Thanks peanut - that is a very good suggestion indeed. I do take VitD but the recent x-rays clearly show that my issues are caused by severe arthritis and a total lack of cartilage tissue between the bones of my right knee, which I fractured in a fall when I was about 15. It has been painful ever since then and 5-6 years of competitive bicycle racing combined with 45 years of extensive business travel plus several surgeries and endless physiotherapy later, my docs have determined that its time to turn me into
The $600 Man with a total knee replacement. I am holding the quacks off until riding season ends this fall or winter. One side effect of all this sloth has been weight gain - and that should disappear along with the pain once I am able to move around more again.
On the
house / shed thing - that IS very funny indeed! I can just imagine seeing my neighbour's big-roofed house and not noticing that cute little 12'6" x 8' shed when viewing the first photo.
Next-up for me is the annual spring motorcycle trip (Quebec City this year -
undoubtedly in the rain - AGAIN!!
) with my riding buddies from Peterborough starting this Thursday (on the ST1300) and then a massive clean-up of the DCW in preparation for getting Lucille back in commission. That shouldn't take too long I hope and
THEN I will swap Lucille into the shed for a bit and bring the '81 Special back into the DCW for the re-start of that project. Having five motorcycles in a 3-bike garage is like running the air wing on an aircraft carrier: you must carefully plan each movement so that you have enough space for
operating machines,
being-repaired/modified machines and
stored machines. Last winter, I had bought a welder (
I needed one and it was on-sale ya know!!) and some other shop gear, and it simply became grid-lock in there (hence the new shed).
My plan for the
'81 Special-to-cafe bike is to do all of the conversion tasks (seat, brakes, XS750 fuel tank, lights, controls etc.) and then have a shake-down period of debugging the electrical and other systems to make sure that all is well in a technical sense and then do a strip-down, re-paint and re-assemble. I believe that I have settled on a colour scheme of
British Racing Green with silver trim (including those beautiful XS650 logos from Resto in Winnipeg). I will likely have a batch of Mazda Paint Code "
HU" mixed up for the BRG colour and may even try hand-painting the trim myself using some silver paint that I have for touch-ups on the Honda ST1300. My old '94 Miata was a Canada-only BRG model and used that "HU" paint code. It is not a modern looking metallic, but a sort of flat 50's-era colour that shines up nicely and should make the silver trim really "pop". Oh yeah, I also have that very nice MAC Performance 2-into-2 exhaust system that I won a couple of years ago to install on her -
what a lucky b@stard, eh?
Well everyone, its a crisp cool Victoria Day
(the Monday nearest Queen Victoria's May 24th 1819 birthday is celebrated in Canada as a holiday Monday) and I've got a large consulting job beckoning, so I'll get back at it. On that note, I'll close by observing to all of my good friends abroad that Canada was supposed to be the optimal combination of
British culture and
American know-how - but for some reason, we wound up with
American culture and
British know-how....combined with a love of
Australian scatological humour and German beer.
Besides, who else would make a holiday weekend out of the birth, 199 years ago, of a British monarch who mostly spoke German and whose grandsons were Kaiser Wilhelm
(started WW-I) and Czar Nicholas
(died in the Russian Revolution)....gotta love Canada!
Cheers and ride safely all!
Pete