November 6, 2000


i thought you'd never ask!
OK, this has nothing to do with bikes, but I have to get this off my chest. I have pissed off the Weird Random Stuff In The Apartment Gods. When I lived in Wisconsin, it was the water heater god whose wrath I incurred. Those who knew me then will recall the frantic evenings I spent huddled in bed with the covers pulled way up over my head as the heater would clang in the night....BOOM......BOOM.....BOOM. According to my friend Keith, who thankfully knows everything, this noise was not in fact caused by scorned dieties, but instead a "water hammer" keeping the hot water circulating through the heater. "Not Satan," he'd assure me. "Water hammer." I, however, was not convinced.

I thought I'd seen the end of my days of Vengeful Apartment Gods when I moved to California, but no. Somehow, in my folly, I have angered the Sink God. The Sink God is an angry and spiteful god indeed! Even though, thanks to my mother, I am overly anal-retentive about cleaning hair out of the sink and throwing it into the trash, my sink plugged up. Washing my face caused a mini-bathtub to accumulate in the sink; I finally went to the grocery store over the weekend and bought my first-ever bottle of Drano. I poured it down the drain, waited the prescribed 15 minutes, and rinsed with hot water. And lo! The next time I washed my face, the water rinsed smoothly and easily down the drain. But the Drano did set back, but it did not kill, oh no! Tonight, I went to wash my face, and there, before me, was the plugged up sink once more, the tinny laughter of the Sink God ringing in my ears. *sigh*

y'know, you're not supposed to *snort* the drano. really.
Peter and Kim and I went to see "Charlie's Angels" tonight. It was fun, but, Drew! Where were the bikes?? You gals jumped out of planes, drove motorboats, owned sportscars, raced hotrods, ambushed helicopters....and yet the ONLY motorcycles in the entire movie were a couple of cruisers in the background of one of the chase scenes?? Really. I'm ashamed of you. The movie was fun regardless; pure campy trashy guilty pleasure. But it would have been soo much better with motorcycles. And I'm not just saying that because I wanted to see Lucy Liu in skintight leathers on a slick black sportsbike.

Really.

OK, maybe I did.

i could be an angel.
I rode home tonight at like a bazillion miles an hour [Note: I mean 65mph, the safe and legal posted speed limit], on the freeway, in the pitch black, feeling like I could have ridden on forever. At one point I tried to give an empowering whoop, a yell to the sky and a howl to the moon...but then it sounded sort of silly in my helmet so I stopped. But the point still got across, I think.

The riding's been *so* good lately that it means the weather must give out soon; it's almost like tempting fate to be praising the blue skies and crisp air so much. I know it's supposed to rain on Thursday and Friday; hopefully it'll clear up for the weekend like it's supposed to. I really want to ride up to San Mateo for the bike show.

power pixie posse update.
Someday I'll tell the story of how the Power Pixie Posse came to be, but it's a sort of weird story, and to relate it without getting into too much personal detail of other people's lives will require a bit of forethought. And I don't have any forethought right now. So it'll have to wait.

Ann's update is that her bike is -- huzzah! -- finally out of the shop, and she's riding it around!! She lives up in the city, and I have to say, she's far braver than I. She claims it's much more necessity than bravery, since her car's brakes are bad and she has no other mode of transport, but I'm going to stick with my bravery opinion. :) Ann is punk as fuck -- I don't know anyone else who would take the MSF course with messed-up knees (I think it was right after her knee surgery, though my timing might be slightly off), have a bike in the shop for 6 months, injure her knees AGAIN the weekend it comes out of the shop, and still ride the thing around FOR THE FIRST TIME all weekend on the bad knees in San Francisco's hills. Damn, woman.

Kim finally has an update, too -- she's buying a Honda CB-1 400 this week! I'm so excited for her; I wanted a CB-1 when I was first looking, but there were none to be found. She's getting a kickass deal too: a used bike at a used price, that's been maintained lately by a mechanic who had been thinking of keeping it. We're going on Wednesday to talk to the guy, and if all goes well, I'll be riding it home for her (yippie! I can't wait to ride it!). It's got aftermarket pipes on it; the guy she's buying it from ordered a set of the original pipes for the bike, so she might leave the bike with him long enough to replace the pipes, but we'll see what it looks/feels like on Wednesday. :)

So all three of us are finally going to get to ride together after months of talking about it. I'm so excited.

my updates.
Not much new for me. I've started shifting earlier, and riding in a higher gear than I "should be," and I've noticed that I get an almost-acceptable gas mileage now. Whereas before when I was waiting for 8-9k rpms to upshift (and maintained cruising at that level), now I shift around 5500rpms and try to keep it between 4-6k when cruising. I used to get pretty much exactly 85 miles to a tank before switching to reserve; lately, I've been getting closer to 100. That's very exciting. Considering I commute 20 miles a day, Peter lives 10 miles from me, and the college where I play viola is about 10 miles away, a tank wasn't lasting me very long at all. I'm much less annoyed now. :)

My bungee net kicks ass. No real specific reason right now, just that it does.

OK, that's it for today. :)


back | next | home