I thought it would be fun to post my Honda Metropolitan scooter gas mileage figures each time I fill up.

05/28/2008 90.5 miles on 1.077 gallons = 84.03 mpg ($4.55)

05/19/2008 96.2 miles on 1.061 gallons = 90.67 mpg ($4.14)

On the 05/19 tank the scooter got a little over 90mpg so I'm surprised to see the dip to 84. Of course I also think I squirted in a little too much gas this time, and with a 1.32 gallon tank, an extra 1/10th of a gallon can skew the numbers quite a bit. Still kicking the tar out of 15 mpg and $117 to fill my Suburban!

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The Vineyard of the Rockies church is coordinating a Windsor tornado volunteer schedule throughout this week and weekend. If you want to help the people of Windsor but aren't quite sure how to get involved, jump in with these guys and do some good.

The Vineyard of the Rockies Windsor Campus is located at:

679 Southwood Lane
Windsor, CO 80550
Phone: 970.219.9454

Here is a message I received today detailing the volunteer plans for this week and weekend.

Greetings again from Windsor!

Today was drizzly and overcast, and as the sirens wailed by one lady mentioned to her daughter, “I *hate* hearing those sounds”. As I was standing line I struck up a conversation with the gentleman beside me: “Do you live here or are you in to help out?” “I used to live here,” he mused, not quite to me. His home had been demolished and he seemed a bit at a loss of where he'd go next. But we've had a thank you notes coming in, and smiling faces as well.

Today we sent out another 40 folks or so to continue the clean-up around town. The excitment to lend a hand is high and there's still more to do. Tomorrow we're slated to help a horse farm north east of Windsor, and we're working on some more exciting plans that I hope to unveil tomorrow!

Here's the schedule:

→ Read more...

Here are some details on how you can help the people impacted by the tornadoes that struck northern Colorado on Thursday.

Volunteering

The United Way of Larimer County’s 2-1-1 volunteer program has set up a volunteer reception site and all volunteers who want to help must go through this site. The site is located in the Community Room at Poudre Valley REA, located at the corner of Highway 392 and REA Parkway (7649 REA Parkway, map). You can register to volunteer today, May 23rd through Monday, May 26th. The United Way 2-1-1 staff will facilitate volunteers as needed in the Windsor, Greeley, Milliken, Gilcrest and Platteville communities.

Directions to REA: Take I-25 to the Windsor Exit, Go East on Hwy 392, Turn right at REA Parkway. Map.

Monetary Donations

In addition to the reception site for volunteering opportunities, United Way 2-1-1 is accepting monetary donations to assist in tornado relief efforts.

In addition, the American Red Cross is accepting donations. Please visit http://www.northerncolorado.redcross.org/.

(Information courtesy of an email circulated at my office.)

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During all the wild weather yesterday I thought I'd wait for a good weather window to jump on the scooter and ride home. Around 6pm I thought I had my chance. Decided to pull on my rain pants just in case, though it had been drive for a couple hours at work. Just as I threw my leg over the scooter and started rolling, big dollops of rain started falling. I was pretty much pelted with rain and buffeted by wind the whole way open. Even with my rain coat and pants, my teeth were chattering by the time I rolled into my driveway. Rain in the face, and the lips in particular, stings at 35MPH. Not sure how the motorcycle people do it without a full-face helmet.

Still, not worth mentioning compared to what our neighbors in Windsor and Greeley had to endure yesterday.

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We just had to cluster to the middle of our building near I-25 and Harmony Road here in Fort Collins. A large tornado touched down near Gilcrest and seems to have run east of us towards Wellington. It was an unusual storm because temperatures were cool all morning and then the storm ripped loose before noon. Typically we see hot temperatures to fuel the storms and then things get wild in the afternoon. Beyond that, we don't usually get tornado-generating storms this close to the mountains.

• KMGH live video. Includes a lot of helicopter coverage of the damaged areas, buildings, cars, etc.
• webcam shots from Windsor, CO. Note the hail on the grass.
• video of the tornado
• slideshow showing dark clouds and hail from 9 News
• continuing coverage from the Fort Collins Coloradoan
• and The Denver Post
• Google News Search
• Google Blog Search

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After a few months of pondering and looking around, we took the plunge and bought a 2003 Honda Metropolitan scooter from some friends. The economics were a pretty easy call for us, since my other motorized alternative is a Suburban. Considering only gas costs, the scooter costs about .04 per mile while the Suburban costs about .27 per mile. At a savings of .23 per mile the scooter will pay for itself in about 4,300 miles. I've already put over 150 miles on it in a week. (The previous discussion assumes 90mpg for the scooter, 15mpg for the Suburban, and gas at $4).

Besides the money savings, the scooter is just plain fun! I love zipping around town, running errands, parking in any little alcove. I look forward to my daily work commute. Most nights I take one or more of the kids out for scooter rides around our neighborhood. Everybody seems interested in checking it out, and I've even gotten some waves from motorcycles headed the other direction. Ah the biker camaraderie, heh.

Fort Collins is a great place to ride, with bike lanes on many streets. As a bicycle commuter, I already had a pretty good mental model of the best routes through the city. Nearly all the same habits apply when riding the scooter, it just gets there a little faster and doesn't make me work as hard. On that note, I need to get past this honeymoon period and back onto my (pedal-powered) bike pretty soon. If I don't, I may be that 300 pound guy riding around town on a Honda Metropolitan!

Our New Scooter

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Here are the pictures I took of Dewey Bridge on our way home from Moab in April 2008.

Dewey Bridge, After the Fire

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Ever not true to just leaving things alone and working, I upgraded to Dokuwiki 2008-05-05 this morning. For better or worse I see very few visible changes. For better, the wiki still works. I did a quick experiment to see how Google Reader did at picking up the RSS feed and it seemed promising, though the default view was the page diff rather than the current version of the page. An odd choice for a default value.

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After some brief consideration of Dokuwiki as a complete replacement for my old thegreiners.com web site, I wrote one rewrite rule, edited a few wiki pages and – tada! – here you have it.

Truly the old site was soooo old and neglected that this implementation was immediately superior, even if only because it had been touched in the last year while the other site had not. Truly, it was nearly that bad. And I am very psyched about the Dokuwiki feature set. So far it's handling all my top-tier requirements. I even tweaked the template up a little, though I don't want to make that the priority. I may tweak a little more and then put the site into a new code lock-down for awhile. Just use it for a month or so and not spend all my time modifying the tool rather than writing.

And even if everything goes to pieces on the next Dokuwiki update, I'll have all the pages as .txt files so I won't lose any content. No matter what solution I choose, I always end up investing some extra time to learn the ins and outs. Perhaps it's more enjoyable for me to tweak up a fun, open source tool like Dokuwiki rather than clicking around the vox site all evening looking in vain for a way to export my posts or search only within my blog. Plus I love the wiki concept so I'm not limited to blogging in terms of sharing and organizing content. All good fun.

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I took a great trip to Moab, Utah at the end of February / beginning of March with a small group of friends. I still haven't uploaded all the pictures, but here's a sampler:

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