New Years Resolution:

For those of you who know me, you know I have a hard time sitting still.  I have a hard time living in one place for too long, and I have a hard time finding a reason to stay.  Please someone give me a reason.

Right now I'm gladly planted in Phoenix for another year getting my Harley Davidson mechanic certification, so I can properly, and professionally start doing my own wrenching, building, and get back to my road trades.  But just thinking of the upcoming summer, I'm bummed that all my trips have to be limited to however far I can get back and forth within three days and two night trips, instead of the months long summer adventures that I'm used to.

As much of a lonely vagabond that I've been, I am starting to long for some sort of biker companionship and camaraderie.  Realizing I have been a solo bird for so long, I just would love to start building and maintaining some neat road friendships.  I miss my riding friends back home.  I miss having stories to share with others cause we went through it together.  I just miss stuff.


To comfort these cold lonely winter days, I spent the day replacing some blown rocker box gaskets.  I woke up late cause I set my alarm for pm, instead of am.  Drove across town for a rocker box gasket kit.  $66.66 later, I had a complete H-D rockerbox gasket kit that came with two sets of gaskets for 3 types of sportsters.  I'm already looking at this as supplying my motorcycle shop walls.  Then when I got home, I realized I had to put my piston at Top Dead Center  Compression before I took my lower rocker housing off, this prevents the push rods from damage during disassembly and assembly.

This'll do for now.

Anyway, that's when I then left my mess and ran to the store to buy a bike jack, cause I was tired of always calling this one guy just to use his.  And what I learned in school, is that if you have to ask 3 times to borrow something, you need to go buy one for yourself.  So today was that day.  Plus I just hate asking people for things.  So now I got my floor jack.  Up went the bike,  and off came the rockers.  Now, as I was looking into the spark plug hole at the top of my Piston, I noticed that it looked nastier than I'd wanted it to, but not as nasty as I needed to maintain it now, so I'm sure I'll be doing a tear down before I completely leave Phoenix.  Today the pressing issue was the blown rocker gaskets, so I just wanted to stick with that.  Plus I got to play with my new torque wrench.  I got my gaskets all on, and everything torqued down.  And first thing in the morning, I'm doing an oil/filter change and she's getting new HD spark plugs, and then we're going on a little date.  (AKA, take her for a little spin around town,  cause we deserve it.)


So for my new years resolution: to hang out at more coffee shops.  I will also try as much as possible to make some epic campout adventures to events back home, hoping to meet up with old friends, make new ones, look forward to seeing them at next, and next, and next events, and then hopefully maybe, too, Arizona will yield me some like minded adventurers and my road camaraderie dreams will be fulfilled.

And although, I love my training and school, I do have an itchy travel bone, and so I'm counting down the days till summer 2014 when I will have nothing to do but ride my little butt off.

Who's along for the ride???