Dogsitting

Naya the Dog has shared our house for the last four days while her human "JW" has been taking the California bar exam. Today he will come to collect her and I will miss her company. Naya is not the first dog with which I have lived but definitely the first for which I have been responsible. Having a dog makes me wish I lived in the country and had a porch she could sleep under. You know, with eight other dogs, and when it got too crowded she could move out to the rusty car on cinder blocks in the front yard. And then I would yell at someone to get off the ding-dang roof already. Jeez.

There was a skunk in the overgrowth behind our apartment; I hesitate to call it a "yard". Naya caught a whiff and proceeded to stare at it and whine from the window for the duration of its stay. The skunk would occasionally regard us like we were the least threatening creatures it had seen and nonchalantly return to forage through the blackberry vines, Queen Anne's lace and detritus. I shot some video with classic dog-whining and skunk-foraging action, act now and I will rush you a copy for the low low price of "free".

The Coldest Winter

Thank you Samuel Clemens, you had it just right. Another delightful summer day of fog and wind in San Francisco.

So, done with school for a few weeks and I suddenly remember that I had this "blog" thing that I was into back when I had moments of spare time and creative energy. About three months ago Elise and I moved to a nice little apartment with a great view of the city. A whole bunch of friends moved out of SF and I felt rather abandoned. I finished spring semester with a 3.6 GPA then jumped right into summer school at USF. Turns out I took the two hardest classes in the MBA program simultaneously AND in the accelerated summer session, which my classmates unanimously regarded as "insane". In hindsight they were correct, but as I was blissfully ignorant of the insanity of my workload I forged ahead and did quite well, thank you very much, finishing with a 3.53 GPA.
I had my Pelican case bags from the old BMW lying around, and I wanted to see if it was worth fitting them to the new bike. After looking at the expensive and crappy-looking after-market offerings for this bike, I designed luggage mounts for the V-Strom and spent a week fabricating and installing them. They work, are mechanically solid, look good and best of all will be fairly cheap to replace if they are damaged (new Pelican case: $100 vs. new Givi case: $350). I may be on to something with these. Just need to do the same for a top case...