buckle-up

There is a lot of truth to the saying, “being in the right place at the right time” and you can tie yourself up in knots trying to figure out just how it all happens. But as I look back through the years at the people that have entered my life it’s all happened without any planning or scheming and yet, many of these accidental encounters have turned out to be life changing. Top of the list, naturally, was how Margo and I met – me from Sydney, Australia, and Margo from Warsaw, Poland. Even as our paths had crossed almost the day I stepped onto the campus of Tandem Computers, the journey wasn’t linear by any means. And then there was the chance encounter with John (JR) Robinson in the offices of Nixdorf Computers at a time when his company was just three people and the future looked anything but assured. It was JR who encouraged me to go to California to join Tandem Computers and work on a mutually beneficial program featuring his product. In the 1960s we called it “the flying fic...

There was a time, way back in the early 2000s, when the idea came to Margo and me to ride motorcycles. Together, we signed up for lessens that eventually led to us both to getting our motorcycle riders endorsements added to our respective drivers’ licenses. Cool! We were still very young back then and immortal. And so a two decades long adventure began. Of course, any opportunity to purchase an entirely new wardrobe meant a lot to Margo and while she stopped short of buying nail polish matching her purple trimmed motorcycle, I have to believe the thought crossed her mind more than once.  My own adventure with motorcycles began when I was still a teen and at high school in Sydney. Friends at my school bought motorcycles as our final year came to an end and I thought that bikes were pretty neat and there was many a later afternoon spent hanging around their homes as they “played” with their bikes. Honda was the manufacturer of choice back then and, for a while, 250cc / 305cc ...

Can’t escape it any more. Road trips mean all but one car stay behind. These days, with our off-premise storage housing our Corvette and trailer as well as our RV, the company command center, it means that our Jeep SUV and the mean-looking Bimmer M4 will be locked away. In all seriousness, who wouldn’t opt for the Bimmer i8 with its miserly demand for fuel? Never experienced anything like it before – it is even better on the gas mileage than any of our cruiser motorcycles! We had a very minor scrape on our trip to Dallas a couple of months ago, but it was all repaired nicely and now, with our minds at ease over how it looks, we have chosen the i8 for the last two business trips we have taken. After all, it is set aside for business purposes and it meets the demands of business easily. However there is more to this tale than simply the choice of vehicles. Whereas the previous month’s trip had been to California and took in many miles along its famous coastline, this time we drove...

To begin with, our outing to High Plains Raceway (HPR) was anything but a routine track weekend. While this is the tenth year of going to road courses and trying our hand behind the wheel of one car or another, we were returning to our home track after three plus years. Not entirely of our own doing, mind you, but being homeless last year with all of our cars in storage while we lived out of our company command center, our comfy RV, afforded us little opportunity for weekends at the track. In the years before becoming homeless, Margo had undergone complex back surgery that limited her appearances more or less anywhere there were cars. And then of course, our grandkids decided to show up, but that did leave us with twin boys that have proved to be a lovable handful! But no longer do we have to put stops to our plans; we pulled the RV and the red Corvette out of storage, hooked up our trailer to the RV and loaded the Corvette having applied the appropriate numbers and dec...