So, yes. I have finally gotten back into riding. But there's other not-riding bike stuff I want to talk about, so, just like the Oscars, we're going to put the good stuff at the end and make you prove you want it by reading the rest. Neener neener.
more reading material for your fireside pleasure.
I have found a new love. I have found "Motorcycle Basics Manual," by Pete Shoemark, published by Haynes. I cannot
sing its praises enough. See, I'm the sort of person who has to read something
approximately 15 million times through in order to understand it, and since I
have a microscopic attention span, I usually end up skimming what I'm reading
and don't actually absorb any of it at all. For example, I have a Computer
Science degree. I'm a software engineer. This is my job, people. Yet I
sit down to read an article about anything computer-related, and it's like
pulling teeth. "La la la turing machine oh i know what that is i learned about
that in college which was in beloit and that is near milwaukee and i'm going
to milwaukee with peter next weekend and it'll be nice to see my cousins in
milwaukee and one of my cousins is getting married and what was his name
again..." and soon it's like 5 minutes later and my eyes are finished reading
the article, but my brain hasn't gotten past like the 3rd word.
So anyway, I sat down one night after I got this book, and read the first chapter (oh, this was a great night. I was wearing my wife-beater tank top, drinking a beer, and reading about motorcycle engines. Jan claims that since I'm a girl, it was not in fact white trash, but rather "lesbian chic."). On engines. Once. Wanna know what I learned? I learned that my bike has a 4-stroke, 2-cylinder engine with 3 valves per cylinder and a single overhead camshaft design. The actual amazing part about that is that I know what that all means, and I can say it all in one breath at parties,to impress people with my studliness. I did so last night. I was the coolest shit ever. Peter was in the hospital earlier this week for some crap that's mainly under control now, and I'm sitting there with him at 4:30am in the ER, at his bedside, with IVs all sticking out of him and machines and little heart monitors, and I'm explaining what a slide carburetor is and how it works in my bike. I have turned into the math geek that we used to laugh at in college, who would tell his girlfriend computational theory if she was sick or depressed. That is impressive shit, people. Creepy. So, yes. The short version is: if you're interested in bike mechanics, especially if you're a novice like me, this book is really really good. The copyright is 1991, so if you have a newer bike, it may not cover any recent design or invention, but my bike's a 1986, so all the info is still right as rain.
That link again: " Motorcycle Basics Manual," by Pete Shoemark (published by Haynes).
I also picked up "Chasing Che : A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend" the other night, but I haven't read it yet. I mainly bought it because, well, it says "Motorcycle" in the title (I'm a sucker), and my old roommate had a huge poster of Che Guevara that would welcome us home every night. So, who knows. I'll get to it after I finish "Return of the King," which, while an amazing book in an amazing trilogy, is unfortunately not a motorcycle book. So I won't talk about it. ;)
Another great magazine: Motorcycle Tour and Cruiser (no URL that I can find, sorry). I don't have a touring bike or a cruiser, but I still find the info informative (lots of technical stuff and vacation spots and travel articles), and, well, lots of pretty pictures of pretty bikes. Mmmm.
i am a yuppie. i must now admit this.
I remember when my friend Chris
finally realized he was a yuppie. It was a little over 2 years ago, and
we were hanging out at the 3-bedroom house that he rents in Suburbia (tm),
and we were all planning an upcoming party/BBQ. Somehow the topic came up,
and Chris denied yuppiedom. "Sorry," said the rest of us, "dude, you just
bought a *grill*." Looking around at his pool and BBQ grill, he finally
had to concede defeat. I had the same experience last week, eerily enough,
while talking to Chris again. See, Chris has an obsession with cars that
mirrors mine with bikes, and we were commiserating about overpriced-but-oh-so-sexy Italian vehicles. He would tell me about the Ferraris and Maseratis,
and I would tell him about
Ducatis and Aprilias and Cagivas. We feed each other's sickness. Anyway,
we were talking, and I said something along the lines of, "yeah, if I make it
big off my internet startup, I'm definitely getting an overpriced Italian
motorcycle."
You just can't go back after saying something like that. Sure, you can try to laugh it off as a joke, but no one's buying that. That is the yuppiest sentence in the world. *shudder* The really sick thing is, it's true. I really would buy an overpriced Italian motorcycle with my internet startup money. I should just get a T-shirt that says "closet yuppie" or "ignore the blue hair; underneath this shirt beats the heart of a consumerist." My punk days are over. Power to the people, Che. Now I have to read this book and be a yuppie pseudo-socialist and start educating my fellow yuppies about the po'. *sigh* I suppose it was inevitable.
can we get to the riding part yet?
Not yet. Ha. But almost. Consider this the segue section. Kim (my wonderful
bike-less fellow biker babe) and I went Bike Crap Shopping yesterday. I had
been riding (*cough*) with my leather jacket, which, while nice, had no armor
and no ventilation and tended to balloon up into a big poof at high speeds.
So yesterday, I bought a very nice Joe Rocker Ballistic Jacket (mine's all-black
like the pic on the right). It's everything I was looking for in a jacket --
it has ventilation, armor on the back and elbows, lots of pocket space, a
zip-out liner, looks great, and was relatively inexpensive ($220 on sale).
Whoo! I also got a wonderfully trashy black tank top that says "Biker Babe,"
a hair-thing for Peter to hold his hair back, and a Kryptonite Kryptodisc lock, which basically
is attached to the front disc brake and prevents the wheel from turning all
the way around. Because I don't trust myself, I also got a little cable that
runs from the lock to the handlebar, to remind myself to remove the lock
before attempting to drive off (though I always push the bike out of parking
spots, so I'd most likely notice first). So that was my consumerist day
yesterday. Kim got a nice pair of Olympia gloves, the same kind I have (the all-black ones
way down at the bottom), in the theory that (a) spending money on gear will
motivate her to go buy a bike already, and (b) once she does go buy the bike,
she'll already have her gear all ready and waiting.
oh, yeah, so i'm riding again.
Good lord, I didn't realize how long this entry was going to be. It really
is like the Oscars, huh. Eek. Sadly, the riding part of the entry is going to
be anti-climactic now; no one tried to run me off the road, I didn't go on any
new routes, nothing exciting. I just put on my new jacket and rode the bike
back from Peter's house to my new apartment and into my very own motorcycle
parking spot (right next to the dumpster). I did, however, take a while
to get back into Thinking Whilst Thou Shifts, in that I ended up in overdrive
(6th gear) for the first time, at only around 60mph, wondering why the bike
was sluggish. When Thy Bike Sloweth In Overdrive, Thou Must Downshifteth.
Amazing how it picked up after that.
The only marginally exciting part of my ride actually came later in the evening, when I went back out to ride the bike to a friend of mine's apartment for her housewarming party. It was dark out and I miscalculated how much room I had to push the bike backwards and to the side before the driveway ended in a little garden area. So, the rear wheel went off the driveway into the dirt, and then I couldn't get the leverage to pull it back up and out. Since the kickstand was still down, the bike was essentially stuck -- it was leaning against the garage wall, and the kickstand was down and against the ground, so I had no side-to-side action at all. Luckily, one of my neighbors came out of her apartment about a minute later, and she went and got her big beefy husband to come help me. He lifted the back of the bike, I pulled it forward, and the rear wheel was back on the pavement again with no problem. Yay for nice neighbors. :) I sort of had the same experience that Melissa Holbrook Pierson mentions in her wonderful book "The Perfect Vehicle: What it is About Motorcycles" -- when my neighbor yelled up to her husband to come help, she called, "the new neighbor girl needs some help with her bike, it's stuck, come help her." It took quite some cajoling on her part to get him to come downstairs, but once he saw the situation, he was very helpful. I'm pretty sure that when he was asked to help me with my "bike," he was thinking of a bicycle, and was a little confused as to how an adult woman gets a bicycle "stuck" at 10pm, and why she would need help with it. Heh.
It's good to be riding again. Now we just need to get Peter's rear wheel fixed so that the two of us can ride somewhere together before the rainy season starts.....