OK, a lot of people claim to follow the teachings of Jesus. That's cool, I agree with them myself. In almost every truck stop I visit there is some scribling or other on the bathroom stall from a supposed Christian quoting some bible verse or a catchy Christian phrase or other. What kind of message does this really send? "Jesus saves" might well seem to be an important message to communicate, but when it's written on a bathroom stall what message does it really send? So, Christians feel...

Here's a pic of the Irish Hiking Scarf I am working on. It's a long way from finished but here's where it is now.

I finally finished the knitted clock for Mom. What do ya think?

I wanted to make something different for dinner tonight. When I'm home off the road I usually prepare a lot of the same old stuff. It's usually something relatively quick and easy. I picked up some boneless chicken breasts at the grocery and decided to make baked chicken tonight. It's something I haven't made in a long time and just sounds good. I prepared the chicken with a bit of butter and some herbs and popped it into the oven to bake. It already smells really good. I'll start some ve...

When I rode down to the C-store earlier today to pick up some brews there was a kid of about 8 or 9 standing in front of the store when I rode up on my bent. The look on his face told me that he had never seen a bent before. He walked toward me and said "Hey mister, that's a nice bike!" I got off and set it on it's kickstand and said "Thanks", The kid asked me all kinds of questions about the bike. It was obvious he was just itching to get on it. I finally asked him if he would like to sit...

Get your act together. This was the advice from someone on a "support" forum after reading that I was dealing with depression. WTF? Is this good advice for someone with heart disease? How about kidney failure? Diabetes? Ok, this wasn't a depression support forum, it was actually a stop smoking forum where I just happened to mention the depression thing in the context of quitting smoking, but still... is this the kind of advice people think is actually helpful? Kinda makes me want to...

When I got home I did the usual. I turned on the water and power, aired up the tires on my bent, and rode down to the store to get some brewskies while the ac was cooling the place down. I've been drinking beer most of my life and it takes a few for me to get a buzz. Well, at least until I started on Wellbutrin. After polishing off two brews I had a pretty good buzz going. I have never, ever had a buzz off of two beers. It seems the Wellbutrin makes one a lightweight. Naturally having an e...

I've been ripping CDs to load onto my new MP3 player. I wonder if MP3 player is the right term as it also does video and pictures? Ah well, anyway, it works great and sounds really good. The ear buds are silicon tipped so they fit nicely into the ear and have no slippage at all. I only have 66 songs loaded into it so far, but I still have a number of CDs yet to rip. I'm storing all of the tunes on my laptop as well as into the player, that way I can either listen to them on my computer or ...

When I stopped in at a fuel stop today to use the restroom and grab a Gatorade I saw (while using the restroom) a sale flier advertising a 256MB MP3 player they had on sale for $40. Hey, that's plenty big enough for me as I don't plan on using it for videos or anything. 256MB is a lot of music. I bought one. It's a knock off of an iPod (but really tiny), and I'm sure it's not the highest quality, but it seems to work ok. It took me a while to figure out how the thing works. I tried to read...

I've only seen the Trick My Truck television show a couple of times. Of the shows I've watched I am now seeing a truck they did on one of them. It has on impressive paint job with "Fort Stockton" on the back. You couldn't miss that truck anywhere. It just pulled into the truck stop and parked. Must be nice. I remember how they did the interior of that one. That guy has a very nice ride. I managed to snap a couple of quick pics.

A lot of bands, especially new bands looking for exposure, are licensing their music under the Creative Commons license which allows one to legally download it for free. I've been downloading music from a site that hosts a lot of CC music for listening or download called soundclick.com While some of the stuff is crap, a lot of it is very good and I've downloaded some very good music from there. It's divided into genre which makes search/browsing much easier. I have a number of tunes from a...

I installed the newest version of Ubuntu, called Feisty Fawn, ugh, on my laptop when it was released. As a long time Slackware Linux user I held a certain dislike for Ubuntu as it is a very GUI-centric distro and I'm a hands on kind of guy. But, as I like to keep up with what the various distro developers are doing I installed this newest offering from Ubuntu to see how it compared to their past releases. I have to say that I have a whole new respect for this up and coming distro. After in...

The following video, along with a press release regarding the incident, is a good example of how little respect we bicyclists receive from much of the motoring public or even the police. Bicyclists have just as much legal right to use the roadways as someone in a polluting, gas guzzling, behemoth of a vehicle and seeing things like this really gets my Irish up. The press release: ROAD RAGE AT BERKELEY CRITICAL MASS Police Again Fail to Protect Bicyclists' Rights VIDEO FOOTAGE AND Q...

This video is pretty funny.

Among other things I am in the process of doing my laundry. Yeah, I know, that ranks right up there with adventures in toenail clipping. So sue me. We have a small laundry facility on the next street over from me that is owned by the park and is for park residents only. It's not much but it's a very short walk for me. I walked over, tossed in three loads to wash, and walked back home to enjoy a nice cold beer and some carport conversation with my nieighbor who happened by on her bicycle j...