It's the little things...

"It's the little things that make me happy". I'm beginning to understand that. I look at my diet plan to see what's for lunch. It's a "Dinnertime" (bigger) Lean Cuisine. I check the mail and two Netflix movies have came in (we haven't had a new movie in 4-5 days - they apparently don't process on Ssat). I open them up and the first words I see are "Salma Hayek". *sigh*

It *is* the little things. A meal large enough so I don't feel hungry, and quite possibly the sexiest woman on earth arriving via my friendly postwoman all on the same day!

I don't know what this movie is about. It's "In the Time of the Butterflies" or something like that. The other one is Traffic. See, when we joined up, we were lazy, so we just started going down their (Netflix) Top 100 list and adding anything to our queue that we hadn't seen and didn't sound totally lame.

Argh, pager just went off. So now it's going to be a cold lunch.. but at least Salma is waiting for me!

Simple thing.. 30 seconds to send an email so the pager doesn't get deactivated (I was *so* tempted not to send that email!). Warm lunch after all! Now, if I could just have a smoke. The cravings are *bad* today. That kind of concerns me since I'm using the patch this time and am on the 14mg... I shouldn't be having cravings THIS badly.

I've been doing a lot of research today on this trip I have planned for next year.. I think this is a lot bigger than I originally thought. I read a journal by someone that had done it for charity. Granted, he *really* took his time doing it, but he traveled nearly 21,000 miles. Maybe there's a better way to do it:

I'm thinking that I'll go to Alaska, come south down to Las Vegas, check out the scene there, head out to southern Cali and call it a vacation... I could possibly even work remotely during the evenings and save a *lot* of vacation time.

Then, the following year, pick up in the exact spot I left off, head south (apparently flying the bike from south Panama to Ecuador is almost mandatory with all the craziness in Columbia), hit the tip of South America, then up to Brazil (Carnival?), have the bike flown back home, catch a commercial flight home, and that covers two continents. If I time it right, I could make the trip to Cali on a 3 day weekend, find someone (Gene, put in a word with Jen for me!) to crash with for the week, and leave on the following weekend.

I'd love to do this all in one fell swoop, but the reality of vacation scheduling and a not-completely-unlimited budget rears it's ugly head. I will have 5-6 weeks vacation, but getting it all at one time is going to be next to impossible. If I could work it out this way, that would give me a month in South/Latin America, which would be way cool.

I'm also wondering about the possibility of taking a ship over to Russia from Alaska.. just to say I've been there (Hmm, could even pick up a Russian bride, tell her the truth at the Canadian border. bwuhahahaha. KIDDING!).

It is *so* hard to find decent maps/directions for Alaska, especially the arctic circle and the eastern-most part. If anybody reading this has any suggestions/resources for this information, please let me know.

I've narrowed down the bike list a bit. Off the list are:
- Triumph Tiger: Footpegs too high (cramped for us tall folks), questionable reliability.
- Aprilia Caponard: Heavy and too low to the ground.

So now the list is:
- BMW R 1200/1150 GS
- BMW F650 GS Paris-Dakar
- Kawasaki KLR 650: People *love* this bike.. No, they are FANATICAL about it, but it seems to need a lot to make it truly adventure-worthy. It's cheap enough that $2000 worth of stuff it needs still puts it many $1000s below the BMWs.
- KTM 950 Adventure: KTM makes some awesome bikes, but support/parts are a major concern.. Not so much with Canada and Alaska, but with South America.
- Suzuki V-Strom 650 (aka "wee-strom") or 1000

.. Sorry if I've said most of this before about the bikes. I tend to research, ask, and go back and forth on this stuff forever. One of the joys of being a Libra. lol This is a very important decision though as my very life may depend on this bike - I'm not talking about crashes, but more about getting stuck 500 miles from nowhere in Alaska, or in some "the police won't even go outside at night" part of South America.

As someone on one of the motorcycle lists told me "They are all good bikes, sit on each of them for 45 minutes and eliminate any that are uncomfortable, test ride them and whichever one stirs your soul.

It's good to see that the "practicing hedonists" blog has finally been updated.

I'm shutting up now.. gotta save something for tomorrow.