masterofmidgets | Entries tagged with bike

For the record. If you are going to turn left on a green light when a) the crosswalk sign is lit and b) there is someone IN MIDDLE OF THE CROSSWALK, you do not get to HONK YOUR HORN LIKE AN ASSHOLE because they are in your way when you almost run them over.

I like riding my bike to work (even though it is getting really seriously cold now, and it's been dark for several hours by the time my shift is over), but fucking hell the drivers in this town are babbling idiots who have no idea how to deal with other cars, let alone with pedestrians. Is it that hard not to turn right into my fucking face?

Three Things (The Seriously, Only Tuesday? Edition):

1. Pretty sure I passed some kind of ridiculous foodie threshold today, by making my own mustard. I didn't even use a food processor - my mini-chopper didn't do anything to the mustard seeds, so I MacGyvered a rig with a rice bowl and the handle of a bread knife instead (I really need to suck it up and buy a mortar and pestle. It would save me from crushing peppercorns with a frying pan, too).

Setting aside the potential maiming, though, it really was about convenience more than anything! I've already had to make an extra trip to the store this week after an entire bag of carrots mysteriously vanished out of my fridge, and whole-grain mustard is expensive, and for reasons I no longer remember I had a bag of mustard seeds in my pantry...it seemed a lot less trouble making mustard from scratch in my kitchen than biking to the Sunflower Market after work, especially since it is approximately ten million degrees here. I'm just not sure that's the thought process going through everyone's head when they consider the state of their mustard shelf.

Anyway, the pork in whole-grain mustard yogurt sauce was delicious, although my forays into whole-wheat pasta continue to be sorely disappointing. I may have to give up entirely and go back to normal, vaguely unhealthy, actually tasty pasta. Alas.

2. Obsessively watching the Euros, of course. Luckily, I work in an office full of a surprising number of football fans, so not only is my manager sympathetic to me keeping the live feed open on my computer while I'm working, but he and Manager S have taken charge of the TVs in the newsroom so the matches are always on (with the sound off, but still). The break room has been staked out as neutral ground, although we'll see how long that lasts, between my Spain fangirling, Manager J's diehard German loyalty, and Manager S's inexplicable support of Italy. I always hate the moment where I have to stop wanting my German bbs to play well so my Spanish bbs can go through, but it's going to be even harder now that I am surrounded by so many German fans (and Spain haters). At least the whole office can unite in our loathing of Cristiano Ronaldo.

3. My week in summation: Cannot stop singing Les Mis songs in the shower (and I am plotting out an epic Javert-centric crossover crackfic I will post about in more detail later). In my RPG group, my character is currently sneaking into a secret military base while invisible, tied with rope to a drug-addicted psychic and a pansexual starship pilot, and carrying a bag of sentient democratic-socialist cockroaches. I have named my bicycle Sleipnir and I feel that I was one of the better life choices I have made. I think that tells you everything about my life you really need to know. And my week, as well.

Made my first bike commute today! And I escaped completely unscathed, if you ignore the part where I ran into the curb trying to get onto the sidewalk and fell over. Or the part where I was walking my bike back from the mailbox and slipped on the grass and fell off the edge of the parking lot. I don't think that one counts though, because I probably would have fallen over whether or not my bike was there. I mean, I currently have bandages or healing injuries on six different parts of my body - both my feet where I got rubbed raw spots from trying to hike through the desert to a volcano in slide sandals (not my idea, I promise you), my thumb where I burned myself on a cookie sheet and then somehow sliced myself open washing the blade of the food processor, and now my skinned knees. It has not been the most successful month for my body-having skills, is the point here.

But anyway my ability to not fall on my face aside, the bike commute was pretty painless - I was worried about being able to get my bike on and off the bus rack, but the frame of my new bike is very light (one of the reasons I bought, the others being that it had a crossbar and seat low enough I could actually get on and off without using a curb to balance, and that it was blue), and it wasn't any trouble at all. Even if the first time I put it in backward, and the second time I got glared at by the bus driver for not putting the rack back up when I got off. Mostly, it was just really nice to have time again. I didn't have to worry about being late for work if I stopped for a thirty-second breather, I didn't feel like I had to rush as much as I could to make sure I made my bus on time, I just set my own pace and had plenty of time to spare. That extra five minutes to comb my hair and put myself together before my shift starts feels like such a luxury right now.

Can't wait until this weekend, honestly. I am thinking of scoping out the bike routes around my apartment complex, certainly biking to the grocery store. If I can convince myself that Sunday is a wearing-pants day, I might even bike over to the public library.

Three Things (The Fucking Chelsea! Edition)

1. Work continues to be work-like. For every vaguely exciting/important release, like Squeenix's new game and Facebook's IPO (I geek out so much over our Squeenix, EA, and Blizzard releases, it is kind of embarrassing), there is the afternoon where I set up ten dividends and a release from a company that makes penis extender devices. The first quarter earnings period officially ended this week, and we've just hired on a load of new editors, so hopefully things will soon be back to normal insane, rather than tear-our-hair-out-and-sob-over-excel-tables insane. On the bright side, I had my 90-day eval on Tuesday, and it was all positive - my stats are all solid, my manager said I'm good at most things and steadily improving on the things I'm not, and I am most definitely certainly not going to be fired in the near future. Also, our operations VP got us all ice cream yesterday.

2. I had my first driving lesson today! It went fairly well, in that I'm not dead and the car's still in one piece. I took a lot of time practicing stopping and starting, and eventually graduated to driving in circles around the parking lot of the Mormon church down the street from my dad's. I even did a few figure-eights, and a bunch of laps weaving in and out of the parking divider. Not terrible progress, considering that the main point of the first lesson was just to get me a little less panicky at the whole idea. I'm currently aiming to have my license and enough saved up for a down payment on a used car by the end of September. It's going to stretch my budget a bit, but if I'm careful (and with the extra money from the raise I'm getting this month), I think it will be okay.

In the meantime, I talked to my manager this week about taking a few minutes off my lunch and leaving a little early at the end of the day so I can make the 7.12 bus instead of having to wait for the 7.50, and he said that was fine. So I've been getting home a lot earlier with a lot less standing around on street corners. I'm also probably going to be buying a bike in the next few days - I'm not going to bike the whole way, because I'd have to go under a kind of sketchy overpass in a heavily traffic-ed area, but being able to bike just from my bus stop would make things a lot more convenient. Helpfully enough, we have a bike shed in the back parking lot of our office, and my HR guy said he could get me the forms I need to be reimbursed the cost of bike commuting (which will just about cover the cost of the new bike). This is all working out much smoother than last week's freak-out would suggest.

3. Seriously, guys, FUCKING CHELSEA. Who the fuck did John Terry have to sell his soul to (assuming he had a soul in the first place, which seems doubtful...) to get that result? I am so bitter and heart-broken right now, I barely have words to describe it. EXCEPT THAT BASTI'S SADFACE IS THE SADDEST FACE THERE IS.

Since I got home last week, I've been borrowing my dad's bike in the evenings, after the temperature drops below 80, and riding around the neighborhood. Not long rides - I haven't owned a bike since mine got stolen when I was a freshman, and this uses my muscles in different ways from all the walking I do, plus my dad's bike is a bit awkward for me since I'm about 8 inches shorter than he is. But I put my headphones in with music or a radio drama and bike around for fifteen or twenty minutes, until I get bored and come home. Towards the edge of the neighborhood you start getting closer to the river basin and there are some nice trees. There's even some actual farmland. One of our neighbors has sheep! And last week I got moo-ed at by a very disgruntled cow. It was pretty fun.

( cut for talk about diet/exercise and bullying )

Wow, but I've been emo this week! And last week as well! Poor Al, our IM conversations for the past 10 days or so have more or less been me crying and her trying to keep me from having a complete nervous breakdown. But I got through ~~most of~~ the classwork I was struggling with, I ordered my ticket home for spring break ~~and my mom may actually not be lame and pay me back, we'll see,~~ I finally got some sleep and took an evening off to read Superman/Batman porn, and now I am feeling much better.

On the downside, I think my bike got stolen? Or possibly I parked it somewhere dumb and just haven't remembered where, which seems probable since I've been like the walking dead all week, but I think I would have seen it by now. So yeah, someone probably stole it. Why someone would /want/ my bike, which is ugly and beat up and doesn't have a functioning gear shift, I don't know. I also don't know how to go about getting it back...and I do want it back, ugly and useless as it is. I mean, where else would I find such a reliable means of making an idiot of myself? There is also the small matter of classes which are inconveniently far away and which I have no desire to walk to. I guess the goal for the weekend will be to figure out if there is anything I can do about my bike now, or if I should resign myself to being bikeless. Worse things have happened, I suppose.

My Witch Hunts class is corrupting me; I had a bunny earlier this week for an FFVII!AU where Cloud is being burned as a witch and gets saved by Zack. I'm not sure, it's kind of cracked out, but I really want to write it.

( Teaser Intro! )

I'm kind of psyched about writing this now...