Leaves Are Changing

Another sure sign of the end of the summer are the leaves beginning to change. To me, it all seems a bit early or, maybe, I have a bad memory. It was 38°F this morning on the ride in. You could see water vapor rising off of the wet areas on the road. Now that school has started, there is a lot of traffic in the morning. Many unpredictable drivers wildly weaving through traffic and for what reason, get to school early? I don't get it...

Last night, I finally got around to working on the BMW R100RT. I pulled the gas tank and carefully inspected the coils (one for each cylinder) looking for cracks but didn't find any. The plug wires were pretty grimy and touching the frame in several locations. This weekend, I will attempt to clean them up and maybe try and get some of the other greasy dirt in that area. Maybe I'll try and re-route the plug wires. Unfortunately, the only time the engine really runs rough is during a really heavy rain so I'm kind of at a loss on how to test. This winter, there is a lot of maintenance that I need to do on the bike. I may even go as far as pulling to heads to check for valve recession. After all, I'll have about 7 months to get it all back together.

I needed to walk down to UPark school this afternoon to pick up the car to run an errand and it was a great afternoon to get out and about. I'm not sure what the temperature is but I felt plenty warm. After running the errand, I dropped the car back off at the school and walked down Birch Lane to Fairbanks St, then along Geist and University back to the campus. I then took the bike path to Ballaine Lake then the Skarland Trail back up to West Ridge before heading back to my office. It was a wonderful walk and well within my allotted time and only around 10 km. Now I feel like finishing off the afternoon. I'm going to miss the mid-day walks once I start riding the bus again. I spend roughly 10½ hours at the university everyday so I can take 2½ hours off in the middle of the day to get in a nice walk. Since I had the errand in the middle today, I was only able to get in 6¼ miles instead of the usual 7½ miles. I still haven't even gotten tired of going on the same routes. There is enough options with the ski trails to keep me from going on exactly the same path every day.