(no subject)

[noahgibbs]

On Friday, I went to a party with people from a cooking class I took awhile back. I made a nice greek salad with tomatoes, olives and feta, and an Italian spring greens salad with a garlic-plum vinaigrette, served with pears and goat cheese. Mmm... Goat cheese. It was simple stuff, but I have no car right now so it was important that all the bits fit nicely into my backpack for assembly on location. I'm getting better at doing unlikely things with only the motorcycle for carrying stuff.

I went to Gaskell's yesterday. I can now dance a bunch of the stuff that isn't taught anywhere else that they play at the other places I dance. It was very large, very loud and very crowded. I'm going to need to start dealing better with massive numbers of other people if I go back to those. On the plus side, I'm getting better at dodging madly through a crowd of random spinning dancers while spinning a partner quickly. I did remarkably little colliding with people when doing, say, the polka. Not *no* colliding, but a lot less than I'm used to. I'm not sure that experience will help at really crowded places like waltzing at the Plough, but I'll find out at some point.

I've been on my bike most of the morning. There's this thing I think about sometimes... You probably know that on a bike, you twist the right handgrip to accelerate. It's a movement a little bit like peeling a piece of orange skin back. When I have nice clear highway and I can just accelerate happily and smoothly with the wind in my face, I think of it as "peeling the orange." No reason, just felt like sharing :-)

I sometimes feel like I'm just not living up to my bike's potential. A Suzuki SV650 is, in fact, a racing bike -- it apparently replaced the Honda Hawk as the champion of at least one category. That's what I get for choosing a bike by asking a racer (Hi boychaos!) what's a good bike to look at :-) But it always responds so well, moves so fluidly, does everything I ask it and more... I have to wonder if it's not a little frustrated with me up there giving the directions. I'm a pretty conservative rider. Hell, if I pretend friends like bikerscum and boychaos are reasonable riders, I'm practically the old granny who only drives on Sundays. I've never wheelied it. I've never stoppied it. I've never even scraped the pegs in a hard turn, though I've come close enough to scrape my boots. I've only taken a handful of different passengers, never more than a couple of times, and always ridden even more carefully with them there...

I have to wonder if the bike doesn't just live for those late nights on 280 when I open it up a little. If so, it's got a pretty bleak existence.

Right. Now I know for certain: riding my bike a lot too early in the day leads to too much anthropomorphizing and dimestore philosophy. I knew that once.

Either way, I've now got all the stuff I need to commence the oil change. This'll actually be the first one I do on the bike all by myself. I'm switching to synthetic oil. Not that that's any harder than using regular.

Comments

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

In fact, they teach everything they play there, except the Zweifacher and the set dances.

[griffjon.livejournal.com]

salsa and argentine tango. Excellent with a good partner, even better with someone you want to become a good partner...

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

I can tell you horror stories about the one place out here I've tried to learn salsa. There's a place that teaches Argentine tango, though the only one I know where I could just drop by (instead of waiting months for the next lessons to start) burned down.

So: I'll keep it in mind, but as with most dance instruction, it looks like it would be much easier for me to just gnaw off a couple of limbs.