Riding for Honor

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This past weekend, I had two annual “for honor” motorcycle rides in which I have participated before, but due to my regular promise to my spouse and sr. pals, I could choose only one of them to participate in. Each weekend, I give one and a half days for work around the house and sr. pal support, and then one half-day to ride. Tough balance — but there is no way I can take two full days of a weekend to ride. Such is the life of a guy who works full-time and has only weekends for personal time.

Which ride did I do, and why?
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Boot Care

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Chipharness99I own and wear many pairs of cowboy boots and motorcycle boots. From time to time, I receive emails asking for information on how I care for them. I have been asked, for example, “how often do you shine your boots?”

A loyal follower of this blog recently wrote to me and said that he searched this blog for information on boot care and could not find such info. I will fix that with this post.

How does BHD recommend caring for boots?
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Chapped

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This time of year in the area of the world where I live, Spring has sprung and prime “ride-the-Harley-to-work” season has returned! After a really slow start, the weather is now much more cooperative for me to enjoy my motorcycle passion while commuting to my professional passion.

This time of year, however, also means that it is cool at oh-dark-30 in the morning when I depart my home to ride to the office. That means that it’s chaps weather. So noted…
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Favorite Motorcycle Boots

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I ride a motorcycle as often as the weather permits… commute to work, run errands, rides for fun and charity. I may not put as many miles on my Harley has other bikers I know, but enough… about 200 days of riding on short or moderately long trips each year. Enough.

Being a safety-conscious and responsible biker, I always wear boots when I ride. Always. No matter the weather — extremely hot and humid, mild and Spring-like, or cold and wet — I wear sturdy, over-the-ankle, protective leather boots with durable (usually lug) soles.

Currently, I own more than 100 pairs of motorcycle boots. Surely, though, with all that experience, I must have some favorites. And I do. Here they are:
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Off the Grid

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I do not like to do this, but I have to take a break from blogging while I am on the road again.

What exotic destination am I traveling to next? I’ve already been to Hawaii, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico this year. What’s next?
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Why No Travel for Fun?

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As readers of this blog know, I have been traveling a lot for my job this year. North Carolina, Oregon, California, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, St. Croix, and coming up later this year — Guam, and California again — obviously, I have no hesitation or problem jumping on a plane for long flights.

So my heart sunk when I received a message from a guy in Berlin that read…
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Distracted Thinking

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This morning while on my way to work aboard my Harley, I had a number of things on my mind. My spouse’s pain and inability to walk… a major problem within my professional association that reflects poorly on my legacy… a number of items on my “to-do” list at work with pressing deadlines… and having to take off work on Friday to drive to the mother-in-law’s to fix the DVD player that we got for her a few months ago.

All typical, every-day things that many people have going on in a busy life.

But thinking about those heavy matters caused me to have a number of close-calls. I quickly snapped…
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A 22 Year Journey

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rp_Us01.jpgI use the word “journey” a lot when I refer to my relationship with my spouse. Like all couples, we have had our joyous times, our down times, our travelin’ times, our comfy-at-home times, our happy times, our sad times, our best-friendiest times, our angry times, our in-sync times, our not-so-in-sync times, our healthy times, and our not healthy times.

Whatever times we have had over the past 22 years since we met in that fateful date (April 25, 1993), I can honestly say…
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Six Month Milestone

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It has been an incredible and rough three-year journey for my spouse as he has dealt with three simultaneous infections born by a tick bite. Months and months of agony, being seen by more than 50 medical professionals, being prescribed more than 160 different drugs, and ongoing fights with a narrow-minded “big pharma”-funded group who deny that his condition could ever exist. Yet with persistent care from a superb general practitioner has brought us to a point that…
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