WetLeather Motorcycle Rider Information

My grandson is being comforted and monitored courtesy of Weatherbee Media LLC.

By Ben (ben@paukstis.com), out of Cynthia (cyn@paukstis.com), Preston Benjamin Paukstis.

2008-08-23@20:08 8lb 2oz and 20 inches long with a 13.25" melon.

At least eight Americans as well as other Western nationals have been detained by the Chinese government, according to Reuters, for expressing political speech related to Tibet. We Americans take our right to "free speech" as a given, although this right is not a global one.

As a child, I was for lack of better descriptive terms, precocious. I was also the youngest of four, then the youngest of seven after my mother re-married.

Being the littlest put me in a unique place. I never got in trouble. Oh, sure, trouble happened aplenty. But I wasn’t ever the one blamed for it. Not even when the blame really should have been mine to bear.

My phone rang this evening, my brother David on the other end of the line. This is unusual in a couple of ways. First, I rarely get phone calls from anyone. Second, I’ve only talked to my brother twice in the last ten years. In his typically strange way of cutting to the chase, David told me he was calling to tell me what a great visit he’d had when he and his wife Kay came through Eugene two months ago. “Ok” I say, while wondering what the real purpose for the call was, “Thanks, we had a nice visit too.” Then he dropped the bombshell, “Uncle ‘Benny’ died today.”

PART 1

It had been a tough winter and a tougher spring. My marriage officially ended in April. The reality is; my marriage had been over long before. Divorce is such an ugly thing. Divorce is even uglier when someone you loved turns on you with a vindictive rage.

I needed to get my head together. I needed to travel and I needed to think. There’s no better place for both than on the seat of a motorcycle.

The blog tool I like best for being simple and free and full-featured is Windows Live Writer http://get.live.com/writer/overview. (You may have to overcome your revulsion for the fact that it comes from Microsoft) It's an offline composer that gives you a quite rich and easy to use HTML/Web editing environment. I find it much nicer than the online posting functions anyplace I've tried. It knows how to publish blog posts, and intuitively does the Right Thing to edit/revise published posts.