The 2007 Riders Choice Awards for the best and the worst in the motorcycle industry were open until March 12th. The list of nominees is here.

Tom Nash has published a new article about his recent visit to Denmark. In June 2006 he wrote a hilarious story about his travels in Eastern Europe which I enjoyed so much that I linked to it in my June 8th 2006 blog entry.

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If you are planning your long ride for this summer as I am, here is something that you might want to check out. Erik at Open Road Journey contacted me requesting a product review. Open Road Journey helps motorcyclists find great roads and routes to ride throughout the world. No more reading descriptions of a cool route and then trying to decipher where it is on a map! Using a combination of Google Maps, GPS, and other technologies motorcyclists can draw their favorite routes directly on a map or upload their GPS files and have their routes drawn on the map real time for them. Those routes are then shared with the rest of the users who can view them on the map, and view any pictures, route features and places of interest that are included.

Erik wanted to take the traditional "good motorcycle roads" website to a new level of interactivity. The site uses a combination of new "Web 2.0" technology to help motorcyclists find great roads and routes to ride throughout the world. All of the Open Road Journey routes can also be downloaded to a GPS device, into Google Earth, or the map can just be printed so the biker can print and go. I have not yet investigated his service enough to recommend it, however, he is requesting constructive feedback from the riding community, so if this service works well for you, please send him comments though the website.

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The grass in the back yard has gone from a thin brown mat of frozen organic matter to a defiant field of rowdy green blades six inches high. This is a winter that I'm glad to see heading into the past.

Several people have kindly written with suggestions for remedies for menopausal symptoms. I've tried many of them knowing that we are each a bag of skin with a different chemical mix in each bag; each of us responds in our own way to medicine. Here in the US, herbal preparations aren't tightly regulated; for some manufacturers, what is on the label may not match what is in the bottle, and, what is in the bottle today may not be in the same concentrations or purity levels as what is in the bottle six months from now. And I'm choosing to not use pharmaceuticals because I'm stubborn.

The symptoms I'm dealing with are hot flashes, night sweats, and anxiety attacks (not quite panic attacks) just before the hot flash begins. And moodiness/depression. Here's what has worked for me. Gaia Herbs' organic tincture of Passionflower Vine, passiflora incarnata, has significantly reduced the anxiety attacks. The hot flashes and night sweats are significantly reduced by a black cohosh preparation sold in the US as Remifemin. The moodiness hasn't been enough to keep me off the bike, even in pouring rain, so I'm less concerned about that symptom than the other two, which were getting in the way of living a normal life. I never thought I would be so happy to be able to make the bed in the morning - the sheets aren't damp any more! And I don't have get dressed thinking about how I'm going to manage the sudden urge to run outside into the cold weather and tear off everything above the waist to cool down. Why is it that we think "normal" is dull and boring - until we don't have it anymore?

It is important to note that the Remifemin is a product of Germany - they regulate their herbal preparations as tightly as their pharmaceuticals, so I have a higher confidence in the quality of the product. Gaia Herbs, a US-based company, has a good reputation; my confidence in them grows based on my experience. Over the past few years I have tried three black cohosh preparations. The lack of efficacy could be due to the quality of the preparation or my own changing body chemistry. I'll never know and that bugs the heck out of my engineer's brain that wants things to be neatly explained by cause and effect. Just because we can't perceive something doesn't mean it isn't there, so we just have to accept that some things remain unexplained until our understanding increases.