Sick Sad Little World

I had to work Saturday, which was bums. But never mind, I slept till 11am on Sunday so had a nice lie in.

I got up in time to watch the second 3/4 of the 250cc’s and had breakfast in time for the MotoGP boys. It was Sachsenring and Rossi needs points. It was mega rainy and initially I thought, “well that’s crap” but after a moment I remembered some of the other wet races and know that it makes it 10x more unpredictable. So I settled in for the race.

Dani was on form immediately, racing away like he was on a dry track when everyone else was on a wet one. It was quite funny though because Charley and Steve were chatting away and then the camera’s cut to Dani’s arse cam. They said “now lets listen to the RC212v…”

“Bvvvvv bvvvv bvvvv OOOOOOOOOOO”

And at the end of the straight we saw Dani go bye-bye. I actually sat there with my mouth open in amazement. It was something else and great timing by the director.

Dani went sliding in to the air fence at 170mph. Oh dear. I think he was 7s in front on lap 3. Serves him right.

Casey then bulleted away, leaving Vale doing his amazing wet weather riding to get 2nd. It was a great race and that concluded the lunchtime slot.

I then washed my bike and lubed the chain. Gave it a wee dry and set it in the garage, by which point I was not feeling too well. But I pushed that aside, got our gear on and we both went out on the bike.

I headed first to see our house, which reminded us why we couldn’t wait to get in, and then we headed out past T in the park.

As we were riding along Em shouted, “Look at the sun!!!” So I did, and this is what I saw:

The sun halo above Kinross.

That photo was taken on my new phone, a Nokia N95 8GB. It’s a fantastic picture and I am well chuffed with it. It gives me a pretty dependable backup camera should I spot something and my actual camera has ran out of battery.

After stopping for a moment, I then saw that I could nip out quick before a lorry came along, so I did…and then did a nice wheelie. Em was crapping herself but I knew it would happen because of the weight over the back of the bike. We then shot off and headed to Powmill, so that we could go around the Knockhill road.

Which we did. And there were tonnes of bikers. It was great! Then a bike arrived behind me and sat really close to me. I guess he liked formation riding and I accepted his fast riding and shot off past the slow moving cars. He followed and we weaved our way through Fife. He then shot off past me, offering a wave before I peeled off on to the motorway to head home again. We cruised up the motorway and back home. It was a nice ride out and took my headache and sick feeling away.

The cones that are laid out to channel the T in the parkers off the motorway are a great source of entertainment. As we approach the segregation, there are signs telling the drivers that in 800yrds you’ll either need to be in the left lane to go to TITP or the right hand lane to go straight on. It’s quite funny watching all these dopey drivers driving along, then suddenly realising that there are cones in the middle of the road…”why is that? What is happening? Am I meant to be in a specific lane here?!” and you can see what they are thinking by the erratic weaving that follows. Then a last minute decision is made and this either means straightening up and accepting your TITP fate, or doing a mega swerve on to the right hand lane.

It all plays out before me and it’s a laugh. Just shows how oblivious some drivers are to what is going on around them.

Anyway,

The news of a poor soul being brutally stabbed in the face and body 11 times at T in the park because he was defending his female friend, has soured my weekend.

We live in a sick, sad, little world where people who go to enjoy music at a festival end up getting stabbed in the face because some drunken neds think it’s cool. It makes me sick to the stomach to think that 2 brainless idiots can deliver so much brutality for something so trivial.

Is anything sacred in this place any more. Can we not go and enjoy something together without turning it in to a blood bath. These yobs who carry knifes around looking for trouble should be locked up. Or better still, shot.

It’s a sad day when we realise that everything we love about this place will end up being desimated because of the delinquent filth who hurt for kicks. We will end up living in a state of emergency. It’s inevitable as long as the dogs that do this shit still walk our streets.

Good night all, thanks for reading.

Gordon

June 2008

Hello.

June 2008 has passed without major incident. There was a few near misses, a few gear updates and yet another “issue” with my GSR.

Things have seemed to flatten out with the starting problem, but I am still not 100% sure it’s fixed.

A funny thing happened on the way home tonight. As I was driving in to my street there was a group of young girls standing in the road, but when they heard the bike they all headed to the pavement. I drifted past and to my amusement, one of them shouted “STIG!”

Brilliant.

The latter end of the month was taken up with house hunting. Me and Em went to see 5 houses and out of the 5, we saw only 1 that we liked. Then we put a bid in and got it! So my weeks shot by with lawyers and bidding and fees. But we got the house that we wanted so were really chuffed.

I’ve spent the past 3 weeks trawling furniture websites, looking at the endless pages of stuff that wouldn’t work. I found myself sitting late one night aimlessly surfing the IKEA website, page after page of just stuff…really sad.

We move in on August 15th, so from now until then I doubt I’ll do much else other than continue to trawl the web and walk around furniture shops. It’s all good fun.

Anyway, that was June! A month that flew by. July will be the same, then it’ll be August, and MOVE IN TIME! YEAH!

Thanks for stopping by folks,

Gordon

Suzuki GSR600. Just plain weird?

Hello everyone.

I have my bike back and it seems to be “fixed”…

After a mammoth day of bank managers, lawyers and IKEA, Em and I were pretty tired. But I gave the garage a quick phone call to see if anything had been done. The bloke said aye, my bike was ready to go. They cleaned the “pick-up and rotor and it fired first time.”

“Great!” I said, “I’ll be along in 20 minutes. And along I did go.

After the usual key giving and me requesting a copy of the job sheet (you would think they would just give you one anyway instead of me having to request it) and then I headed out to my bike…which wasn’t there.

It was in the workshop still and the guy wheeled it out to me. Em was waiting in the car and I got my helmet and gloves, gave her the job sheet and headed over to my bike. I put the key in, held the clutch in and pushed the starter button.

“eeee…eeee…eeee…eeee…thud.”

Oh dear. Why isn’t it starting I wonder? I thought they had fixed it!

“eeeee…eeeeeeee…brrrrvvvvvvmmmmm”

It finally caught on after a long blast. Really stranger but I thought, I’ll get it home and if it fails to start, there will be some serious yamyam rage to deal with.

I drew up along side Em and tried it again. It took a wee second to catch, and when it did it was really low revs to begin with, however it stuck and we headed out.

The ride home felt good until a massive flash rain shower started and I got soaked.

Once home I tried the starting sequence again and it was fine, and even later on when the engine had cooled down I tried it again and it fired first time. So it seems to be working ok.

I guess I’ll see tomorrow morning when I try it to go to work!

So I am glad I have my bike back and I am glad it’s working now. I am looking forward to not getting up at 6:30am, and will instead enjoy a leisurely 7:45am rise. Ahhh the joys of motorcycling.

I need to get another new back tyre. I am thinking dual compound. The question is, Michelin or Bridgestone. Pedrosa or Rossi….hmmmm

Tough choice!

Thanks for looking all,

Gordon

Suzuki GSR600. Unreliable?

Life without a motorcycle, when you’ve had one for the past year and a half straight, is difficult. It’s even more difficult if the reason you don’t have your motorcycle is because it’s broke down.

I purchased my Suzuki GSR 600 K7 in January of this year. I’ve done, as you can see at the left there, nearly 8000 miles on it. So why, you ask, is it broken already?

Well it’s not even the first time it’s broken. This is the second. The first was in May, when the bike refused to start. I was in the middle of no-where when it broke and would have left me stranded if I were riding alone. Fortunately I wasn’t and Blair was able to give me a ride back when the Garage came to collect my bike.

They took over 2.5 weeks to fix it and the result was that they didn’t know what was wrong with it. The wiring loom was replaced and it seemed to work perfectly first time.

Well whatever the reason for it breaking in the first place has returned. My bike is “booked in” on the 8th July, when it will be looked at and probably taken through the same diagnostics that they used before, which means that it will take yet another 2 weeks to fix. I may be surprised, but plan for the worst.

2 weeks without a bike may seem like relatively little, but when your day to day life depends on it, a far greater loss is suffered.

I am really disappointed with this. I was under the impression that Japanese bikes were reliable and for the most part, they are. But for some reason this bike seems to have a problem.

Anyway, it’s pretty frustrating and I think a wee letter to Suzuki will be in order.

In other news, Emma’s Draggin Jeans that she had ordered 3 months ago still haven’t arrived. So she decided to phone them up again and cancel the order. When she did the guy that she spoke to was like “OK, that’s it canceled bye.” which frustrated Em a bit because she wanted some sort of apology or reason, but they gave nothing.

Draggin Jeans = poor customer service.

Oh well. We have bought a house! I am beyond excited about it and find myself looking at sofas, lights and blinds for our new place. I can’t wait! I keep winding Em up saying that I am going to get a 40″ flat screen and she keeps getting annoyed saying there’s other things we need first. Like a bathroom! hahaha.

I’ll keep you updated on the bike situation.
Thanks for stopping by,

Gordon

It all started so promising as well.

Well good evening.

I don’t know if you recall but when I was arranging the purchase of my brand spanking 57 plate Suzuki GSR 600 from my Suzuki Garage I was a bit on edge. This was the last chance for me to get a motorcycle that I liked and could use for the following 3 years, until I had paid off my 3 bike debts.

I had spoken with honesty with the man there about my disappointment with being treated like a fool and not really feeling like I was a valued customer. “Don’t worry, we will look after you here.”

My bike is still sitting outside. It has remained in that very position now for 4 days. In brief, this is what happened.

Sunday: I washed my bike and polished it to a high shine, catching every detail with timeless beauty. But then it didn’t start, so was pretty much motionless as well…(unless you count me pushing it up the steep drive because I had tried to jump start it…) A call to the garage was needed and was met with a pretty disappointing result. There was a slight edge of story telling going on, and the gist of the story was that they couldn’t come and pick my bike up because the van collection wasn’t covered under warranty. This was an issue really, because without the garage’s van, I couldn’t get my bike to the garage to get fixed…Not to worry though, because if I call back tomorrow and ask for Alan, he will be able to arrange for the van to come and pick my bike up under warranty…o.k…

Monday: I call at 9:30am and ask for Alan. “Alan has just stepped out for a second. He’ll call you back” 2:30pm, no call. So I get on the phone and ask for Alan. He hums and haws and says that he will get back to me about collection. Which he did. At 4:59pm. I missed the call as I was speaking to my boss, so he left a message. It was kind of hard to understand him but basically he said to give him a call back and he would arrange for the bike to get picked up. But the bike shop was now closed.

Tuesday: Ring Ring, “Hello, can I speak to Alan please.” “Alan is off today.” My bike needs to get picked up today because it’s not starting and I need it fixed because I USE IT EVERY DAY FOR MY JOURNEY TO WORK 38 MILES AWAY. “Well you’ll need to call the driver then. I’ll put you on hold.” Then I started thinking, why the hell should I call the fecking van driver? “Hello, yeah the van driver will call you today to arrange it.”

Wednesday: Well after yet another call-less day, I called back yet again. I asked for Alan. Not in. This is ridiculous. So I finally got the guy to get the van driver to call me and he said “Hello, I understand you need your bike picked up. Well I am going to Edinburgh Saturday, I can pick it up then or before if you like because you are just down the road…” TOMORROW PLEASE, BECAUSE I HAVE BEEN ASKING YOU FOR THE PAST FACKING 3 DAYS. “Yes, can you pick it up Thursday?”   “No problem”

No problem. Yeah…ok.

So hopefully I will return tomorrow night and my GSR will not be sitting there. If it is, my head will explode.

I am so disappointed with the reaction from my garage. I bought this bike in January, brand new. And so far it has been fine. But now this is the second time that it has broke and I am getting slightly fed up. The bike is great, but if I have to go through this hassle every time something happens, I just wont be bothered with it. This bike is under warranty for 2 years and rest assured that other things will happen to it. So much for the “Don’t worry, we’ll look after you.”
I spoke to Blair about it and he reminded me of a chat that we had when he was after a GSR. B raised the question of buying from down south cheaper and we were told that “If you buy from down south and you get a problem, I wont be as quick to help you out than if you bought from me. If you call me up and you have a problem, I will not hesitate to get the van out to you as soon as humanly possible.”

Well it seems like the humans react very slowly to problems. That’s 4 days.

Anyway!

Life is very complicated at the minute. I am trying not only to deal with difficult bike garages, but me and Em have just purchased our first house. It’s something that all humans go through, but boy oh boy is it draining on the system.

I have never been so nervous, exhausted, elated, disappointed, taxed, confused or stressed in my life. But today we got news that we had got the house that went to a closing date. I am so excited I can hardly sit still.

Work is very busy at the minute as well, and I am getting the bus to work. That means 6:30am wake up to get the bus at 7:30am to arrive at work at 8:00am, only to start work an hour before anyone else arrives. Then it’s a bus journey home at the end. I miss my bike.

So tomorrow we get the survey back and I am shitting myself that it’s below our offer. The house market in Scotland is in such a dilema, it’s a minefield. Fingers crossed.

On a different note, Scottishbiker has updated his site. In a nutshell SB is a man not dissimilar to myself in which he runs a blog about motorcycles, however he is clued up to the nines about the world motorcycle community and offers updates on new bikes, gear, events and news. A very informative website and one which is a one stop information overload. Check it out because it’s great. And he’s Scottish, which makes him one of the coolest folk on the planet.


Click image to head over to his website.

So there you go. Sorry I haven’t been updating for a few days.

I need to sleep because I haven’t for the past 4 days.

Thanks for stopping by folks!

Gordon