I spoke to Stephan at Stephan's Autohaus, and the van still isn't leaking oil. It is, however, leaking a little coolant - I'd thought it was the ancient and cracked up overflow bottle, but it sounds like it's a valve for the heater in the front. I've asked him to fix this, and I should be good to pick it up tomorrow :o)

Dorothy next door brought over her tax junk, and I threw it into TaxCut. As she's retired, her taxes are easy... I believe it takes longer to print them than it does to enter the data :o)

I finally broke down and ordered the Warcraft expansion pack, as I figure I'm never going to get rich at about 4 gold a quest, and the experience I'm giving up is a shame - I could be level 61 by now :o)

In the afternoon, I played a little World of Warcraft, as Scott had got a group together to hit Scholomance. Well, we ended up hitting Stratholme Dead, until one of the players had collected everything he wanted there... the douchebag just bailed out on us, meaning we didn't really have a big enough party to continue. We just bailed out and went home. I was pretty annoyed by this, so I gave up for the day.

In the evening, I worked on the YSR a little. I hacked the Japanese headlight mount to work with the US frame, and threw some paint at it to stop it rusting.

I finally joined the nearest gym, as they were having a special deal. Vic's already a member there, so hopefully we'll drag each other along there and actually get a little fit :o) I played with a few of the machines, but I've booked a session with one of the trainers to work out a starting routine.

I spent a little quality time with TaxCut, and my taxes are nearly done. I just need to wait for a few other bits o' paper, and I can send in for this year's refund.

I played a bit of World of Warcraft, working on getting the dreadsteed for my warlock. I ran hither and yon, killing, maiming and tricking to find that I don't have enough gold to buy a single component that I need for the summoning ritual. Great. At this rate, it seems like I'll need to get around 600 gold, and I'm getting gold very, very slowly. I was thinking I'd ignore this mount, get the expansion pack and work towards the flying mount, but it seems like you can't skip the middle one. Oh, and you need 6000 gold for the flying mount. Yipe! Maybe I'll just get used to using the slower horsey :o)

For you non-bike riders out there, even a fairly slow bike like the Hawk will kill anything short of a Ferrari in a drag race. It's all about power to weight ratios, and trust me, even a 250hp Mustang weighing a ton can't live with a 50hp Hawk weighing 400lbs.

They've put up a digital speed sign just up the road (North of me on Woodcreek Oaks, before Safeways, if you're local). It's funny to watch it go red if you're breaking the speed limit by as much as 1mph. My bicycle speedo on the Hawk is pretty much spot on, and I think I'll try the speedo on the Van, as I think it's overreading a bit.

As the wind's died down, I'm now coming down with a cold :o(

Jeff called to say he had finally buckled under the pressure and bought himself a new bike, good lad, and requested that I come and "ooh" and "aah" over it. As I was stuck at work, we went over after Vic got home from work, but as we pulled into Jeff's road, we saw him pulling out. Oh well, there's always tomorrow.

I had intended to go to the airfield and take the Rans out, but it was suddenly very windy, between 10 and 20mph.

What did suck was coming back to the Subaru to find that some motherlover had doored it. The white paint should polish off, but it looks like there's a light crease in the metal :o(

Joy of joys, my first 2006 tax year stuff arrived today, so I get to start spending quality time with the craptop and TaxCut. And backing up regularly.

It's funny, they sent me the CD of the program, you just have to pay to register it so you can use it. I looked on eBay, and half the world seems to be selling these CDs. Registration is the same price as walking into a store and buying the program, and more expensive than ordering it from Amazon, so why do people bother?

In the evening we watched Stephen Colbert on Bill O'Reilly's show, and then Bill on Stephen's show. Bill's a pompous, far right wing dick, and Stephen's show is totally based on spoofing him, so I was expecting it to be a lot funnier than it ended up being.

I finally got tired of my old laptop crashing dead for no apparent reason, and broke down and ordered a new PC. I figure by March, I should be able to get it running properly. I'll probably install Ubuntu Linux on the craptop, and we'll see how that does for itself :o)

I was going to go to the SPCA, but Vince called to say Mike was flying up from Prunetucky, so I met with them. I'd have flown too, but the temperature's terrifyingly cold - like below freezing at 9am. I'm just not interested in that, thanks.

So much for global warming.

In the evening, I joined Jason for a bit of screwing around in World of Warcraft. We couldn't get a group together to run a big dungeon, so we just killed lots of things in Silithus for a couple of quests and the reputation with the Cenarious. The expansion pack goes live on Tuesday, so I'll have to decide if I want to get that and try to make level 70. It'll be tough, as more or less every level 60 out there has better equipment than I do, so I'll struggle a bit. Anyways...

In the afternoon, I heard from Stephan at Stephan's Autohaus - the van's ready to come home :o)

In the evening, I took a look at the nightmare of wiring on the YSR. Pat gave me a chopped around wiring loom he sourced from somewhere or other, so I've been trying to figure out what's been done to it, and why. Hopefully I can get enough of that figured out to make it work. It shouldn't be that hard, as it's just lights and charging systems after all - there's no electric start, fuel injection or other trickery on this thing. Still, it'll keep me busy over the cold weekend - they're saying that temperatures will be in the 40s, and as cold as it's been recently, I believe them.

I also played a little World of Warcraft, getting my warlock up to level 60. Woo hoo :o)

I wasted the day, just playing around with the website, various computers (trying (unsuccessfully) to get a very old laptop to run as a webcam server) and doing a little work on the train set. It's taking a while to make progress there, as I glue things down, then have to wait for the glue to dry before tipping the table to get extra "stuff" off. Still, I did make the battery shelf, now I just need to get the track all clean and dust free so I can try to run the train around it on the battery.

I can see light at the end of the tunnel :o)