You know that picture of the slightly balding guy where if you look at it twice you realize that his hair and ear is also a drawing of a naked women, and the whole thing symbolizes men always having women on their mind? I feel like a similar drawing except with a motorcycle instead of a woman would be a good way to represent my brain for the last couple of days.

Monday I had figured that I wouldn’t get to practice any because it was forecast to be rainy and I figured I had a bunch of work to catch up on after being out at a c++ programing class for the past week. It turned out that the rain stopped early such that the roads dried up, and I came up with enough excuses to leave work early (a lot of people were out for the holiday, the one person I was working with left early, I wasn’t getting any work done anyways because of looking at motorcycle sites, …) So I came home and tried out Tyson’s motorcycle. I started out just in the local subdivision. I practiced turning around in the cul-de-sac and one of the to be developed road intersections. Tyson’s motorcycle is enough heavier that I had to significantly change my idea of how much to lean it. I practiced starting on the little up hill. And generally I just practiced driving around in a more real world environment than the parking lot of the weekend. After almost an hour of that, I needed to run a local errand. I decided I was up for some real roads with other cars on them. That trip went just fine too. And then I decided I was done for the day. But it was great! I drove an actual real motorcycle on an actual real road, and actually, really did Ok!

Today I managed to be much more attentive at work, especially because I knew once I got home, Tyson would already have taken the motorcycle to get to his evening activity.

In other nice news, the new mattress we had ordered arrived yesterday. It is one of the nice natural latex foam mattresses. Compared to the old mattress which was pretty much the cheapest thing I could find as a grad student that still looked like an actual mattress, the new one is luxurious. The only down side so far, is that it required some assembly (you can customize the firmness of the mattress with different layers of foam) and we only started on that after I had fun with the motorcycle and we went grocery shopping.

It looks like at work I have found someone to regularly play bassoon with. I ordered some new duets last week and brought them in today so that we could have fun sight reading them at lunch time. Just playing with one other person doesn’t feel nearly so intimidating as actually playing with a group. For one thing if I don’t manage to practice during the week, it isn’t such a big deal.