Happy Father’s day to all you father’s out there! I’ve had a very weird weekend, and in the midst of all of it I completely forgot it was Father’s Day! Thankfully my dad is on vacation, so we’ve already planned our Father’s Day festivities with him later this week.

I was supposed to pick up my Father-in-law’s present yesterday though, and I completely forgot about it. I slept through half of the day yesterday, so Hubby made other plans while I was asleep. I think I’m going to change those plans though. I was just looking through a furniture catalog I receive monthly, and I spotted a really cute table lamp I think I want to order for my father-in-law.

I know most men don’t care much about furniture, but my father-in-law loves to buy unique furniture for his shop at home. He’s got an awesome desk in the corner of his workshop, and the lamp I found is a motorcycle lamp.  It would look great sitting on his work shop desk.  I’ll have to ask Hubby for his opinion, but if he agrees I think I’ll just have to tell my father-in-law today that his present is on it’s way.

I couldn’t find the exact lamp online, but here’s one that’s similar to it.  This one looks pretty cheaply made though.

It’s a fact that more people are looking for ways to save money on gas. A lot of people are turning to motorcycles. All of us who ride know we can go just as far on a $12 in a bike than $60 or more in a car. More people turning to motorcycles for transportation also means crashes involving motorcycles are on the rise.

The video below is from Arkansas, but I still think it’s beneficial to everyone looking to purchase a motorcycle to combat gas prices. They give some important tips for staying safe while riding.

I know now that our motorcycle is out of commission for the next couple of months we’re really feeling the pinch. I’ve had to cut out a lot of extras to be able to afford the extra gas in our Blazer. Before if I needed to run out to get something like an HDMI switch we’d take the bike and throw it under the seat or in the backpack. Now I have to hold off on single item purchases and make a trip to the store when I need a bunch of things. I just can’t afford to run out in the Blazer for every little thing.

Just a heads up for those of you trying to leave comments. My comments are still messed up. There’s something screwy in my database, and I haven’t been able to fix it. For some reason the only comments getting through are the ones that say stuff like “Find the best wrinkle cream here”.

Comments are there, I just have to go into my database and manually approve each one through phpMyAdmin. The spam comments aren’t being caught by Akismet either. They’re call coming through as regular comments and actually showing up for me to moderate. Since these are the only ones getting through, for now I’m going to disable ALL links in comments. I’ll continue to manually approve comments until I get the problem fixed, so I’m not closing all comments just yet.

Pennsylvania repealed their helmet laws requiring all motorcyclists to wear helmets. Now there are conflicting studies, one saying deaths are down, the other say deaths are up. Which one do you believe? I personally lean more towards Pitt’s study for the simple fact that they compared death rates for just head injuries. The DMV’s study takes into account all motorcycle related deaths regardless of whether or not it was a head injury.

South Carolina’s law is that helmets are mandatory for all riders/passengers under the age of 21. I personally advocate mandatory helmet laws. Every time I hear of a motorcycle related death in our area the first question I ask is “Was it a head injury?”. My second question is always whether or not the rider was wearing a helmet.

People do me a favor. Wear a helmet!

I’ve been kind of bummed today about the bike. It’s been super hot all weekend, hitting 101 today, and that just really puts me in a bad mood knowing I probably won’t get to ride all summer. Hubby and I were talking today about what we’re going to do when we finally get the bike put back together. One of our friends has been begging us to take a long road trip. He wants to go to Vegas! Hubby thinks it’s a great idea.

I’m not so sure I can ride that far on a sport bike. I mean, the 600r is extremely comfortable as far as sport bike passenger seats go, but my butt still tends to go numb after a couple hours of riding. Now we’re going to have the r6 seats, so I’m not exactly sure how comfortable that will be. Thank god it’s not the new r6 passenger seat! Those are horrible!

On the other hand, my father in law mentioned that he’d like to go, but my mother in law doesn’t want to make the trip. He really really wants to ride out that way and hit the salt flats. Riding with him on his V-Star would be very comfortable, so if he’ll let me ride with him I’m all for it! I guess I should check out some prices for vegas hotels. The price of traveling that far may not even be worth it right now. With the price of gas going up by the minute who knows what it’ll be like at the end of the summer! I know gassing up the bikes is a lot cheaper than taking a road trip in a car, but I’ve got to consider this from all angles.