Financial Help

 

Beautiful day yesterday, especially after the storms on Monday. I had an appointment with a financial advisor about 10 miles from the house, so I rode the motorcycle over. Since I'm turning 72 in a few days, I need to figure out the Required Minimum Distributions on my retirement accounts, and if I don't get it right Uncle Sam will be kind enough to charge me a 50% penalty on the screw-up. Hence the need for some professional help. I need to get some paperwork together and drop it off at his office before we come up with a plan, so I worked on getting most of that collected later in the day. On the way home from the meeting I passed this Jeep truck on the trailer down the street from the shack. I don't know the guy but from what I've seen of some of the things around his place, we probably have a lot in common.

I stopped at the library after my meeting with the financial advisor and parked next to a little scooter in the lot. As I was getting off my bike, a former student of mine was coming out, he being the owner of the scooter. Like most people riding around the county on scooters, he'd had some trouble with alcohol and no longer had a driver's license. I remembered making an expansion chamber for another of his scooters while he was in school and asked him about it - said he still had it. That's it in the above photo. We built it to his specs that he came up with. It was noisy as hell but I don't know how effective it was. Probably needed some carburation tuning to optimize the performance. He was surprised I remembered the project but I always like working on the oddball jobs.  

The sheet metal for my collector showed up yesterday. Might not be as cool as an expansion chamber on a motor scooter but same skills required. The tubing should be here on Friday, at the latest. I still haven't decided what to make the pipe the collector will dump into. I'm thinking 2-1/2" or 3". I'm going to try to spend a little more time in the shop the next few days. I really want to see some more progress on the jitney and a couple other things that have been neglected for much too long.

Besides the projects, time to ramp up my training for the race walks I'm planning on competing in. I've got my weight down lower than what it has been in years. I managed to keep from gaining any weight while in Tulsa. I did break training at Oklahoma Joe's. We went there for lunch one day and I had sliced brisket, their spicy slaw and the cowboy or trail beans. I couldn't pass up the brisket - cattle country after all. I don't normally miss eating meat, but man-o-man, that brisket was killer.