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Amelia knows colors!

Posted In: Video, Amelia — September 28, 2007 @ 11:46 pm — Peter

…well, most of them at least!

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like a duck

Posted In: Video, Amelia — September 26, 2007 @ 10:37 pm — Peter

Amelia has gotten more adventurous with her Kangaroo Climber lately. She likes to swing from the arch before zipping down the slide. The video is set to her favorite song, Keith Boynton - Like a Duck.

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Born to ride!

Posted In: Everyday life — September 24, 2007 @ 1:00 pm — Peter

This past weekend I worked up the courage to disassemble my Vespa and diagnose the fuel leakage that started a couple months ago. I assumed a repair involving the fuel system was best left to the professionals, but my attempts at saving for service never seemed to materialize.

I removed the storage area beneath the seat and found a great view down into the engine compartment. I followed a few suspect hoses to the leakage area and found one hose to be cracked, possibly the culprit of the fuel leak. A bit of Goggle’ing turned up a forum thread on MondernVespa.com which suggests that regularly changing the fuel line is a good idea on the ET4 model.

The repair seemed simple, so I went for it. A quick ride to Auto Zone and I had the parted I needed, a couple feet of Goodyear 3/16 fuel line and hose clamps. It took about 40 minutes to replace the line and get the clamps to tighten in the close quarters of the engine. Unfortunately I could not test the repair right away as the battery was dead and on the charger.

When I got home from the store later in the evening the battery was fully charged. I reinstalled it and took a quick cruise around the block. The repair worked, no fuel spraying from the side of the scooter!

It was pretty fun doing work on my Vespa. I plan to peruse ModernVespa.com to find some maintenance tips I could try to make the scooter run better. I’m already eying this one as my scooter does run a bit rough, apparently this can result from overfilling the gas tank, oops! Also, changing any sort of oil is probably a good thing.

I had forgotten how much I love to ride my Vespa. This morning was fantastic, albeit a bit cool. Cruising down 13th towards downtown was a blast and best of all, I made it to work in ~10 minutes. Sure does beat the ~30 it takes the bus to crawl down Colfax.

For those that have forgotten what my Vespa looks like, here is an old picture, not much has changed on it since then:

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Ticket to ride

Posted In: Amelia, Everyday life — September 10, 2007 @ 11:20 pm — Peter

Tonight we took Amelia for her first bike ride. We’ve been meaning to get a bike trailer for a while now and watched Craigslist for the past few days until a deal came our way. We trekked out to Thornton to pick the trailer up and drove on the highway with it bungeed in our trunk. I got home from work this evening eager to take it out for a spin. We rode roughly 2 miles around the neighborhood and Amelia seemed to enjoy it.

When we got home, Amelia was in a great mood and being a little chatterbox. She helped us corral Iris and told her to go “owshide” and also said “bike” when asked if she enjoyed the ride.

We’re going to go for another ride tomorrow and likely take it for a spin to the Park Hill library this weekend and stop for coffee at Perk Hill. I wish we got a trailer sooner!

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