Back to the Grind...

Well, its official.  Started back to school last Wednesday.  Couple of meetings under the belt already, and 8 mind numbing hours of helping with registration spread over 2 days.  Didn't get anywhere near as much as I'd hoped done in my room but we are making progress.

Now that I'm back "on the job", that means project time has totally dried up.  I've got a few things I want to post about over the next week or two from summer, but in the meantime here's what I've been working on most recently.

The Monday before I was supposed to go back to school, my wife and kids were already in school.  That left me home all alone.  Boooorrrriiiinggg... Time to go for a ride! So I got all loaded up and headed out on this:



To do this:



I was under 700 miles to go for my goal this year, this would have put me within 400 . The last couple of miles was hoping to rack up riding the 7 miles to work and back.




Ride started out great. Roads were clear, found a fun little detour, clearish skys, nice weather. Had a little niggling feeling though that maybe I should head home, get some stuff done, and save this for another day.



Nah, it'll be fine.

15 miles later.



The hole is almost the size of a quarter, and you can see clear into the tire. I hear a *BANG* and felt the bike kind of lurch, but just thought that I ran over something. About a mile later, I decided something was wrong, and started slowing down from about 70. Once I got down to about 45 the back end started to wander ALL over the place. Kinda scary, but I got it stopped and managed to get a ride into Soda Springs and get things figured out.

3 hours later, thanks to some family that lived sorta nearby, we got the beast loaded in the back of his BRAND new pickup, which made it a pain because we had no ramp and he didn't want to scratch his new truck.



Made it home, but I think the bike'll be down for a while... Can't afford a new tire right now.



Only made it about 90 miles into the 300 mile trip.  Bummer. Guess I'll just have to ride 'ole paint.  I wanted to haul things though, so that means I had to camouflage my KTM as a KLR... Think anyone will notice?



That worked great for a couple of days, but really... I can't handle that.  SO... Dug out the set of panneirs and Happy Trails rack I have for the bike that got mangled when I got rear-ended at a stop sign a couple of years ago.

Started with this:



Applied some heat,



Welded up some cracks,



Added some hopefully rear-ender deterrent:



Slapped a coat of paint or 3 on the rack,




And ended up with this:




Turned out pretty nice!  Even got it relatively square.



 




Now I can lug my lunch to school in STYLE!  Hoping to get a new tire for the ST soon, as I still want to hit my goal of 60,000 miles (6,000 of them this year).

I'm getting excited for school- got all kinds of idears tumbling 'round in my head for things to try and change this year. Hoping for a good batch of kids who want to learn, but I have to remember its more MY attitude about that then it is theirs that makes it fun for me.

Could be a pretty rough year though.  I have 17 computers, 22 desks, and TWENTY FIVE students in most of my classes.

Twenty five students? You might say, "thats ALL!?" Yeah.  Try having that many in my classroom with the amount of different things going on and sharp objects / power tools all over the place.  The rest of my beard may actually go white this year.

Wish me luck!

Smashing Cricuts.

Well, not really, but I used a Cricut vinyl cutter for the first time today.  Lotsa fun!

I found a set of Adobe Illustrator templates for my bike several years ago and have been meaning to do this for a long time.  I designed some new graphics a couple of years ago, but still didn't get them cut.  Today was the day.  Last day of school, no students, room was all checked off and I was good to go.  Been fighting with file formats for the last week so I figured I would give it one last try, glad I did! Got them all straightened out and ran them through "Make the Cut".  The OLD version, that lets you run the Cricut like a CNC without having to cut only whats on the stupid cartridges.



Cricut doing its thing.



Peeled off the extra vinyl and had this left. Made a few stickers for my website with all of the extra space.





Used a little bit of contact paper to transfer this piece over,



The rest were just stuck on by eyeballing it.

Before:



After!



Not to bad for eyeballin it!  One side done:



Now to do the other side and finish up a few little things.

FWIW, the templates I have DO NOT fit perfectly... I had to trim a little to get it to look right, and because the tank is not perfectly flat there were a few teeny wrinkles in the vinyl.

I spent about $25 on vinyl- just used whatever my local craft store had in stock. Don't like the orange I got so I will probably order some brighter stuff but I was impatient and wanted to get it done.

Here's what my poor bike looked like before:



and AFTER!

 






You might notice I changed a*few* other small things besides the stickers... Glad it's finally back in the dirt! Hoping to do a lot of riding with the family this year... I even figured out how to stuff the bike, the 4 wheeler, and two mini-bikes on my teeny little trailer!



Oh, and did I mention?  SCHOOLS OUT!!!