Sadly, I'm still not mentally up for responding to the danger entry. Sorry. I promise that I really will get around to that.

just an observation.
When you check the sky in the morning, and it's cloudy, and so you check weather.com to determine your transportation for the day (car if raining, bike otherwise), and weather.com predicts "refreshingly cool!", what they're *really* saying is, "that's too bad that your lazy ass still hasn't bought winter pants." There is nothing "refreshingly cool!" about riding 55mph in jeans when it's 50 degrees out. I'm just sayin'.

all i want for christmas is my two front forks...
My bike's Christmas list:

• A new cover. My current rain cover is about {----this much ---} too small for my bike. This means that it *will* eventually *mostly* cover the bike, but it requires about 10 minutes of pulling and stretching and smooshing and repositioning and bending the mirrors out of the way. It's really annoying to have to reposition my mirrors *every goddamn morning*.
• A new clock. A little while ago, I bought a $3 digital clock at Kragen's. It was small and displayed the time, and had an adhesive strip on the back to stick right on my instument panel. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, my $3 clock from Kragens had an aversion to water, which I found out one morning after I hadn't bothered fighting with the rain cover. Oops.
• Motolights. I think Motolights are the coolest things ever. They're little halogen riding lights that attach onto your forks to give you better visibility. I saw a sportsbike up in San Francisco a couple weeks ago that had them, and they looked really nice. I'm all about better visibility.
• Aerostich Roadcrafter suit. My co-worker Justin has an Aerostich Roadcrafter one-piece Bright Ass Yellow (tm) suit. It's got armor, it's waterproof, it's got tons of ventilation, it's got pockets. I'm in love. The catch is that, of course, no one under 5'4" (and certainly no women) exist in the Aerostich universe, so it'd cost me as much to get it altered to fit than the damn thing costs in the first place. Feh.
• A friend.
• A dial pressure gauge. Remember when I took the bike in for the wobble and it turned out that it was because my tires were at 40psi? Right. My brain has, magically, latched on to that little nugget of information, and now every time the bike wobbles *at all*, I think I need to check the tire inflation (because, y'know, maybe they inflate themselves overnight). And why get a nice new stick gauge when I can get a flashier, more expensive, dial one? How American of me.
• Tools. I have a nice little set of Craftsman tools. It's a very nice little set. It has a ratchet wrench and screwdriver and an Allen wrench that I tossed in there once. But...need more. Need more tools. Need torque wrench and other wrench and eight thousand different sized allen wrenches and little bitty screwdriver and great big screwdriver and mallets and pliers and more wrenches. My life does not have enough wrenches in it. And a big shiny toolbox.
• Books. Right now, my bike-related wish list includes:
  • The Ultimate Motorcycle Book, Hugh Wilson
  • Motorcycle Electrics Without Pain, Mike Arman
  • Riding High, Ted Simon [Note: I suppose I should finish reading Jupiter's Travels first...]
  • Trail of the Dove, Dorothy Friedman
  • Against the Wind, Ron Ayres
  • Chilton's Motorcycle Handbook, Kevin Maher and Ben Greisler
  • The Art of the Motorcycle, Guggenheim Museum
  • La Motocyclette, Andre Pieyre de Mandiargue
• Wrist/thumb relief. I know I've talked about the Throttle Rocker before (for some reason, I always want to say "throttle master," but that just sounds dirty). I'm not sure that it'd really help, since it's the fleshy part at the base of my thumb (as opposed to my wrist) that really cramps up when I'm riding, but I'm willing to give it a shot.
• Hard bags. Since this is a fantasy list, I wouldn't complain about any of the Givi bags. You know, for all that touring I do. On my bike with the 3-gallon tank. Yeah.
• A new helmet. OK, I don't really need one, I already have a perfectly good working black Shoei RF800, which has never had a spill or anything else which would make me need to replace it. But, man, I really like that wine red RF800. In fact, I wanted one when I was first buying a helmet, but the store we were at didn't have one in XS. :P Someday.
• Little squeegie thing. My aforementioned coworker Justin also has this little plastic wiper-thing that fits on the finger of his glove and squeegies the rain off his visor. Apparently the official name of it is the VeeWipe (why? dunno.). I can't link to Aerostich's stupid products page, but here's a review of it.

OK, that's enough for now. I'm sure I'll think of more.

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