Arizona DMV, my luck remains in tact....

Rick is always teasing me with his comments about my luck with the DMV's in the various jurisdictions where I have licensed vehicles..



My luck almost always is bad.....!   And since I was trading cars along with my son several years ago, I tend to buy and sell vehicles all the time..  Seems like I never make any money doing this, but rather just manage to keep the fleet newer....

But back to the Arizona DMV.....  I have no experience here as I have dodged registering vehicles, but when we got the Camry here, I ended up going back to Kansas and paying the sales tax over again because of paying it in Arizona first...

Anyway, I broke down and said OK register the new bike in Arizona, because we will not be back to Kansas in 45 days...  That's all the longer you can buy a temporary plate here..

But, the 45 days is almost gone now, and guess what ??  No license plate!!  My luck is intact!!   I have trouble everywhere.....!!

So today the first place I rode the "black couch" to was the motor cycle dealer......  Asking if the license plate was to be sent to my home or to them.....  They assured me that it wasn't to be sent to them.....

The sales manager and the general manager were hanging out together, and they both looked in their computer system to make sure that it was sent in correctly....  Bottom line is that it should be here any day.....!!! Ya, right!

I spent part of the day waiting on hold with a credit card company because they cancelled my online signon...  Why?  I was told they didn't know why but they just did, so we spent a bunch of time on the phone getting reinstated....  The paper bill goes to KC so if they want paid.........

And then I got to fooling around with pinterest uploading my own pictures and connecting them to blog posts that I have made...  You can upload a picture and make a comment and post a link...  With the link being the blog that goes with the picture..

I don't plan on putting all of my blogs on Pinterest, but for certain ones like the Honda Oil Change and things of interest like that, I plan to use that venue as another source of exposure...

Its getting lighter for longer now which has allowed me to be out riding later into the evening..  But along with that it will become too hot in the afternoon to go out within the month...  Hard to realize that we are about to have another couple of months with absolutely perfect weather,  but Arizona never fails to have Feb and March as super months....

Oh, hey, I finished the Lincoln book and there was nothing political in it anywhere that would relate to modern day situations.....

Retired Rod

Superdome Power Outage/ Bike ride for a flower....

I was surfing the web trying to decide what actually happened to the power at the Super Dome last night...  Boy mum is the word for my searches...  No one is saying anything....

I finally found one site where they explained that a piece of equipment that monitors the condition of the power and the amount of current draw had sensed an anomaly and had powered down one of the major feeds from the power company....

I had visions of the many power closets all over the stadium with dropped breakers..  And way too few people that had authority and the keys to these facilities...  Just having the knowledge about where these lockers were located and how to recognize the tripped breakers would be huge..

Remember that this place runs on 208 volt three phase lines for its most simple power, so its not like going to the basement and snapping a few switches...    Much of the power is measured in the thousands of volts....  So 34 minutes was probably quite good for a response time...

Word had it that Beyonce had her own generators for the special effects and lasers for her show, so she wasn't to blame at all...

I waited until this afternoon when it was 70,  and took the Goldwing out for another long ride to our South..  Down Ironwood Rd several miles at highway speeds.. Used the cruise control for most of it...  That's a cool option on a bike...

Just beyond the intersection with Octillo is a greenhouse that I have visited several times before...  Its named A & P, reminding me of the old grocery store chain...

So I went inside and out the back doors into the bushes and trees...  They have some, and most were not damaged from the cold... But I was on the bike so I only purchased a small flower with tiny red blooms on it.....  Stuck it in the saddle bag on the right side with my jacket liner wrapped around it...

They hope to have a lot more bushes in a few weeks, but again were worried about the possibility of an upcoming freeze...  But they had a big plastic enclosed hot house that was full of plants...

My glasses immediately fogged over when I stepped in there....  But I didn't want to take plants out of that protection and expect them to survive 35 degree nights, like we are supposed to have this weekend...

I'm just nervous that we lost so much of our plantings and want to do something.....  Anything.....

Loyce was surprised when I gave her the flower after I came back from the ride....  "How'd you carry that in the bike, she asked?"

It does have rather large bins on the back, if you open them up...

Retired Rod

Rain and no Ride....

Super Bowl Sunday is another day like New Years Day....   A day when all the stuff on TV keep you inside and captivated....  But today started out rainy anyway....

I thought that that was bad when I got up this morning, as I was hoping to get a ride in before the game....  But then I got to watching the Iowa Basket Ball Game with Minnesota...  We both suck as teams, but I had hope we could beat them....  But it was up in Minneapolis, and not to be as we were behind by one point at the end and had to foul...

Of course they hit their free throws as the clock ran out and we missed a desperation three pointer at the buzzer.....  Another loss.......... drat.

Then on to Golf, that was taking place here in Scottsdale...  Kind of neat being right here where the national TV is originating...  Congratulations Phil...

And of course the Super Bowl, which lasted even longer because of the power outage...  San Francisco almost had the gift of a season as that unplanned intermission killed the momentum of the Ravens...  Probably a good thing the Ravens hung on for the win, as otherwise there would have been untold investigations...

And I didn't read any more of the book, and think I will let that subject go as its author seems to be too political to even bring up...

Retired Rod

More on the Lincoln book...

Good heavens, its late at night....  I got to reading this Killing Lincoln book and lost all track of time.....  I'm to the point where Lincoln has just been shot and Booth has ridden off into the night on a fast horse...

The story is told like you are reading a novel...  As though it was a here and now depiction of the events....  I'm sure that some of it has to be conjecture as what each man was feeling and thinking would have to be...  But it is as though you are right along side of Lincoln and Booth as the scene unfolds...

This book is written by Martin Dugard, who has some experience in writing history and does a good job of it in the present tense...  And as a celebrity author, Bill O'Reilly  lends his name as well...   O'Reilly has the advantage of being a history teacher from high school, so his abilities in the matter are also worthy...  He has a graduate degree from Harvard..

There seems to be no political agenda or bias one way or the other in the telling of the story....  The opinions expressed are only those of the people that are the central players of the story in 1865...

I did read that some of the facts behind the story are not exactly correct, and that the people at present day Ford's Theater wouldn't sell the book... But I wonder if that isn't politically motivated...  The facts in error were dates of a fire in Ford's Theater and the president's office being called the oval office which would be wrong because the actual oval office was built in 1909..

So far I haven't found any reference to the oval office in this edition, so I wonder if that hasn't been subsequently corrected....

Anyway not much else has happened around here today as we just watched the TV and made a few meals...  Loyce of course works on her quilt projects and is totally happy at that...

The motorcycle stayed parked even though it was a sunny and bright 73 degree day.....

I really didn't get started reading the book until later in the evening, but it is hard to put down once you start on it....

There have been over a million copies of this book sold, and to the extent that it teaches the history of events surrounding this period in time, it should be a positive thing...

Oh, and a commenter made reference to not wanting O'Reilly to make any more money from him on the book...  But I do think that O'Reilly has stated that profits from his books all go to charity... And on his web site, he goes into extensive explanation of which charities those are....  O'Reilly Charities

I agree that O'Reilly can be a rather polarizing news commentator, but none of that positioning seems to be present in anything I have read in this book so far...  Perhaps there will be some castigating at the end.......

Retired Rod