Went for a short ride today, it was so much fun. I was a little nervous about spontaneously falling off again, like maybe I caught Wipeoutitis and was doomed to forever suck at motorcycling. So that's good. That I didn't.
Now for the home stretch of A Dance With Dragons. Spoiler alert- George RR Martin really really dug Avengers #9.
One time I was reading an old issue of ROM Spaceknight (I think) and there was a fan letter from Kurt Busiek (I think). Here's a good mission for you- see if you can dig up the old comic that has a letter from me in its letters page. Give up? I was only fooling!

NIghtshift sometimes is pretty cool. (Other times, not so much.)

I'm still working on A Dance With Dragons. After four or five weeks I am only about 750 pages in or so. It's not that I don't like it, it's that I like to savor things and also we keep getting all these great books from the library that have to be read within a certain amount of time. Such as:

Manhood For Amateurs, Michael Chabon: pretty much brilliant, just a bunch of loosely connected essays about his life, and being a dad, and being a man, and being a geek. I wonder why I related so much. There was even one essay that opened with his great love for Big Barda, a superheroine I had never heard of till I met her at the Calgary Con and then saw her all over the place.

Then I read two books by Sesame Street Muppeteers- Carrol Spinney who plays Big Bird and Kevin Clash who performs Elmo. I learned about them from two different podcasts, so that was weird, sorta like running into Big Barda everywhere 35 years after her brief moment in the sun. Great books, especially the Elmo one, actually. Kind of autobiographical but also made me realize how important Sesame Street is and so I have Pallas watching much more Youtubeos of Elmo. Him and India Arie doing the ABCs is pretty good. Me: India is pretty, eh?

Pallas: Yeah! Mommy, India is pretty!

Michelle: Who else is pretty?

Pallas: Me!

Silver Surfer: Requiem is one of the best comics stuffs I've read lately. Especially since I had no idea it was about what it was about. I really like J. Michael Straczynski's stuff.

The best book I've read lately is Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall. Michelle found it in a bookstore one time and showed it to me, but even though I'm a runner I kind of put it back on the shelf, thinking that reading about running sounds like even less fun than actually running. Luckily she read it and kept reading me all these astonishing highlights that I had to give it a try. It's awesome the way books like Into Thin Air and Klondike are awesome, full of amazing feats and real-life characters that would seem too over the top if you put them in a novel. I'm not quite done it, so every few minutes I turn to Michelle and say I'm gonna throw away my shoes and go barefoot, and she keeps telling me to finish the book before I go entering any ultramarathons. Today was actually a run day for me but due to inexplicable soreness on the side of my body I fell on when I crashed my bike, I decided not to.

Did you ever see that movie One Week? Most likely not as it was a Canadian Indie about motorcycles and cancer. Anyways, the guy has cancer so he buys a bike and rides across Canada to sort things out in his head. There's one scene where he's driving along and alla sudden he's in the ditch. Or maybe there was a very good reason he crashed, I don't recall exactly. Well, a similar thing happened to me today. Except it was a corner I came on a little too fast and didn't really handle it too well. I'm okay, mostly, and so is the bike, mostly. It's even uglier now but at least the scars on it are my own and not the previous owners' doing. If only that one burger joint had been open in that one town we were in, it wouldn't have happened. Well, nothing you can do now, at least in the sense of changing what happened. What you can do is control how you go forward, right? I've given it some thought though I might need some more time to process it, it's kind of surprising how many different and weird emotions and reactions I'm having.
The first thing you can do, obviously, is get up. For some reason it was really important that I jump up immediately, as if in doing so I would guarantee that I hadn't been hurt. My Dad didn't see it happen so I had a few minutes to pick the bike up and try to get it back on the road, though I wound up needing his help to do so.
Then you have to get back on the bike, assuming it will still run. Mine did. Did I take corners a little more slowly on the way home? Yeah, but nothing wrong with that.
The rest is mental, as so much of life is, and here's some thoughts I tried, and mostly succeeded, to believe:
-yeah I crashed but I'm so badass I got right back on it and kept riding.
-it coulda been a lot worse and it wasn't so chalk one up to luck (both good and bad I guess) and be better next time

If it had been my bobber I think I would have cried. And threw up. Poor little EX 500!

So I did a kind of cosplay yesterday, we went to a supernaturally themed costume party. We been catching up on True Blood Season 3 (we just finished it tonight in fact) so what better than dressing up as Sookie and Lafayette? Especially since, with two weeks notice, going as Daenerys and Khal Drogo wasn't really all that feasible . . .although that would have been pretty kickass. Michelle would have to really amp up her weight training though if she wanted to pass as the Dothraki horselord. And of course I don't have long silvery gold hair. Hmm.
Anyways. Sookie was easy enough, though a little expensive as we had to order the t-shirt and apron with the official Merlotte's logo from the States, and pay extra to have it expedited here in time.For Lafayette you have a little more leeway, just have to wear something suitably loud, a necklace and jangly ear-ring and a do-rag. And eyeshadow and nail polish, of course. Nothing a quick trip to wal-mart can't provide. I had to get a kindly old lady to help me with the eye shadow- I pointed at a picture of a model wearing some and said, "What's that stuff around her eyes? I need some of that!"

So the race we ran this morning was called Iron Mama, and it was pretty cool since it was a lot of Moms and their kids. And four dads! I was one of them. Also Batman was there, encouraging you to enter to win. It was fun, and in support of a good cause, famine relief for Africa. We ran it pretty fast, too, so we wondered if it was really a full 5km- but no one was complaining too much. Last night when Michelle told Pallas we were running this race, and that she and her sister would ride in the stroller while Daddy pushed them, she said "Maybe Pallas race too!" How can you say no to that? There actually was a kids' race, though we were under the impression it was a 1km run, so we didn't go in it. BUt it was just a fun there and back again sorta thing and Pallas totally coulda run it. Anyways after the race Pallas said it was her turn so we let her out and I ran with her for a bit, she was pretty happy with that.



After that I went for another motorcycle ride with my Dad, so pretty much a perfect day!

Good news! I figured out Bluetooth, so I can finally get all the pictures off my little cellphone. But the even more better news is I went out for a ride with my motorcycle gang today, which consists of myself the Homie Bear, Uncle B (the B stands for Badass) and uh, Big Papa. We showed how many rat's asses we just don't give by staying a shade under the speed limit the whole time! Another reason for doing so is technically I still don't have a motorcycle licence. Rat's asses I just don't give, I'm telling you! It's still legal for me to ride since my class 5 counts as a learner's so long as I'm in the protective care of my posse. And leave all my guns at home.
Anyways, all joking aside I just have to say how so so so fun it was. So fun. We rode about 200 kms, just going around some of the backroads a bit and then home on the highway. Big Papa found a killer deal on a Kawasaki EX 500 that was a little banged up from being dropped once or twice- it used to be a motorcycle school bike, but it runs great. Perfect for me to get some experience on.
My friend Robin, who also got the motorcycle bug from Big Papa, now has three bikes- a bobber like the one I'm building only his is done and runs, a small Honda for his wife and a new Triumph. HIs wife is totally into it,and we were discussing the possibility that Michelle might someday want to ride. I said it wasn't going to happen, srsly. Robin said, "She probably doesn't want a bike because she loves life."
"Yeah, that's basically why, in a nutshell. Living is nice."
"But I would argue that is the very reason she should get a bike."

You know what's fun? Running. Except that it's really actually not, no matter how much I try to tell myself it is. What's fun is being in shape and the knowledge that yes, I can run 10 kms without trying too terribly hard. There's also, I admit, a small degree of satisfaction in knowing that in all likelihood, you can not. Not to get too cocky though, there are tons and tons of people from children to senior citizens who run marathons and would use my laughably elephantine gait as a lesson in how not to do it.
Perhaps in an attempt to make running even more fun, I've noticed a proliferation of themed runs. A few years ago, Michelle and I ran a 5k race whose theme was, uh, cops and robbers or something. We were the only ones who dressed up! This year there's a run in support of mountain gorillas and other great apes where everyone is supposed to run in a gorilla suit! Remind me to register for that one. But the best one I've seen so far is this one in Baltimore (roughly a million miles from here) called Run For Your Lives, where you have to evade zombies while you run. Ooh! More locations coming soon. What better than one in Deadmonton?
(via Bonniegrrl)