Has it been that long?

two plus years. yes, i'm still alive. barely. headaches-still got them. and now we add kidney stones to the mix. i've already passed a bunch of them. maybe the rest will come out on their own.



scooter club basically fizzled. Last spring i bought a bigger motorcycle, 1981 Yamaha Maxim 550. it was built by one of the guys that we ride with. he rebuilt it for his girlfriend. they split up and she kept the bike. rented a garage to store it in and never rode it again. Deb and i bought it, cleaned the carbs, eventually a new battery. i've put almost 4k miles on it in less than a year. it's a lot of fun and it makes the range alot bigger than we had on the scoots. i rode to Chelan/Manson several times. Lake Wenatchee once. Leavenworth, Cashmere, Monitor many times. we do a ride to Malaga, then over the mountain by Clear/Lily lakes and come down the Squilchuk canyon. nice ride. all paved. lots of twisties. this winter i've been building a 360 enduro. it was given to me by my neighbor. we had seen it in his back yard. you could just barely see the headlight from the street. it was the same color as my '73 Yamaha 175 enduro. Jerry and i were helping a neighbor clean up some storm debris and i asked him about the bike. he said it belonged to his son and he would talk to him about it. later that afternoon, i had taken a nap and when i woke up, Jerry had rolled it over and left it in the carport. the color of the headlight bucket was rust orange. rust being the word. it wasn't the same as mine, but a 72 360 with a rusty headlight.



it wasn't much to look at, you get what you pay for. and free isn't much. i played with it, and got it running. but it needed a seat and other parts. turned out, the seat is about the hardest used part to find for these bikes. i ended up buying a parts bike that has a rebuildable seat. i've stripped it down to the bare frame and have started the re-assembly. tires are on order, and a few parts from Yamaha. once done, i will sell the parts bike, hopefully for about what i have into it. anyone need a 1973 Yamaha RT3 360cc enduro? for parts?



guitar playing has been very limited. my son Rob and his family rented a cabin up Blewett Pass over the holidays and we drove up there everyday. it was very cold that week, near zero degrees F. so we spent most of the time in the cabin playing. that was a lot of fun. the kids got a guitar hero or whatever the version of that type of game for the Wii. it had the Beatles edition. of course, Big Lew knew all the words, all the songs. it was a lot of fun. sure impressed the grandkids.

i'll try to update this thing a little more often. oh, yeah. Rob and i took the sailboat up to Chelan for a few days just after Memorial Day weekend. we had the lake mostly to our selves. it rained and stormed something terrible. we went to Mitchell Creek and spent a couple days there. Rob caught one big squaw fish on the dock. only time we had the boat out last year. maybe this year will be conducive to sailing.