this morning on my ride to work, i was on the bike path when some dude heading in my direction hit a low pole and went over his bars. no helmet, just a backwards baseball cap to cushion any potential head trauma. lucky for him that it was just his arm, hands and knees that made contact with the asphalt.

i rode up to him and stopped to ask if he was ok. yeah, yeah, i’m fine. you sure? yeah. which is when a cute girl cyclist rolled up to see if he was ok and he turned his attention to her, completely ignoring me. he also found some mystery owies to show her. i felt slightly dissed but then realized that i had zero interest in standing there making myself late for a meeting while comforting someone who wasn’t even smart enough to wear a bike helmet. so without further ado, i finished my commute.

i suspect those poles get a lot of people, but i don’t think that they get a lot of people a lot of dates. this coulda been the first.

tonight was the last night of sailing class (i passed and am now officially a novice sailor). after class, i unlocked my bike and then in the process of locking the chain around my waist, proceeded to break the key off in the lock. yay! so now i have a rather thick chain wrapped pretty snugly around my fairly thin waist and was feeling like maybe the dumbest person in the universe.

i asked the instructors if they had a set of bolt cutters. they didn’t, but through alternating chuckles and sighs, they said that they had a dremmel tool that would work. not wanting to stand there watching one dude cut into my waist while three other dudes stood there watching the spectacle for 20 minutes, i asked if they had alternate suggestions, which is when the main dude came up with, ‘dude, you should to to the firehouse. firemen always have bolt cutters.’ (i will remember this forever.)

so i rode home, took a picture or two, and went to the firehouse, conveniently located two blocks from my house. i knew the firemen would be awesome when i saw that one of them had a road bike parked next to the firetruck. and they were awesome (and jaded — firemen have seen everything and are totally unphased by small shit); they were able to get the key to turn in the lock and didn’t have to resort to the bolt cutters. they also didn’t make me feel super-stupid, which was nice of them, since i was already feeling normal-stupid.

mia got lasik done today and i got to watch/comfort/drop my jaw in amazement at modern science. the good news is that she can now see without glasses — one minute(!) after some oddly clockwork orange/chien andalou (both nsfw!) eye-opening/eye-slicing surgery (which was pretty awesome and pretty insane to watch from my ringside seat), she had 20/30 vision. the bad news is that it hurt when the valium wore off, so she’s now in a deep vicodin-induced sleep. i think that the wake-up-in-pain-request-a-vicodin cycle is going to persist until tomorrow morning’s follow-up appointment. and of course, lots of different eyedrops.

to summarize: cool to watch, cool that she can see, cool that she came out of it ok (touch wood), but megabummer that there’s so much pain.

also, in rereading this post, it seems that it was maybe written by an in-love-with-quirky-punctuation(and parentheticals) 12-year-old. bleh.

lately, it seems that i’ve been on a mission to avoid ambiguous human interactions. i probably should have realized this when i stopped taking the bus last winter or the elevator a few weeks ago. i thought i was being anti-social, but that’s not quite it. it’s the don’t-quite-know-what-to-do judgment calls that i can do without (give up a seat? say hi? i don’t think i have the emotional bandwidth for this kind of shit). other people maybe have this issue too, i think. only they deal with it by burying themselves in sunglasses, a book, and an ipod in the way back corner of the bus and when they get to work they stare straight down when walking the halls.

anyway, i realized today that the last piece of the puzzle was to avoid eye contact while running (or anywhere else, but tonight’s challenge was to try to do it while running). mostly it’s the i-say-hi-they-say-nothing-i-feel-compelled-to-flip-them-off thing that tends to make me crabby. so now i don’t acknowledge that anyone else is alive by keeping my eyes low. i am stupid with the eye contact, btw. so this is no small feat.

my plan was going swimmingly until i was about 3/4 of the way around green lake when it 100% failed. i was keeping my eyes on the running path to make sure that i didn’t run over any small dogs when someone who i reckoned to be a chronic inebriate of some variety dropped her shorts to her knees and showed me her cooch.

two things:
1. hard livin’ tonight at green lake.
2. i need a plan b to avoid the awkward social stuff, plan a didn’t quite work out.

anyone who ever said that location can’t change a person. i moved north of lake union and became a white person. or maybe my inner white person is now external, though my skin has just turned its natural summer pan-ethnic deep olive (the indian intern at work just asked me if i was indian, too). but never mind that! i have turned white since moving. here’s the evidence:

- i spend a lot of time watering tomatoes
- i have taken up sailing boats on water
- i wear non-ironic dorky clothes while bbqing

i love the neighborhood. the other day, some neighbors offered me a really nice table saw for free if i would get it out of their basement. i haven’t picked it up yet, but am planning on doing it this weekend. this brings the count of free things we’ve gotten since we moved here to five — four scones and one table saw. actually, we got six things if you count the plate that the scones rode in on that we don’t plan on returning. that’ll teach them to give us anything.