My motorcycle started blowing fuses around Thanksgiving of last year. Most of the wires live underneath the gas tank, so I ended up removing the faring (windscreen) and gas tank to troubleshoot this problem. Of course, having the gas tank off makes it easier to change the air filter… and having the air box removed makes it possible to replace the 15 year old fuel lines… and while the faring is off, I might as well repack the steering head bearings, and so on. It didn’t take too long before the bike looked like this:



It sat like that for a long time, sometimes waiting for parts to arrive from Germany, but mostly waiting for me to make time to reassemble it. This past weekend I finally found the pinched wire that was blowing fuses, and put everything back together:



I was really worried that after six months I wouldn’t remember where all the pieces went. I won’t jinx it by saying I didn’t forget anything, but I rode about 20 miles to lunch today and it seemed to work. Phew!

Today we went to an open house at the Pure Luck farm and dairy. You can read about their organic farm and goat cheeses at their web site. I just wanted to post some pictures of their cute baby goats, who will try to nurse from your fingers if they are hungry.

Our furnace and air conditioner, having lasted 25 years, are being replaced by new, high-efficiency models. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be much of a project, but the only access to the crawl space containing the furnace and air conditioner is a tiny door, one foot wide and three feet tall. The furnace must have been installed first, and then the interior walls were built around it.

I opened up a wall to give the service people a reasonable chance of replacing the system. (That room was next to be remodeled anyway.) They removed the old system this week, and I scheduled the installation of the new system for next week to give us time to re-insulate the space.

In the meantime, we are enjoying the mild weather sans heating or air conditioning.

The old “What’s New” page has been replaced by this WordPress page. It is easier to manage and more scalable than the HTML page it replaces. I’ve been using WordPress for my research page and have found it fairly straightforward to edit the themes and plugins to make it do what I want.

« Previous Page