Pastor Tom Schoeneck is looking for additional means of income, since we are so small that we are having trouble paying his salary, and he asked me to make a video of his sermon last Sunday. The sermon topic was an “Introduction to Ecclesiastes”. The sermon was about 27 minutes long, and I recorded it with my trusty Canon DV camera. I took it home and imported it into my Mac mini using iMovie. After it imported, I watched some of it (and yes I have the lastest version of iMovie installed), and I noticed that occasionally it would drop some frames. I had imported the video to my external firewire 400GB hard drive, so it should have been fast enough. Anyway, since I have a Quicktime Pro license, I tried it again in Quicktime. Quicktime now has a video import function. Anyway it worked fine, so I changed the file extention from .MOV to .DV and moved it into the media folder inside the iMovie video project. When I started up iMovie it automatically recognized new clip and asks if you want to delete it or use it. I driopped the new clip onto my timeline. This previous part is important because it avoids the very time consuming import copy process that iMovie would have gone through if I had just imported the video normally. So now I had the 27 minute DV clip in iMovie and I split it into two parts, the introduction (about 4.5 minutes), and the main part of the sermon (22 minutes or so).

Ecclesiastes Intro Part 1

Ecclesiastes Intro Part 2

I think they look pretty good. I exported them as described below using iMovie expert setting to H264. I had tried several other encodings, but they ended up with files that were too large to be usable on the web, and while 40MB or so is very large for a web movie, it is 26.5 minutes, so I don’t feel bad.

The specs on the video are as follows (for you nerdi types);
Data Rate: about 210 kbits/sec
Video: H264, 320 x 240, Millions of colors, 15 FPS
Audio: AAC, Mono, 16kHz

Editor’s Note: The videos above have been modified by youtube.com to work with their video display software, so they may not have the same visual quality they did when I was hosting them on my own web server as Quicktime H264 files. Flash is required to play these videos.

Ok, we are setting the way-back machine to around 1966. I was in High School, and my first bike was a Vespa 150 Red, hand painted by me I think. It ran pretty darn good for a scooter. 150cc’s is a lot for a small vehicle. I bombed around a lot with it, I don’t remember how or where I got rid of it, but it was fun.

My second most memorable bike was a 1964 Suzuki X6 Hustler. The Hustler was one of the first 250cc bikes that was able to exceed 100mph. It was a 2 stroke of course, and literally ran like a Banshee. I don’t think I ever tried to get it up to 100mph, but I drove plenty fast in those days.

Next on the list of favorite bikes is the Honda CL72 250 Scramber 1964. This was a great motorcycle. I bought it used from a dealer who told me it had been bored out to 305cc, but he had to sell it to me as a 250 because that was the model it was. Fine with me, it ran good, and who ever bored it out, did a good job, because I never had any trouble with it, and I put a lot of miles on it.

Three motorcycles remain in this chapter of history. The next bike I bought was a Suzuki 380cc 3 cylinder air cooled two stroke. These early bikes used oil injection, so they didn’t smoke as much as earlier two strokes, and they were very good at limiting oil usage, I think I only had to add oil to the oil injection tank about once every 1000 miles. Now I am not trying to say they don’t smoke, cause they do. It didn’t bother me, but I have been asked to ride in the back of the group, so there won’t be other riders behind me that have to smell all the smoke. I didn’t mind, it produced a lot of power for its size, and it was very smooth. It used a 120 degree crank, that is three power pulses per engine revolution. Hard to beat that with any engine.

My next bike was also a two stroke, the biggest two stroke motorcycle ever made. It is the Suzuki 750 three cylinder water cooled two stroke “water buffalo” as it was called. Big torque, big power, very smooth. I did have it over 100mph at least once. It was very much my first touring motorcycle, and it was very happy two up. Debbie and I rode it lots of place.

The final bike in this set actually occurred earlier. It was a Royal Enfield 750 Interceptor. A kick start battery-less twin with magneto ignition. If you didn’t set everything right, you would never be able to start it. Once it was running, it was amazing to ride. There really is something about those British twins. It definitely had more torque than any of the two strokes I ever owned. The royal Enfield wasn’t completely trouble free, but I think it was my first taste of the motorcyling mystique that motorcycles are more than the sum of their parts, and some lack of reliability is not necessarily a detriment to the fun of ownership and operation.

Ok, This history covers the period from about 1994 through 1998. This span of time begins when I did not own a motorcycle, and had not owned one for about 10 years. I was sitting on the couch, being a potato, and Debbie walks up to me and sais point blank “I have decided to get a motorcycle again, whether you do or not”. I blinked a couple of times, and immediately replied “Over my dead…”, No I really said “I guess we are getting motorcycles”. I had been out of motorcycling since the mid 80s, when I had crashed my Gold Suzuki GT-750 Water Buffalo in a hairpin turn in the hills behind Milpitas California where we were living. I gave it up, thinking this just wasn’t fun any more, since I dislocated my right shoulder in the process, and it took almost a year to heal. Anyway, we proceeded to look for Motorcycles, debbie bought a Black 1985 Honda Shadow 250, which lasted her about 3 months, since it was so small. I bought a Red 1982 Yamaha Virago 920 (no picture), which I loved, except it had a few problems, like it had sit for a year in someone’s garage. Truely a bad thing to do to a Yamaha, they get all gunked up. So, while I was having problems with the Yamaha, I found a really good deal on a Black 1985 Honda Shadow 700 with very low miles (3000 miles?). I snapped it up. Then I discovered why it had such low miles. It ran great, it was very reliable, had lots of power, but it had an exhaust note that would drive almost anyone crazy. It sounded like it had no mufflers, though it a had factory exhaust system. I eventually changed it out for an after market exhaust system that improved the tone somewhat, but I never really learned to like the Shadow 700. I eventually sold it for a bit more than i originally paid for it.

My next purchase occured around 1994. I bought a Suzuki GSX1100G. Basically your 1100cc road rocket. I should have known when I bought it that any motorcycle with a name like GSX1100 would be a hotrod. I knew it had a heritage from the Suzuki road racers with the same engine, but somehow I thought I would be able to handl it. fool that I was. I don’t think I ever got a ticket on it, but I can’t imagine why. It just wasn’t happy below 70mph, and I really wasn’t happy above 70mph. One day, Debbie and I were going to go out for a ride together on it, I warmed it up but left the choke/enrichener on a bit too long, and it loaded up. We got on, and sputtered along until we got to the freeway in california, and i decided to open it up to clean it out. So as we accellerated onto the freeway, giving it full throttle two up, we accellerated until it cleared out. It only took a few seconds, but then I looked down at the speedometer, and it read 90+mph, and I think I was still in 3rd. Needless to say, I turned white as a sheet while I looked around for police cars. fortunately none wre around, so I slowed down for the rest of the ride. I don’t thihnk Debbie knew how fast we were going, until later, when she beat me up.

Within a few months, we moved to Texas, and I sold the Suzuki and bought a brand new Yamaha Virago Black and Cream 1100 Special. It was really a pretty bike. It handled well, was fund to drive, and it was happy below 70mph. In fact it didn’t really like going a lot faster than that, but I didn’t care, I was now a cruiser. I rode the yamaha for a couple of years, to lots of rallies, until we sold our house in California and became momentarilly rich enough to buy Harleys.

As Paula pointed out in an email this morning, there have been at least 7 accidents, injuries, or surgeries in the first two weeks of September. That is after what seemed like several months of no more than one accident a month. It’s not like there have been a lot more activities lately, in fact the whole summer has been almost crazy busy, events coming and going sometimes two to a weekend. I guess God is trying to make sure I don’t get bored. Well, it is working. I hardly have time to sit down anymore it seems, but I do trust that God is in control. I feel like I am in the midst of a hurricane, and I’m constantly trying to find the eye of the storm. I find my emotional state moving in and out of peace and distress like a yoyo. I feel like I need to constantly be reminded that I don’t have to handle all this because I can’t, and I don’t have to. God will handle everything, and HE IS HANDLING EVERYTHING! Last week, I was able to visit people in the hospital three or four times, but this week, I couldn’t do that because priorities at work and evening activities prevented me. Fortunately other people picked up the ball, and they went. I didn’t ask them to go, they didn’t even know I couldn’t go, God just took care of the need by prompting them himself. I find that amazing, even though I shouldn’t, He is after all God! Why is it so hard to trust that God will take care of our needs, when we see it all the time? I guess I don’t have an answer, unless I am just too pig headed. Yah! That must be It!

Here are three pictures of Debbie’s 1973 Shovelhead Electroglide “Miracle”. I think the name came because Debbie found a sticker on the front end that said “Expect a Miracle”, so it stuck. Of course we knew that it would actually be a miracle if Debbie actually managed to turn it into a drivable motorcycle.

This first picture shows “Miracle” as we received it (him, her?), basically a basket case, or bike in a box. It was pretty complete, but the motor had a broken jack shaft. I think that is something to do with the cam, down in the bottom end. Anyway, it didn’t look like much to start with.

This second picture shows the frame after she had it powder coated, totally bare. Nice and shiny. in the background you can see some of her other parts that have been powder coated, sitting on the shelf.

The last photo shows one of the rare moments when I got to actually work on Miracle. We are working on installing the oil hoses. As you can see, Miracle has mad a lot of progress since we bought it in January 2004. We are actually pretty close to being able to start the engine. Debbie needs to get the wiring done before we can do that, and then all that is left is painting the sheet metal. And purchasing a few more chromy pieces of course. She is still pondering what color scheme to use, but we already know it will be something simple, no fancy multi-hue color changing paint for Miracle. This is a ’73 FLH rebuild, not a chopper.