The Screaming Viking

After we decided to move out to the farmstead, I was concerned about the Impala handling the country roads.  If they were good gravel that was all well maintained it wouldn’t be a problem at all.  These roads though are beat to hell by the oil and gravel trucks.  I remember back when I was younger that it was very rare to find a bad spot in the road, but now even the highways around here are starting to buckle under the abuse.  It’s been a really wet spring and early summer as well.  Some of the roads are light on gravel so when they are wet you slide around quite a bit on the underlying dirt and clay.  I’d driven the impala a bit around here for a while and there was just no way the wife was going to be able to handle it when it’s wet.  It’s like driving on snot.

I had looked around a little bit trying to find one of those AWD vehicles.  I pointed out quite a few to the wife that I thought would work well…for one reason or another she didn’t like any of them.  It became clear that I was going to need to let her find one on her own.  It did get a little frustrating trying to find something for her…but once I let her handle it and told myself that she’ll either find something she likes or deal with the impala…it’s her problem, I was much more content with the process.  I did put a couple requirements on her, I wanted one where the interior space compared to the impala and the milage needed to be mid 20′s.  In the end, I did end up giving up some on the interior space…there was no way we were going to find an AWD she liked that had the same space as the impala with the milage we wanted. Read the rest of this entry »

I got the itch a couple weeks ago to take one last decent bike ride for the end of the year.  A buddy and I went to detroit lakes with the intention of heading to mahnomen then back across country to Fargo.  It was pretty chilly when we took off, and by the time we got to DL we were pretty much icicles.  We decided to just head back to Fargo and forgo the long run.  I had planned to head back to the farm at some point in the fall to do a few things in the hills.  The kid was going to come with, but since she screwed up I had the opportunity to go alone.  The weather seemed decent, so I decided to run up there on the bike.  This would be the first “long” run I’ve been on since I took the bike back to Fargo a couple years ago.  I’ve made several adjustments since then, so I was curious how things would go.

I had a few things to do around town plus all the road construction, so I ended up leaving a little bit later than I’d hoped.  There was a head wind going north.  A couple days before I took off I’d adjusted the fuel/air mix, cleaned up the air filter and tested it up and down the interstate a bit.  It was a dead calm evening and she was giving me all she had.  It tops out for me right now around 90ish, which given my size is about all I can expect out of this bike.  I’ve stopped being so concerned about the absolute top end and became more interested in how fast it can get from highway speed limits to that top end.  With the new jets and fresh mix ratio it was performing about as good as it’s going to…I was satisfied with it. Read the rest of this entry »

This past holiday weekend we made the trek back to the farmstead.  It’s always a big of a hassle to get out of town and start the drive.  With two women and two dogs away from their house for 4 days…you can imagine the amount of stuff we have to bring with.  To the wife’s credit she is getting better each time with the packing.  She still takes a bit much for my taste, but it is significantly less than she would take when we first started our trips up there.  We bring quite a bit of stuff for the dogs as well.  We always bring them a bucket of food, which I think we’re going to stop doing.  The Sarge seems to do fine with the food the folk’s give their dogs…he used to get some kind of tremors going on, but I think I’ve traced that back to nutrition.  I’ll have to buy my folks a bag of food for their dogs once in awhile and we’ll be square.

The first obstacle once we got to the farm was how my dogs would interact with my mother’s new dog.  Her last dog and Sarge had a bit of a conflict.  For some reason the dog found it’s way into Sarge’s mouth pretty often…I’m pretty sure it had something to do with food and how much of a bully the dog was to Sarge when the Sarge was a puppy.  I don’t think it was so much of a revenge mentality…but I think that started the tension, then the dog wandered in front of the Sarge’s food dish…that set him off and it was on like donkey kong. Read the rest of this entry »