normal, reckless youthfulness had been inspiring (to Unk, at least). Therefore, he proposed rather stentoriously that I could have a choice: either I got the small Honda I dreamed about OR I could attend the Shattuck Military School!

Well, duh! Unk may have been a former premier military doctor (in North Africa, in WW2), but although he was a formidable physician/surgeon, he was no psychologist and I soon ended up with my Honda 50! [Looking back, with the benefit of acute hindsight, some 50 years later, I well-recognise that I would probably eventually have gone into medicine myself and ended up filthy rich, with a highly successful practice myself, had I chosen the military school option and folowed Unk''s footsteps. Sigh! Oh well!]

So, there I was,

finally possessing one of these little tiddler bikes (as we called ‘em) and feeling gloriously ‘bad’, not quite fully daring to believe my extremely good fortune. To complete the perfection of that moment in my life, a good friend of mine named Steve Kroeker also mmanaged to wheedle a C-110 out of his father…an exact clone of my small black Honda beauty (one of the few times in my life when I TRULY felt ‘Black is Beautiful, baby!’ with every cell in my puerile body). They cost each of us exactly $290 each!

Steve’s family was from the Ukraine, interestingly enough. With his tall, lean frame, big shock of sunflower-blonde surfer-style hair, Steve was someone I secretly envied more than a smidge. His father, a house-painter, also agreed to let him have a small Honda like mine, so there we were, ‘sort-of’ twin minor Gods in the local youth pantheon of such deities (as we imagined ourselves…”Two girls for every boy” is how the Beach Boys put it).

Remember how one always seemed to find two teenaged girls paired up as BFF buddies back then, with one invariably being a stark, raving FOX and the other a far-less attractive, usually short and somewhat squat companion with fine taste in mufti? We were sort of like that, Steve and I. As the less lustrous of us two, I basked in his reflected studly brilliance, not daring for a second to think I was the virtual guy-counterpart of that fat, dumpy girl companion the ravishing blonde beauty palled around with.

Anyway, we were pretty unsophisticated at that early stage in life and the only thing that mattered was that Steve and I both had the bike of our youthful dreams as sophomores!

I might inject here that in his book, Peter Egan shares the fact that his very earliest experience on a motorized two-wheeler was on an old, ratty 1953 Cushman Eagle motor scooter, which he amusingly described as a birdcage contraption fitted around a fuel tank, set on a plank and perched on a motor connected to two small wheels. Amazing as it may seem, that was also my very first experience on a bike, as well, since before Hondas, Cushmans were the name of the only game in town!

In the late 50s,

I had an across-the-alley neighbor named Mike Bartel, whose family, ostensibly ‘liberal Mennonites’ by religious preference, had a fairly progressive outlook on life. Mike’s family also had an old Cushman Eagle that Mike introduced me to one day. My very first ride on a powered two-wheel machine was on the back of that ratty old Cushman as we chugged noisily up and down the alley that separated our two homes. We probably hit a maximum speed of 10 mph at one point and it was absolutely thrilling! Small world, but not the only one of many similar rites of passage I find I passed through, just like Egan did!

Steve and I explored the performance envelope potential of those little tiddler Hondas in exhaustive detail, I can assure you, even traveling along the dangerously narrow margins of the highway leading from Bakersfield, CA, to Tehachapi and down into the Mojave Desert on our small Hondas for a few days of camping on the dry lakes there one spring. It was exciting stuff, us zooming along at a breakneck 40-45 MPH, with huge semi-truck & trailer rigs passing by us and barely clearing us by a few scant inches, but hey!...we were young and crazy and the concept of exactly what ‘road-kill’ (dead, formerly living critters, whether animal or human) consisted of never entered our youthful minds, once! Come to think of it, we didn''t wear helmets, either! Needless to say, we somehow survived that period.

At one point, later still, Steve and I tried to enlist another childhood buddy, Peter Peterson (son of a Methodist minister, who later became an attorney for the State of California) to go on a cross-country adventure on those same Honda 50s tiddlers, believe it or not! The plan was to load the bikes up with everything we needed for a two week-long trip and head up into lower Canada, then return via Yogi Bear’s Jellystone National Park (AKA: Yellowstone). Today, when I think back on that admittedly hair-brained idea, I have to thank my lucky stars that neither Steve nor Pete were able to secure the parental assent required to thus jeopardise their lives in such a rash manner.

Again, in his book Peter Egan also shares the fact that he had a similar plan to do the same on his own Honda 50 at one point in his early life (although not quite as young as Steve and I at the time). Egan, by the way, worked his way through a whole series of small Hondas, progressively getting bigger and bigger machines, as was the custom back in those days. Another ‘shared circumstance’. This makes me wonder exactly how many other hundreds of kids had a similar fantasy, in the 60s and at that tender age? Thousands, perhaps?

As the ‘cooler dude’ of us two

(Steve and I), Steve quickly outgrew his tiddler and graduated to a Honda 250 ‘Scrambler’ (that was certainly WAY cool), while I worked my way up through first a Honda 90 and then a Honda Bentley 125. But that wasn’t enough of a performance upgrade for Steve, who at the same time that I was entering my first year at college, decided to trade his Scrambler for a fabulous Honda 305 ‘Super Hawk’. For my part, I was also getting itchy for some bigger hardware and I decided that I should get the more ‘genteel’ counterpart to the Super Hawk, known as the Honda 305 Dream Touring! Looking back, I should have gotten a Super Hawk, which is now regarded as a highly valued classic bike of that period!

At that point, we sort of started drifting a bit apart, since the Super Hawk, with its bare-tubing framework, was oh, so much sexier than my stodgy old 305 Dream, with its black and boxy touring bodywork. Visualise here a thoroughbred and a mule… Steve probably felt a bit ashamed being seen riding with me, now that I reflect back on this!

The Honda 305 Dream remained with me, though, until my sophomore year in college, when my student deferment threatened to be yanked from under me due to my unremarkable GPA (President Johnson was running out of warm bodies to send over to Vietnam to be potential body-bag gun-fodder in a Vietnam rice paddy) and I WAS NOT at all thrilled by that prospect, electing, after the NROTC turned my application down for a Reserve Naval Officer commission (on a physical washout BS pretext: ever heard of “Inadequate Carbohydrate Metabolism?”) to enlist in the Air Farce.

My roommate at college (one of them, anyway) was a big jovial mass of corpuscular superabundance named Tom, whom due to his penchant for watching cartoons on TV whenever he could, we Christened “Tommy Toons”. Tom owned a huge, old and grotesquely aubergine-colored Czech JAWA motorcycle of undetermined cubic capacity. It had a typically low-efficiency Czech two-cycle, rather than a higher efficiency four-cycle engine and in addition to sounding like it was constantly on the verge of a pending mechanical breakdown, it smoked like an out-of-control Yorkshire (England) coal-fired factory chimney. You could both see and hear the bike coming at least half a mile distant, due to the noise and clouds of exhaust it gave off! And given Tommy’s prodigious weight, I swear it sagged (and may also have actually groaned aloud) when he took a corner too fast on it!

Thus, began my introduction

to the passion for motorcycles that is still as strong today (in my mid-70s) as it was back then. Judging by the many amazing similarities of my experiences to those of Peter Egan, I suspect that this sort of adolescent passage was a lot more common in the 60s than I had ever suspected. And it is thus perhaps unremarkable that those who read Peter Egan’s compelling narratives identify so completely with his acknowledged motorcycle journalistic genius and spirit!

But, perhaps at this point someone is wondering exactly what prompted me to recapitulate this chronicle of my formative motorcycle experiences for you here, today on the first day of the new year? Ah, let me explain a bit further.

Almost two years ago, in a fit of teeth-gnashing, mouth-foaming utter madness, I decided that at nearly 76 years of age, it was time to acknowledge the ineluctable verity of my human frailty and stay off powerful, state-of-the-art motorcycle works of pure psychopathic destructiveness! As a retired medical person who has spent a lifetime watching and assisting others who had near-fatal as well as fatal motorcycle accidents, and also as someone who well-understands how vulnerable a human body is to that bitch, gravity’s capricious inertial whims, I decided that I would sell my last remaining superbikes and confine myself to old VW bugs and lesser hazardous thrill seeking!

Thus, I foolishly sold, in rather quick succession, a beautiful 2000 Honda VFR800, an incredible 2000 Kawasaki ZX9RC-1 ‘Ninja’, (one of my two all-time favorite bikes, the other being the Honda Viffer 800) a 1998 Yamaha FZR1000, a Yamaha XJ550 Seca, a XJ750 Seca and an XJ900 Seca (rare!), as well as not just one but TWO magnificent Kawasaki ZZ-X1100s (think faster than a silent fart, at 0-60 in under three seconds!). GAAK! Whatever possessed me I shall never know, except that wifey was immensely happy that I seemed to have at long last come to my senses, again!

Well enough, I guess, but very recently I’d experienced a recurrence of that familiar old motorcycle itch. Despite the itch becoming stronger and stronger each day, I managed to pass-up not just one but two beautifully pristine ‘Millennium Yellow’ 2000 (the best year to have, of all VFR 800s, with its gear-driven cams and fuel-injection!) Honda VFR800 Interceptors; but when I recently stumbled across a 1998 Kawasaki clone of my dearly loved, departed 2000 Kawasaki ZX9RC-1 Ninja’, something massively snapped in the dimmer corridors of my forebrain and I had a serious relapse of prudent, good judgement.

Long story short (at least as short as my chance of living to see the next New Year!), I promptly arranged to buy this magnificent hunk of Japanese engineering steel (the ZX900); it had only 7000 miles on it, not even fully broken-in yet, and the seller even agreed to drive it over and deliver it to me! The only trouble was that this occurred right in the midst of this huge, once-a-decade storm we have been contending with here and it seemed unlikely that I could bring the purchase to a prompt conclusion, given the weather! There was also the fact that I was stricken with guilt over how I should lay this blockbuster news on wifey, who is Chinese and who has gamely tolerated (barely) all my similar transgressions over the past 35 years (but not without taking her eyes off her kitchen-cleaver, ever)! An analogue that applies here: As Clint Eastwood famously once said in the movie ‘Dirty Harry’, “What you (I) need to ask myself, punk, is…DO…I…FEEL…LUCKY?!”

Well, I did and as it turned out, inappropriately and with catastrophically misplaced optimism! When I finally broke the news (of a ‘done-deal’ with no “Mother-may-I?” tendered beforehand), wifey had a spectacular melt-down right then and there. See, we’re on the verge of a 35th wedding anniversary and this was (apparently) just too over-the-top even for a minimal risk-taker such as myself! I could see the clouds of doom hovering just over the marital horizon liked a tsunami of dire destructiveness and I could also visualize that wickedly-sharp kitchen clever moving telekinetically from its drawer in ‘her office’ (the kitchen) to the table we sat at, when I finally broached the matter with her! Then, after I did my Irish best to convince her of the righteousness of my cause, in a short, succinct sentence, Madam Chairman prounounced sentence: ‘Over your dead body, you roun’ eye white devil!’

John Wayne Bobbitt rides again!

Ummm, mebbe not! Friends, I can tell you candidly that no one can make the histrionic threat of an immediate John Wayne Bobbitt punitive fate as clear and unequivocal as a Chinese wife can when scorned or maltreated! I ‘GOT’ the message quick enough! The Kawa would have to remain off-limits to me if I wished to continue speaking in a deep, masculine vocce basso (which after 76 years, I''ve gotten quite fond of!)!

That’s the way things stand at this precise moment, friends. I yielded on this issue owing to both expediency and my keenly empathetic ability to feel and share John Wayne Bobbitt’s intense pain when his Ecuadorian better-half sentenced him to a sort of…dare I say it?...’penile’ colony…for emasculated males.

The storm (both the weather and this debacle), by the way, isn’t over yet. As I shared earlier, today is a brief ‘weather window’ amidst the howling, jet-stream driven low-pressure front that promises at least another week or two of wild weather. Let’s hope that I am able to keep my head about me in the interim (and a certain ‘other’ part of me where it also belongs), LoL!

As some wise idiot earlier stated things, “Growing older is mandatory; growing wiser is not.” [Hell hath no fury…but you know the drill, I’m sure…!]

Happy New Year!

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POSTSCRIPT:

Dateline 11 Jan 23. It''s about 11 days into the New Year and I can''t believe my good fortune! While meandering around the web I stumbled across a fellow about 85 miles from me who wanted to sell his pristine 1999 Honda VFR800FI ''Interceptor''. For those who don''t know a VFR800 from a brick, it''s another of those machines like the Kawasaki ZX9R ''Ninja'' that is generally recognised by the two-wheel cognoscenti as being one of the 10 most popular modern sports-touring motorcycles ever made.

I''ve had two previously, one a 2000 ''Millennial Yellow'' VFR800FI and the other a red 2002 VFR800FI (with ''V-Tec'', a complex system that was supposedly intended to do several beneficial things to the performance curve but is not really favored by most Honda owners). This one is also red but as a 1999 model, it benefits from gear-driven camshafts, unlike later generations of VFRs that use chain-driven cams (ask a Honda buff to explain the difference if you''re curious).

The price being asked was right, so I went ahead and purchased it, planning to reveal my heinous breech of marital etiquette a bit later (after it was a done deal).

The only fly in the ointment is that we''re right in the middle of a series of severe winter storms here in Californica (sic) that will make picking it up and trailering it back to homebase a bit problematic.

Fortunately, tomorrow should be rain-free, so I am going to dash up there to the seller''s home and try to sneak it back here before the rain & wind returns (as it threatens imminently to do).

By the way, those of you whom I communicate with by cellphone may have recently noticed that the pitch of my voice seems to have gone up a notch or two but not to worry! I managed to escape the dreaded cleaver treatment due to two factors: 1) I''m Irish ancestoried and can sweet-talk a Leprechaun out of his pot of gold, and 2) I''m married to a real saint!

The change of voice pitch is probably just due to some Dihydrous Monoxide that leaked into my phone, d''ya ''spose? Anyway, once the weather is warm enough again, I''ll be back in the saddle, death-wish front-and-center as always! Yahoo!

Oh yes, and whomever it was that sent a wreath of black roses to my address with a condolence card, reports of my demise are definitely premature, I swear it...or my name isn''t Percival Blarneystone!