While doing a Google search on “Honda C70” last night, I stumbled upon the Mad Bastard Scooter Rally ’04, put together by CMG, a Canadian motorbike online magazine. I love to read stories like this. A group of several (6?) scooterists go on an endurance rally around Lake Ontario on scooters, including a Yellow 1981 Honda C70! I won’t give away the ending, whether they made it or not, but it’s a pretty cool story. You can also read about the ’05 Rally here, although no C70’s made the trip in ’05.

I have a fascination about motorbike journeys, and have been reading “Long Way Round” by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman. Someday I’d like to take an extended trip on a bike too. Seems like a neat experience.

I pre-ordered Nintendogs: Chihuahua edition from Amazon a few days ago for the awesome price of $14.99. Today I received this email:

Hello from Amazon.com.

We regret to inform you that an error caused “Nintendogs – Chihuahua”
to be displayed at an incorrect price.

In accordance with our posted policies on pricing, we are unable to
offer this item for the incorrectly posted price. Therefore, we have
cancelled your order for this item. At any given time, despite our
best efforts, a small number of the millions of items on our site may
be mispriced. We do, however, verify prices as part of our shipping
procedures. If we discover that an item’s correct price is higher than
our stated price, we will, at our discretion, either contact you for
instructions before shipping or cancel your order and notify you of
such cancellation. This policy is posted in the Help section and is
accessible through numerous other areas of our web site.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

We value your business and hope that you will give us a chance to
serve you again in the future.

Sincerely,

Customer Service Department

Amazon.com

Please note: this e-mail was sent from a notification-only address
that cannot accept incoming e-mail. Please do not reply to this
message

The fender that arrived for my C70 should fit on nicely. The mounting holes on the top are placed differently than on the original fender, but the forks actually have bolts in the correct place for the replacement fender as well, so it should work out. The only problem is that I only have about an 8’x4′ space to work on it in the garage. The rest of the garage is filled with our moving stuff. I need to stop by Home Depot to buy some bags of dirt to make my homemade motorbike jack to lift the front of the bike up. Then I can change the front tire, and replace the fender at the same time. Speaking of the fender, the color turns out to be a really nice dark greyish-blue. It is actually one of the colors I was thinking of painting the bike, so I guess it’s decided. I shouldn’t have any problem finding a matching color at the auto parts store. The photo above is what my bike will look like. I am even going to paint the side covers white to match the legshield. I just need to search for a luggage rack like the one in the photo, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find since they are still produced in Japan.

Yummy!

Last night Mariko and Bay went out to get sushi. They returned home with a boatload of really yummy nigiri, a caterpillar roll, and miso soup. It was so good, but there was so much, we couldn’t finish it all. I think that was the first time that I was not able to eat all the sushi. But, the four sushi that were leftover were the cheapie ones: Krab, inari, and the other two I don’t remember. Anyways, sushi is notorious for making you super-thirsty later on, so I made sure to have a big glass of water before I went to bed. Mariko, however, woke up at 1am to get some water, and couldn’t sleep until 4am. I slept like a rock.

Bay and Koa have been enjoying Deko Boko Friends, which is a series of short videos that are part of the NHK (Japan) Kids’ show, Okaasan to Ishoo. The characters are all strange and funny, for instance, there is Tamago-Ooji, which is a hard boiled egg person whose shell cracks when he gets mad, and Sabo-sabo, who is a super shy cactus who sheds all his spines when he gets flustered. The twelve characters are supposed to represent twelve different personality traits, and teach about tolerance and how to get along. Anyways, we were watching Noggin on our DirecTV system, and they had Deko Boko Friends in English!!! It was so funny to hear them talking in something other than Japanese, but it was very cool.

I loaded up Neverwinter Nights and am gonna play it with my friend Tony. We used to play D&D waaaaay long ago, and this game uses the same ruleset at the pen-and-paper game. We’ll probably spend half an hour figuring out how to connect our computers over the Internet so we can play together (I am in TX and Tony is in SoCal), then the fun begins! The game is cool because it was designed so that gamers can make their own custom content, and people have recreated some of the classic modules. We’re probably going to just play the basic NWN campaign tonight, and later on try some of the custom-made content. We’re such dorks!

It’s Friday!

Only a few more days until Nintendogs is in U.S. stores! I want the Dachshund and Friends version of the game. It comes with the Dachshund (of course), the Pug, and the Shih Tzu, as well as a couple other breeds, but those are the ones I am eager to play with. Here’s a cool site called “Puppy Times”, which is a blog by the “Drinky Puppy Club”.