Love Is In The Air

This year’s sustained early warm weather has been quite unusual. The leather has remained in the closet, while my spouse has been feeling just a bit better.
We have a hill behind our house on which the spouse (with help of some neighbors) have planted between 500 to 1,000 daffodil bulbs every year that we have lived here (except between 2012 and 2014 when he was so extremely ill, the neighbors and I did it for him.) Daffodils are not eaten by deer that roam frequently and destroy everything in their path.

We now have over 20,000 daffodils on that hill. This year, the “early crop” of daffodils have already bloomed, and my spouse…
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Lucchese Classics Cognac: Feature Boots

I am trying a new thing for this blog: to feature one pair of boots from my collection about once each week. My stat program attached to this blog and my boots and leather website continue to show that this blog receives more visitors daily than the website does.

I am still trying to figure out why the blog visits have overtaken the website visits rather consistently now, but am thinking that my website is so “old school” and I do not know how mobile friendly it really is since I refuse to pay the ransom to have a web-enabled mobile device and have no way to check it.

This blog is on the WordPress platform, and WordPress programmers work hard to make it mobile friendly. Since now more than 85% of my web visitors are using mobile devices (rather than what I use — a traditional desktop computer), I am thinking that this blog receives more visits due to its mobile-friendly nature and that google’s algorithm for searches favors mobile-friendly websites.

So here goes … a feature about Lucchese Classics Cognac all-leather boots…
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Leather Guys

My spouse surprises me sometimes. He has not been feeling well, but with the recent duration of unusually pleasant weather, the spouse was feeling a bit more limber. He gave me a gift and instructed “put it on and meet me out back!”

What?
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Winter Tease Ride and Home State Orientation

We have been enjoying an ongoing spell of warm weather that is quite unusual for this time of year in Maryland. Ambient air temperatures have reached over 70F (21C) under sunny skies.

After spending all day Saturday tending to the usual weekend chores (Shopping with the LOLITS and husbacare), I was given a day off for good behavior, leathered and booted up (in my favorite Chippewa Firefighters) mounted the Harley, and…
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Post 2544, Continuing

So this is post 2,544 for this blog… not bad considering that according to a study of blogs by a leading social media research firm that most people who write blogs do so for an average of 15 months and post an average of 50 posts before they lose interest. Tell ya’ the honest truth, it is hard to keep a blog going.

Apologies… my post-counter got wacko for a bit, and at first when I wrote this post I thought the counter said that this was post 1,800. But then I refreshed the counter and found that this is actually post 2,544. Rather than delete what I wrote, I kept it as if this were another 100 milestone. Read on.

100 blog posts ago was…
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Personal Mush

Today, February 14, is one of the most contrived holidays to boost retail sales, especially of jewelry, flowers, candy, and cards. I know this sounds a bit cynical for an old sentimental softie like me. However, I continue to eschew the trappings of corporate greed that leverages a made-up “holiday” to fill the coffers of businesses that are all about profits and little else.

So my usual practice for this February 14 goes back to what I did in grade school, which is…
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Occupied

I know the blogging has been off schedule… sorry loyal readers for such haphazarditiness. (I love to make up words that are not real words, but native speakers of English can figure them out.)

Since December, the Spouse has had an average of two doctor’s visits each week. He is not well. Not seriously sick, but not well. Ongoing visits to specialists, dentist, and related errands to the pharmacy, etc., occupy a …
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Spring-like Weather, But You’re Not Riding?

All last week, I was on the West Coast of the U.S., in cold, dreary, damp and icy weather. I was working very long hours, and due to the time difference, was waking at 2:30am local time, and not getting back to my hotel room until about 8:30pm each night. I was “running the show,” meaning that I was leading, facilitating, and speaking at meetings all day, every day.

While my flights to and from this over-green, over-yuppified and increasingly expensive city were uneventful, they were indeed quite packed. So it was no wonder that…
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Riding In The Cold

I was contacted recently by a fellow biker who moved to Maryland from Hawaii. Riding in Maryland is significantly different from Hawaii — the least of which is Hawaii’s tropical weather.

Back here in the Mid-Atlantic, I would not say that summertime riding is “tropical.” More like “seasonal” with intense heat and humidity from mid-May through the end of September. Likewise, in the shoulder riding season (mid-March to mid-May and October through mid-November), riders usually experience pleasant temperatures and lower humidity.

But between mid-November through mid-March in Maryland, we experience riding weather that…
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