Russell Remembrance

10 years.

It’s been 10 years since I got that phone call.

It was a Saturday and I was scouting some roads in CT, killing time until a friend of mine finished work and I was going to pick her up for a ride.

I felt my phone ring and pulled off to check the voice message.  I’d assumed the call would be from my friend, but it was from Karmen - and she had the worst news to tell.

 

I called her right back and we spoke for a short time, neither one of us really knowing what to say.  No sooner had I hung up than my friend texted that she was all set.  I replied that I had to cancel, explained why, and headed home.

I kept Karmen’s voice message for years.  I didn’t want to delete it as it was just one more thing that connected to you, even though it was something terrible.  When I finally ditched that phone for an upgrade, my carrier wasn't able to save my messages so it went away, too.

But enough of that.  I said that each year I’ll post a Russell Remembrance.  Something that sticks out in my mind from all the fantastic memories.  This year I think I’ll share a time that showed Russell’s softer side.

I believe it was 1993; it was the year that I fell into the fire.  Russ had taken one look at my hand (despite my protestations that I was fine) and said “You’re going to the hospital.”  There was no arguing, the decision had been made.

We met the EMT’s at the fire hall, finally got to the hospital and the conversation went like this;

            Doc; Have you take anything for the pain?
            Me; Yes.
            Doc; What did you take?
            Me; I don’t know.  (Steph had handed me a white pill and said “Take this!”, so I took it…but I didn’t think to ask what it was.  I found out later it was a simple (useless) 200mg Ibuprofen.)
            Doc; We can’t give you anything without knowing what you’ve already taken.
            Me; Got it.
            Doc; We have to clean the burned skin off of your arm.
            Me; Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
            Doc; This is going to hurt (as he approached with what looked like a Brillo pad and started 
 scraping away).

Pain.

I can assure you that I’ve had some painful things happen to me in my 50 years, but I assure you that this was the *worst* pain I have ever felt in my life.  Not just what the doc was doing, but the entire burn; the arm, the palm of the hand, the fingers; every screaming inch of it.  And as I’m standing there trying to be a tough guy and not make a sound, my body took over and started shuddering.  Not violently, but I wasn’t able to control it and it was enough to be visible.

And then - Russ reached out, took my good hand in his, and held it.

 

He didn’t say anything, just held it; firmly and comfortingly, letting me know that he was right there with me.

I didn’t need to look at him, and I imagine he wasn’t looking at me.  Hell, he hardly knew me.  It was only my second time up here and here I’d managed to hurt myself so badly that he was dragged out of bed (he’d had company with him, shall we say) and off to the hospital.  Yet here he was, standing beside me and holding my hand in his.  He didn’t care how it looked, or that he was a tough biker, or anything like that.  He was strong enough to show that he cared about me.  I’m sure the act wasn’t lost on the doctors or nurses, either.

I’ll never forget that.

I say it many times, Russ.

Usually in my head, sometimes out loud;

We miss the hell out of you.

Victrola Brother.

Higgins' 30th Annual Toy Run

I'd tried finding the info on this year's November toy run but it seemed like all that was out there was info for prior years.  I tried FB, Google, friends in the know, etc.  Nothing.  Then - at last week's Riders meeting, one of the members had found it.  It would b in tree days!

We hurredly sent the word out but unfortunately with such short notice, folks' availability was extremly limited, and it just wound up being three of us.  No matter; the weather wound up being stupendous for mid-November and we had a great day.

First up was to grab a toy - a quick jaunt along the aisles of my local Wally-World and I found what I first presumed to be a simple stuffed animal.  Only after I was walking up to the register did I realize there was more to this little guy than met the eye.

This thing was two animals in one!  It's a Flipazoo critter and apparently there are like 8 different ones. The one I'd grabbed (which was the only one on the shelf) was a dragon by all appearances.  But this thing had...a...I guess "hood" would be the best way to describe it.  In it's "dragon" form, the hood folded over the back but if you lifted it up and over the dragon's head, you revealed a unicorn, underneath.  You had to see this thing - it was so cool!

Here he is, all anxious and ready to get rolling to the run.

You can also see in the pic how nice and sunny the day was, too.  I was thinking I should have taken a pic of the sky - it was nothing but blue for as far as you could see.  Not even a single cloud anywhere.  Awesome!

I met up with Dale and Kathy at the Post and we headed off to the rally point.  There was a fantastic turnout already parked at the ready.  This run is well known, and somehow they always seem to have fantastic weather - pretty amazing for mid-November!

We headed inside and registered...and we wound up with the last available tickets. Judging from the ticket numbers, they'd had 350 to sell and were all out.  Other folks were still showing up, and they were just asking them to pay their $10 at the Commercial Club (the place the run ends at, and where the massive after-party is).

Oh yeah - when we'd parked, the guy in front of me had this thing on his antenna.

I've never seen one of these before but I Googled them and they're out there.  $10 apiece.  I'd like to get one but I'm pretty sure someone would swipe it pretty quickly and then I'd be po'd.  So I'll have to think about it.

This year's run was somewhat shorter than prior years.  I don't know the reason for it, but it was still a nice scenic ride - despite one road being nothing but serious bumps and potholes.  Nevertheless, we all made it safely to the Commercial Club.

Heading inside, we placed our toys upon the masses of other toys already there.

It's so cool to see such outpouring and support for kids!

We grabbed a frosty and some grub, then headed out back to enjoy the warmth of the sunshine still flowing down from above.  The band was hammering some amazing biker tunes, our bellies were full, there was a feeling of camaraderie in the air.  It was an awesome vibe.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to stick around for long.  One beer and it was back to the roadways to meet up with a friend of mine who'd lost her husband two years ago on this day, and needed some cheering up.  We hung out with some friends, had some laughs, and managed to distract her from her thoughts for a few hours.  All in all, a good day.

The Higgins run is something I look forward to each year.  It's a great time and for a great cause.  But it's also bittersweet because it's usually the last organized event for the year.  Which means I don't currrently have any other runs on the docket.  Oh sure I'll still find some mischief between now and next year's riding season but it's kind of a bummer knowing that the rides are done for the year.

Although...I did hear rumblings about a frosty nuts ride on January 1st.  I'll have to see if I can find anything out about it...

Ride Hard, Keep Your Nuts Toasty

How's That Surprise Workin' Out For Ya?

Bill and I were slated to head up to the NH house this past weekend to get some work done on the yard.  But, then Myszka started texting me at 10am on Friday morning; he was coming out to visit!  And, he was bringing Tom with hime!

He'd only made up his mind to do so, about two days earlier, and hadn't wanted to tell anyone so as to surprise folks.  Surprise!  I'm not going to be around, and neither are Bill and Tara, who are heading up north as well.  (How's that surprise thing workin' out?)

But no matter; brothers were coming out and plans needed to be changed!  A quick call to Bill to call off the work weekend, and I shot home.  I'd already secured a half day off from the job so instead of using that time to miss traffic going north, I jumped on the bike and headed west to meet Steve and Tom at the halfway point.

All things considered (leaving at roughly the same time, each having 250 miles of pavement to travel, me hitting a feet-down, bike-off traffic jam on the Pike, them having to make more gas stops due to smaller gas tanks, etc), we did pretty damn well and only missed meeting up at exactly the same time by about 10 minutes.

Some quick grub to fill the furnaces (both us and the bikes) and we were soon hammering eastward, finally pulling up at Kevin's house where the guys were staying for the weekend.  Beers and shots of course soon followed, along with Kevin working the stove and grill to get a late feast served for the guys.

The drinks and good cheer were flowing fast and durious so I took my leave around 11:30.  I knew if I stuck around much longer, I'd be pulling up sleeping space on the couch.  (And it was a good idea to leave since I later found out that they'd been up to about 3:30 in the morning.)

The next day, the boys were off to a local brewhouse where many of us Massholes caught up with them as the afternoon wore on.  The beers were delicious (and strong!), the bartender was a hottie, and we even got a behind-the-scenes tour of the place.  Good times!

From there, we rolled on to Chickie Flynn's for more camaraderie and more friends showing up.  We had dinner, washed it down with a few more frosties, then headed back to my place for a fire and more drinks.  And more folks showed up - sweet!

We didn't run that long into the evening, it'd been a pretty long day.  I do remember capping off the evening with pulling out the Johnny Blue and savoring that smooth sweet nectar with a good number of us.

The next morning, and I was feeling the effects of having gone hard on little food the day before.  Kevin texted that the boys hit the road around 9am and I busied myself with chores around the house.  Around 6 in the afternoon, the messages began coming in; the boys had arrived home, safely.  We all agreed that we'd had a hell of a great weekend and we couldn't wait to do it again.

I didn't get any work done on the house in NH, but did manage to give the liver a working over, and share lots of laughs with some awesome brothers.  Definitely made the right choice.

Ride Hard, Take Chances

Costume Chaos, Party II

After doing more thinking about dispensing shaving cream, I realized it would be a terrible idea.  It would get all over the floor, make a big mess and be all kinds of slippery.  Having folks wipe out and get hurt is not a good way to get votes for your costume.  So I opted to go with white silly string, instead, and it was a huge hit/success.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

 

First up was to take a picture of what I was trying to create so that I could keep referring back to it during construction.

Yes; the all-important souce of the good stuff...

Then, a quick trip to Lowe’s for a wardrobe box and I had the main component.  It was too big by itself so I had to cut the seams and glue things to make the dimensions more in perspective.  Holding things in place for drying took some creativity (what you can’t see are the cardboard supports I’d built to hold the top from collapsing inward.)

Next was the faceplate.  I took measurements from the image on my phone and then used some geometry to scribe the arcs, and voila; a faceplate.

For the window, I tried taping some cellophane over the middle hole, with some tin foil behind that, but didn’t like the way it looked…

You could still see the inner edges of the faceplate’s cutout, so I took the piece of cutout cardboard, wrapped that in foil and cellophane, then pressed that back into the faceplate and it looked great; all the edges were in line with each other.

At this point I realized that since I needed to cut a hole in the top for my head to fit through, I needed to remove the clothes hanger bar that the wardrobe box comes with.  It’s along the top of the box, and secured to either side with flaps which I’d now painted over.  That, and having glued the box into a smaller shape meant I was no longer able to easily remove the bar without destroying the box…unless I used my dremel to cut one of the flaps off.

Which I did, nearly setting the box on fire in the process.

 

The last thing needed was the dispensing port.  Originally I’d planned on having it shoot out from the very bottom, but after cutting the hole in the top for my head, the whole thing sat way too low.  The dispensing point needed to be in line with my unit, so I cut a hole at the right spot and created a rounded half-shell top to spiff things up a bit.

Success!  A life-sized, Purell hand soap dispenser (I google-image searched on the Purell logo and found some large versions which I printed out and glued on).

 

And it worked flawlessly.  Well – I did find myself going through the cans of silly string much faster than planned, but a quick trip to the party store and I was stocked up again.

A bit of fortune greeted me in the middle of the day.  I happened to come across the owner of the company (the guy who makes final decisions on who wins and what place they come in), and he was eating lunch.  I proceeded to walk up to him while asking if he’d washed his hands prior to eating.  “It’s very important to wash your hands – do you need some of me?” and then let loose with a stream of string, right at the floor in front of him.  He started laughing so hard, I honestly thought he was going to choke on his lunch.  Someone next to me actually said they thought my costume was inappropriate for Cognex, but the owner (while still laughing his ass off) said no, it’s PERFECT for Cognex!

Fast forward to the after-work party, and the contest.  I was called up as one of the finalists and proceeded to spray string all over the dance floor – much to the laughter and cheers of most people, and got some shocked looks from others.  It turns out I made the company president blush, but this seemed to please the owner all the more, and I wound up with 6^th place (out of 15).  The 5 people who beat me out, definitely deserved to, as their costumes were very creative and obviously took much more time and thought than mine had.

I wound up claiming a KitchenAid blender system of some sort but since I don’t do any kind of serious baking, I brought it back to Best Buy today at lunch (we’re allowed to do that) and get store credit; Holy crap - $425!  Not too shabby for 4 nights of work and about $30 of materials.

So there you go; this year’s costume chaos.  I wonder what I’ll wind up doing next year…

Ride Hard, Take Chances

Costume Chaos

It's that time of year; my company's annual Halloween extravaganza is approaching and many of us employees are scrambling to get our costumes done in time.  I had another ambitious plan for this year; I was going to be a meat grinder, complete with working crank which would push more 'ground meat' out when turned.

Despite once again being an over the top costume, I was excited about the idea.  I brainstormed the plan, bought materials, and dove in.

Much of this thing was going to be paper mache, which I've never used before, but I looked up some tutorials on YouTube and off I went.

The first thing I needed was a central tube for the grinding chamber.  I wanted the end to flare bigger than the inside end so I grabbed a metal trash barrel, wrapped it in chicken wire...

What a pain in the balls this was, cuttin the wire, wrapping each cut piece around its accompanying connection point, tucking all the sharp ends inside so they wouldn't keep jabbing me.

Apparently I did a great job of wrapping it very tightly.  It was so tight, it took me almost half an hour to slide it off of the trash barrel.

After that, I molded another chamber to house the crank, for opposite of the grinding chamber.

Next was to cut some cardboard circles to tuck inside to give the chambers structural integrity...

The circles on the end kept sliding inside the tube so I cut some spacer shims to keep the circles in place.  But the shims kept falling over so I tied them into place with thread (if you open the pic you can see the thread).

Lastly was the center of the costume.  I wanted it to be a bit rounded to give more of a chamber effect, rather than just a straighht tube.  I bought an inflatable exercise ball and then se the tubes against it.

(In this pic, just the smaller tube on top was splayed open to mold it better to the ball, but after I took this pic, I splayed the bottom tube as well, for a muc better fit.

 Next up; the paper mache!  Glue, water, and a bit of salt which apparently keeps the paper from molding.

Ta da  Wait...no "ta da"...it's not done!  When I started to apply the paper, I found that while it stuck great to the ball, it wasn't sticking to the chicken wire at all.  This meant I had to do the middle section first, then I'd have to lay it on its side to apply some paper on its top, let it dry, then roll it a bit, put more paper on the top, let dry, etc.

 And messy?  Man, just look at that tarp.  This stuff was dripping all over the place.  But, I had knocked some of the project out and it was time to let stuff dry.  I turned on the ceiling fan, set up a floor fan to help, and kicked back for a while.

When it was dry (many hours later), I went up and checked it for strength.

And that's when it hit me...

This costume required me to be inside of it to achieve the effect of me being ground up - I was aware of that.  But I'd assumed I'd be able to cut a section out of the ball and have the remainder of it held firmly in place by the paper mache.   But what I found was the ball was still very flexible, meaning that as soon as I cut into it, relieving the internal pressure, the costume would lose all structural integrity.  This meant the costume would flop around on both sides, most likely resulting in the whole thing tearing in half.  Definitly not what I wanted - and with only 5 days left until go-time, I was out of luck.

So I cut/tore/dismantled the entire thing and it all went out in yesterday's trash.

This left me without a costume for what is the biggest event at my work, all year.  But that'd be sacrilege.  I've been competing in the costume contest for almost as long as I've been here.  For weeks, folks have been coming up and asking me what I was going to be (I never tell beforehand), and saying they couldn't wait to see what I came up with for this year.

But I was out of time and to be honest; out of motivation.  I just wasn't feeling it.  I figured what the hell, I'll take a year off and sit this one out.

But then yesterday, as I was washing my hands after using the bathroom, I was hit with inspiration; I'm going to go as a commercial hand soap dispenser.  (Huh?)

That's right; a commercial hand soap dispenser, complete with PURELL (C) labels on it and everything.

Anyone that's daring enough to hold their hands under the dispensing part - which will conveniently be located at my crotch level - will get a handful of cream.  Shaving cream, that is.  I'll be holding a can of it inside the box I'm building.

I may not place in the winning group, but I plan on getting a shitload of laughs.

Maybe I'll try the meat grinder thing again next year.

Ride Hard, Take Chances

Just Can't See Getting Any Older

This whole "getting older" thing sucks.  Yeah, it's cliche' to say that and we all know it to be true, but I'll press on with it anyway.

The latest example for me is how it's getting harder and harder to clearly see the roadway at night.  Granted, some of this is due to my sucky low-output, yellow-beam headlight, but most of it is due to my eyesight losing it's youth.  I've been realizing more and more that as I'm rolling along roadways in the darkness, especially when there's traffic coming toward me and their headlights are washing out my own, that I'm riding on pure "blind" faith that there aren't any obstacles in the road.  I can't see the surface to know that it's clear.  And that's bad.

I need to see about upgrading my headlight situation, and I'm hoping there's something out there that's a better option than that +$300 light which I returned a few months ago.

Oh well, moving on...

I really need to get my bike in for its service, I think I'm about 500 or  600 miles over, and have another run going on this weekend so that will wipe out the option of bringing it in then.  I'm kicking around the idea of bringing it in tomorrow at lunch and then hopefully picking it back up on Thursday at lunch.  The problem with that is it'll take me at least an hour to get there, let alone the time needed to drop it off/pick it up, and then the hour ride back.  How do I explain my extended lunch periods?  I'm not sure but I'll try to think of something.  (They offer a free bike loaner for 24 hours, so that would cover me getting back to work and then home and then back to the dealership.)

Lastly, it's that time here at work; Halloween.  Folks keep asking me if I'm all set with my costume yet.  Nope, I'm not.  In fact, I haven't even thought of anything yet - I just feel burned out.  I need to get my head right, though, and think of something fast.  The party/contest is 10 days away...

Maybe I should go as the Invisible Man...and just not come in...

Ride Hard, Take Chances

Light At The End Of The Tunnel

I'm waiting on one answer from an exec and then I'll be able to hand off my budget plan.  That'll mean an end (hopefully) to the long hours and working on weekends.  Sweet!

So what do I have in store for this weekend to celebrate not having to work?  Not a thing!  I tried making an appt to bring my bike in to Boston Harley this weekend to have the 35k service done but they have an event tomorrow and a huge run going on, on Sunday, so they're pretty tied up.  No to say they couldn't do the service, but they probably couldn't get it done within 24 hours, and that's where the problem comes in.  My "priority" service plan alots me a free rental bike for 24 hours, so I ordinarily would be able to drop the bike off tomorrow, take the rental home, then go back in on Sunday, return the rental, bring my bike home.  I will try again for next weekend.

The weather looks like it might be halfway decent so I'm going to see about taking the new bike out - the mountain bike, that is.  Having weighed myself in the gym the other day and finding that not only have I regained all the weight I lost in the Spring, I'm even heavier than I was, originally.  So burning off some calories via pedaling won't hurt me a bit.

I'll probably take the real bike out some as well, even though I'm 300+ miles over the service interval.  It's all synthetic fluids, though, so I imagine it'll be fine.

Not much else is going on.  Kinda looking forward to having a drink when I get home; a luxury I haven't afforded myself in some time, due to the long hours and fried brain cells of late.

I'll try and find something fun and exciting to do this weekend and bore you with the details about it on Monday.  Have a great weekend.

Ride Hard, Take Chances