boy these last couple of days have been packed!

on friday, i went bike shopping with jimmy and paul. we went to performance bikes and checked out stores. one of the salespeople there related a horror story about a downhill biking accident that he recently had which has left his left arm severely crippled. he’s hoping that after some serious rehab, he’ll be able to get most of the function in his arm back…right now, it’s pretty much paralyzed. he just had a $14,000 surgery at stanford medical where they put a bunch of pins in various places in his arm to help fix it up. that story almost made me reconsider getting a bike.

we then went to the off ramp and i test rode a couple of bikes there. jimmy has a high bias towards specialized bikes, and it seems like a reasonably good bike. there’s definitely a difference between different models in a brand, though…as the varying prices of the bikes would suggest.

i finally decided to get the ’04 rockhopper in zolder blue. what is zolder blue? i don’t know. sort of looks like powder blue, maybe? it was on sale and after being reassured by jimmy that this was a reasonably good price, i decided to get that, a helmet, and a water bottle and cage at the off ramp.

later we went back to performance bikes to get a lock, patch kit, and gloves. i stayed within my budget for everything so i was pretty happy about that. when i was first looking at bikes, it looked like my budget may have been unreasonably low. the other alternative was to get a costco bike, but everyone scoffed at that. bike snobs.

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on saturday, i woke up like a little kid eager to play with his new toy. i tried to sleep more, i swear, but i couldn’t, so i strapped on my camelbak and headed out to ride my bike. so where did i take my bike out to on its maiden voyage? the donut shop. =P

it seemed to me a little contradictory at the time to get a bike to encourage more exercise and then go bike to a donut store, but the call of the donut was strong…and i had to heed its call.

after that i washed up and got ready for the photo shoot with anita. i hadn’t seen anita in such a long time so we spent the day catching up and taking pictures. i was also able to try out my new 4GB micodrive, courtesy of the muvo! the shoot went well and i have a bunch of photos that i still need to process.

after that, i went to celebrate paul’s birthday with a bunch of other people at il postale. the food was quite good and i was pretty happy about it. a bunch of us got together and got paul a 20GB ipod as a group gift. i hope he liked it.

and that leads us to today. i volunteered for the nikkei matsuri, the japanese cultural fair in downtown japantown today. i decided instead of trying to deal with parking, i would bike there. the bike ride was about 9 miles and took me about an hour to do. then i spent about 2 hours making strawberry shortcake. actually, i was tasked with serving the finished product to people and supplying them with forks. not very labor intensive, but very tiring nonetheless.

after that, i biked over to paul’s apartment and paul, leeya, jimmy, mike, and i went to the shoreline to do some biking/rollerblading. that was pretty fun, too. man, lots of biking for me. i think we did about 8 miles there. and then we got some pearl tea afterwards and now i’m showered, clean, and at home.

talk about a long weekend.

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