Eunos Chump

Monkeyboy and I have pretty much lost the entire weekend to Minecraft , the primitive looking yet viciously addictive sandbox game.  It's simple enough - you're dropped into an uninhabited landscape with the aim of surviving.  You have to fashion tools, weapons, food and shelter... especially shelter, because when the sun goes down the monsters come out. I reckon the key to it's success is tapping into our ancient survival instincts.  It also reveals your horrible personality defects - I can't delegate anything but the simplest of tasks and I'm doing it in Minecraft too.  Monkeyboy got quite fed up with me ordering him to collect wood/buckets of water, whilst I got annoyed with his untidiness.  Hordes of zombies hammering at the door every night unite us in the struggle to survive though.

I rode the VFR up to the National Motorcycle Museum today, it's off J6 of the M42 next to the NEC so a 250 mile return trip.  I used the A44/A3400 rather than the M40, and it was a fantastic ride.  Went through Stratford-on-Avon and lots of scenic villages, unfortunately that meant a lot of 30/40/50 speed limits too but there are some cracking NSL bits where you can get a beautiful flow going. The museum was very quiet, I only saw 6 other people.  It was peaceful; I'd like to live there...  there are 5 halls with over 800 bikes, takes about an hour to wander around it all.  They're pretty much all British bikes; I'd like to have seen some foreigns mixed in there too, especially those '70s Jap bikes blamed for destroying the UK industry.  A buckle in the drivebelt?  The pedal looks like it has barely any clearance too, better watch your feet  Somebody, somewhere thought this looked good and people would want to buy it... ...

Mrs B and I extended the width of the drive today.  It doesn't look much but we ended up making 4 trips to the tip with huge amounts of earth, and it took about 8 hours in total. My back was too weak to pick up the bags of gravel, Shelly had to move them whilst I looked on (feeling pathetic and unmanly).  She's a good woman! The drive is now wide enough for 2 cars with enough gap between them to manoeuvre motorbikes (and I have been sorely tempted by a local GPZ and a naked SV650 on eBay, so it was important I was kept busy whilst those auctions ended).

A kind soul gave me a Givi rack some time ago, so I've bought a top box to use with it.  It's big enough to hold 2 severed heads,   yet narrow enough not to spoil my filtering shenanigans.

I've made a couple of recommended (and very simple) modifications to the VFR, detailed here .  These disable the 'flapper' and PAIR valves, which control emissions and noise, and it took all of 10 minutes in total.  I've not ridden it far since, and there's always the risk of placebo effect with this kind of thing, but the response below 6000 RPM seems far more linear and the flat spot around 5K is gone.  That has the benefit of smoothing the transition into the VTEC zone too.  If it ever stops raining I might be able to test it properly.

The order has been placed for Mrs B's car (C3 Picasso).  This should mean I can spend the next 3 years buying various shoddy bikes/cars without getting heat from the domestic management!   I've got a hankering for a GPZ500 at the moment: Old - check Dated - check Rot-prone - check Available in various undesirable colour schemes  - check Cheap - check I still like the VFR, especially it's looks; I often just go and admire it in the garage (it's much too wet for riding at the mo).  However, it's a bit... serious, perhaps sterile.  If it was a person, it would wear a shirt and tie, even at weekends, and go to bed at 10pm (after it's drunk every drop of petrol in the house, of course). I've just realised it's a year to the day since I started my CBT!  I've covered more than 14,000 miles since then, it's addictive stuff.  Wish I'd started in my late twenties, really...

We've been looking at new cars for Mrs B this week, to replace her tired and broken Berlingo.  Yeah, proper new cars!  I'm getting a company motor 'cos it's cheaper than buying a used one.  Unfortunately, she likes her cars like her men (ugly and malformed), so the candidates are: Nissan Juke:  It's so amazingly, breathtakingly ugly I can't help but like it.  A bit.  Definite future Autoshite though, especially with a Renault diesel engine.  They weigh 1700KG for no obvious reason (it's a 1.6 FWD), and they charge you extra for any colour apart from white. Citroen C3 Picasso . I liked the look of these, but was sure it would be cheap'n'nasty inside; I was wrong.  It's a world away from the sparse Berlingo.  It's very cleverly packaged and there are lots of toys (thanks to low emissions and it's impact on benefit-in-kind tax the top model is plenty affordable). This is going to mean one or more of our existing cars will be getting FIRE...