uncledj

I feel ya. Rewiring a big industrial HVAC unit, had 3...count 'em 3....bad relays new in the box, picked up at a supplier that morning. After I figured out it wasn't my wiring, but rather the new relays, I took them apart and there was a white chalky substance on the contacts. Put an old relay in and was good to go. Took the bad ones back to the supplier to make them aware of the situation. I think they were Mars relays, made in Mexico.

Not looking to make any changes anytime soon, but I think I'd like to try a trike. Either a Venture or Goldwing with (I think) a Hannigan kit on it. I think I'd feel safer with the wife on the back on a trike.......dunno....

Just moved my 94 year old Dad in with us. Took a bit of time over the Spring to get the place ready for him, but he's in now. Been taking care of my mildly autistic older brother for 10+ years now. He lives in an apartment I built onto the garage. At work we just got a large account that's requiring overtime, and potential service calls 24 / 7. Here we are, Mid June, and I haven't taken the bike out of the shed yet.

Bummer, but that could have been resolved. There's 2 bedrooms, having 5 bunks each, but there's also a single bunk in a tiny room that's been built as a sort of a mud room between the cabin and back porch. My niece is a hunter, and when she'd go up with her dad (my brother) he and she would stay in that room. He would take the bunk, and he had a "rack" , hung on the wall, that he'd set up with a mattress for her. When she's not there he still uses the bunk so he wouldn't be subjected to any snoring. Like I mentioned, if a handful of folks are interested, we can try this again sometime.

Gonna have to call it. I'm going to go ahead and pull it from the calendar. Apologies to all those who made plans to attend. (By "all those" I mean Wiz) Maybe we'll try to set this up again sometime, but I'll be going up there at least 3 and maybe 5 times over the course of the Summer, (planned events with friends and work trips) ....and with a 6 hr drive and longer if I'm riding, it's a bit much for such a low turnout. If anyone is interested in trying again, let me know and if there's enough interest....off the top of my head I'm thinkin' 6 or more takers, I'll try to set it up again. Thanks to those who were interested....sorry it didn't work out.

Poo. If I can't get a bit more interest, I may have to cancel. No biggie ....I just thought some of y'all would have wanted somewhere else to go that weekend that'd be inexpensive (free) to stay. Seems like most of the folks who wanted to do MD have made other plans. I'll leave it on the calendar a bit longer just to make sure there isn't any more interest.

Drove down to Bryson City NC Thursday night and spent the next couple of days riding steam engines around the Great Smokey Mountains. Had a great time. Drove from there up to the cabin Sunday to get the water hooked up, cut the grass and check for any issues with the cabin. All is good to go. 1509 miles on the tripmeter. Now we just need a few more folks to join us !!! Should be an enjoyable weekend.

No worries. It IS the same weekend that MD was scheduled for. I dunno what happened there.....I'd swear I put the correct date in. I'll fix it.

I wrote directions with the listing on the calendar, but I looked it up on Google Maps and here's the link. https://goo.gl/maps/BuaUBDeGYzy

Wife and I are discussing it now. Looks like she'd be the only one there of the fairer sex. She's telling me to go ahead and commit, so I guess I should do it. Lemme make a quick contact first, see if a pal and his wife (who were planning on going to MD) are going. Might be a longer ride than they want on an old Honda Shadow 700.

Yeah, I'm a bit surprised that the folks who were bound for MD aren't jumping on it. It really is a great place. Not as much room for RVs and such, but plenty of room for bikes and tents. It could spill over into the neighbors lots if it had to as I'm on pretty good terms with the ones I see regularly. Rattlesnake hunt would make it interesting, albeit the snake hunt's gotten a bit rowdy over the past few years. Lotsa them unsavory biker types. LOL Penns Cave has a boat trip through the cave that's pretty cool, and some cool places to eat there in nearby State College. (Campus) The Zippo Museum in Bradford and Pennsylvania's Grand Canyon are a nice ride to... and worth seeing. Those who are young enough at heart could even spend the day either floating in place in the river, or do what we do every year and float anywhere from 3 to 11 miles down the river on tubes.....we always have a raft with a cooler full of the good stuff. We keep some tubes in the shed. There's been a few times I indulged the adult beverages more than I should have while floating down that river. lol Campfire and some adult beverages, maybe hotdogs cooked on the fire are usually a great way to put the day to bed. I absolutely love it up there...and plan on spending a lot of time up there when I retire, but I guess it's difficult to engage others in my passion.....just 'cause they dont know. Anyhoo, I just wanted to put the option out there for those who are looking for another venue since MD is off this year.

I was thinkin' that since Don was forced to cancel this year, ... Maybe we should have a get-together up at the hunting cabin in North Central PA that weekend. (Search Sinnemahoning, PA) Cabin has 11 single bunks and a couch, and there's room to set up some tents. We have all the modern conveniences, including an odor free outhouse....running water with shower and basic kitchen, back porch with a swing and a fire pit. Trout stream 100' from the porch, ....mountain starts up from the far side of the stream. The Willows restaurant / bar is 2 miles away....Sinnemahoning Sportsmen's' Club about 4 miles away, and I believe that's the weekend for the Annual Rattlesnake Hunt, which has been a pretty significant event for the area. Beautiful area to ride. Penns Cave and Beaver Stadium about an hour and a half away. Elk viewing area....Straub Brewery about 45 minutes away. If there's enough folks to make it worth the effort, I'm happy to invite them up for the weekend. Friday - Sunday. If interested, lemme know.

WOW It's amazing what ya can survive when the Good Lord's watching out for ya. Glad you're here to tell the tale. Like someone said, if you figure out what locked up the back wheel, please let us know.

I'm with ya, ....haven't even taken the bike out of the shed yet.....too busy....but I can't imagine EVER selling my 06 Black Cherry....."the prettiest color of them all"

Yup. Last year... Lisa asked "What was that noise?".....a few minutes later we figured that the noise was the bolt that'd come out bouncing off the bike before it was lost to the ages. Had to use the sidecover bolt as someone had mentioned. I think I now carry a spare.....(I'll have to check)

Hey....I worked at Turkey point back in the mid 80s. I actually worked as a laborer for Bechtel and then as an Insulator for Shook & Fletcher....I used to fly on that stretch between US1 and the powerplant. I used to fly up Cardsound road on my way up from the Keys. (I was living in Key Largo, at about MM 96) Brings back memories.

As an HVAC tech, I occasionally get calls for " Gas smell", and sometimes have difficulty making the customer understand that whatever it was they smelled, it wasn't gas, as it's an all electric building. I'll get the answer that "I smelled it this morning, and it smelled like gas". The ? mercaptin ? or something like that....that they put in the natural gas as an alert odor is very strong and distinct, but sometimes we'll get calls where there's an odor from outside that's getting into the building. (Nail salons....restaurants....asphalt paving).... All I can say is that if it happens again, call us back......and I don't recall ever getting a callback on mystery odors.

I saw this posting on Craigslist and thought I'd share. So, last week, something pretty tragic happened in our household. It's taken me until now to wrap my head around it and find the words to describe the horror. It started off simple enough - something that's probably happened to most of you. Sometime between midnight and 1:30am, our goat Evie dropped a deuce on our rug in the living room. This is the only time she's done this, so it's probably just because we forgot to put her diaper on before we went to bed that night. Now, if you have a detective's mind, you may be wondering how we know the poop occurred between midnight and 1:30am. We were asleep, so how do I know that time frame? Why, friends, that's because our Roomba runs at 1:30am every night, while we sleep. And it found the poop. And so begins the Pooptastrophe. The poohpocalypse. The pooppening. It's enough to really get your goat! If you have a Roomba, please rid yourself of all distractions and absorb everything I'm about to tell you. Do not, under any circumstances, let your Roomba run over goat poop. If the unthinkable does happen, and your Roomba runs over goat poop, stop it immediately and do not let it continue the cleaning cycle. Because if that happens, it will spread the goat poop over every conceivable surface within its reach, resulting in a home that closely resembles a Jackson Pollock poop painting. It will be on your floorboards. It will be on your furniture legs. It will be on your carpets. It will be on your rugs. It will be on your kids' toy boxes. If it's near the floor, it will have poop on it. Those awesome wheels, which have a checkered surface for better traction, left 25-foot poop trails all over the house. Our lovable Roomba, who gets a careful cleaning every night, looked like it had been mudding. Yes, mudding - like what you do with a Jeep on a pipeline road. But in goat poop. Then, when your four-year-old gets up at 3am to crawl into your bed, you'll wonder why he smells like goat poop. And you'll walk into the living room. And you'll wonder why the floor feels slightly gritty. And you'll see a brown-encrusted, vaguely Roomba-shaped thing sitting in the middle of the floor with a glowing green light, like everything's okay. Like it's proud of itself. You were still half-asleep until this point, but now you wake up pretty damn quickly. And then the horror. Oh the horror. So, first you clean the child. You scrub the poop off his feet and put him back in bed. But you don't bother cleaning your own feet, because you know what's coming. It's inevitable, and it's coming at you like a freight train. Some folks would shrug their shoulders and get back in bed to deal with it in the morning. But you're not one of those people - you can't go to sleep with that war zone of poop in the living room. So you clean the Roomba. You toss it in the bathtub to let it soak. You pull it apart, piece-by-piece, wondering at what point you became an adult and assumed responsibility for 3:30am-Roomba-disassembly-poop-cleanups. By this point, the poop isn't just on your hands - it's smeared up to your elbows. You already heard the Roomba make that "whirlllllllllllllllll-boop-hisssssssss" noise that sounds like electronics dying, and you realize you forgot to pull the battery before getting it wet. Oh, and you're not just using profanity - you're inventing new types of profanity. You're saying things that would make Satan shudder in revulsion. You hope your kid stayed in bed, because if he hears you talking like this, there's no way he's not ending up in prison. Then you get out the carpet shampooer. When you push it up to the rug - the rug that started it all - the shampooer just laughs at you. Because that rug is going in the trash, folks. But you shampoo it anyway, because your wife loved that damn rug, and you know she'll ask if you tried to clean it first. Then you get out the paper towel rolls, idly wondering if you should invest in paper towel stock, and you blow through three or four rolls wiping up poop. Then you get the spray bottle with bleach water and hose down the floor boards to let them soak, because the poop has already dried. Then out comes the steam mop, and you take care of those 25-ft poop trails. And then, because it's 6am, you go to bed. Let's finish this tomorrow, right? The next day, you finish taking the Roomba apart, scraping out all the tiny flecks of poop, and after watching a few Youtube instructional videos, you remove the motherboard to wash it with a toothbrush. Then you bake it in the oven to dry. You put it all back together, and of course it doesn't work. Because you heard the "whirlllllllllllllll-boop-hissssssss" noise when it died its poopy death in the bathtub. But you hoped that maybe the Roomba gods would have mercy on you. But there's a light at the end of the tunnel. After spending a week researching how to fix this damn $699 Roomba without spending $699 again - including refurb units, new motherboards, and new batteries - you finally decide to call the place where you bought it. That place called Hammacher Schlemmer. They have a funny name, but they have an awesome warranty. They claim it's for life, and it's for any reason. So I called them and told the truth. My Roomba found goat poop and almost precipitated World War III. And you know what they did? They offered to replace it. Yes, folks. They are replacing the Roomba that ran over goat poop and then died a poopy, watery death in the bathtub - by no fault of their own, of course. So, mad props to Hammacher Schlemmer. If you're buying anything expensive, and they sell it, I recommend buying it from them. Especially if you have a 300 acre estate like I do. And remember - don't let your Roomba run over goat poop...

Pretty cool.....wish I had the time...

Two things that generally don't lie are small children and drunk people. One thing that NEVER lies are yoga pants.

Godspeed my brother. Prayers for family at this difficult time.

Yup, and we need to have additional taxes on fried foods.....and red meat.....and riders that don't wear helmets.....we could use the additional tax revenue for nutrition and motorcycle education. More regulation and taxation will set us straight......

Something I come across from time to time in my trade are humidifiers that use a canister with electrodes in it. When voltage is applied to the water, it boils. When replacing canisters, from time to time I find that I have to drop an alka seltzer in to get the water to conduct electricity so that the thing will work.

WOW That's 1/10 of what I'll pay at OMF. How soft is it? I don't want to sink into it....I like 'em kinda firm.

Went and looked at a few today. The one we liked the best was at The Original Mattress Factory. The typical mattresses there were ok, but, the memory foam one was the most comfortable, and the most expensive. About $2300 out the door. Sams had a foam (hybrid) that felt ok,...a little soft, at less than half the price, but it was one sided, and 6lb foam, whereas the one at OMF was 2 sided, and 8lb latex foam, guaranteed 12 yrs, and supposedly won't leave depressions. Jury's still out, but I'm thinking we'll end up laying out the $2300. We're gonnna sleep on it. lol. Thanks for all the great, and helpful input.