Ride Like a Leper
This morning I had the good fortune to misplace my bike helmet. Start of fantastical rant.
After scratching my head for quite some time I came to the sudden realisation that I’d gotten a ride home with Kirsty last night and therefore must have left in her car. A quick call with a “please bring it to me at lunch time” and I was off on my illegal ride to work.
Now, I’d commented to Kirsty that I was likely to get pulled up for not wearing a helmet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cop on my way to work in the couple of months that I’ve been riding to work, and it was a little tongue in cheek really. But wouldn’t you know it… I hit Havelock Road, and here comes Mr. Ecilop Man. *sigh* I studiously looked anywhere except straight at him and he drove straight past. Obviously bigger fish to fry!! *whew*
My near miss with Mr. Policeman was nothing compared to the flack I copped for the rest of the ride though. You see… I was already abnormally late.
On my usual ride to work I encounter essentially the same group of people on their bikes. Some days I’m a few minutes early or a few minutes late so it’s a slightly different core group one way or the other – so for the most part I almost feel like I could wave to my “friends” as I pass them by. But not today. Today because I was that much later, it was a completely different set of riders – people who really hadn’t seen me before so didn’t know that in two months (or in fact about 15 years) I had NEVER ridden my bike without a helmet. But clearly there was no telling them. EVERY one of them glared at me like I’d just slashed their tyres, smashed up their frames and melted them down for scrap metal.
“No really… I’m a good honest, careful citizen every other day!”
*sigh*
It turns out though that in terms of righteousness, there’s only one group that far exceeds serious cyclists. Pre-school teachers. As I dropped Connor off, every one of them had something to say.
*sigh*
On a slightly more serious note… I’ve totally missed Jimi’s birthday!! I didn’t forget it… I remembered it about a dozen times between the 12th and 14th of December, I just forgot to email you/post about it/give you facebook wishes! SORRY!!! It’s kinda par for the course for me though I’m sure you’ll agree. So happy burpday, Jimi! Hope you had a good one!!!
18
Dec
Thanks Gert (ooops, I mean Mr Moon!). By birthday was a bit of a non-event this year anyway. Wayne worked from 7am until 4am the next day so we went to a show in the West End on Saturday night (which we were 10 mins late for) and we were supposed to go for dinner after but Wayne was coming down with a cold and the show was longer than expected so in the end we just went home! So my birthday dinner officially became the McD's we ate in the car earlier that afternoon
Apparently I'm getting a raincheck on the birthday dinner, but since I'm still the proud owner of a raincheck for our Anniversary Dinner back in March, I'm not holding my breath on it happening before 2010!
As for how I spent my actual birthday – I was woken up by a phone call from my dad just before midday. Then I lay in bed watching TV until about 2pm. Got up when the hunger pangs were starting to turn my stomach inside out and spent the rest of the day watching House Season 2 on the computer with a bag of popcorn. A pretty good way to spend a birthday
…for shame…