Corner of Bourbon & Division

Wait! Before you tell me that I skipped a day, I did it on purpose! The reason for this is that I'm at work (it's a very slow night), and the post for Day 19 will likely require pictures that are on my own computer. So I'm cheating and writing today's entry first.

tx_cronopio wants to know my thoughts on bicycles, which can be summed up thusly: Bicycles are awesome!

Here are the reasons bicyles are awesome:

1- They are fun to ride. It's one of the basic skills you learn as a kid, and there is nothing more fun when you're little than racing around with your friends on your bike. Bicycles are the best way to get around when you're little, in my opinion.

2- They are ecologically friendly. They don't require gas to operate, and thus are one of the greener forms of transport out there, with the advantage of being faster than going anywhere on foot.

3- You can attach trailers to them. If you need to transport groceries or lighter items or a kid, just hook up a trailer to your bike!

4- They are (relatively) inexpensive. After your initial outlay of funds, which can admittedly be expensive depending on what sort of bike you want, a bike will basically cost you nothing to use. Once a year I get a professional to tune up my bike for about $40, but experienced bikers know how to do this themselves. Every so often you might have to spring for new tires, but compared to the monthly cost of owning/leasing and operating a car, the cost is negligible.

In short, bicycles. Inexpensive, versatile, useful in a variety of ways, and also fun!

I have not biked much (or at all) since I moved to my house, but now that I'm moving I plan to dust it off and use it to do my grocery shopping at least during the months when the ground isn't covered in snow. I'll have to get it properly detailed and the tires replaced, but I'm excited at the prospect now. :)


On that note, I need to get back to work. It's been quiet thus far, but it could pick up at any second. Also, I seem to have tweaked my neck in my sleep, and it's been getting progressively worse all night. Time for some ibuprofen, methinks.

Why on earth are bicycle trailers so expensive? Also, they all appear to be made for transporting children and not groceries. I found one at Wicycle.com, but it's still more than I would ideally like to pay for a trailer.

*sigh*

Any thoughts one where I could find one at a reasonable price? In Montreal?

After a very long day yesterday that was preceded by a very short night of sleep, I decided to sleep in a bit today. That went well. :)

So now I'm having a very late breakfast, in the company of my cats, before I start gathering my stuff together in order to take my bike to work again. Of course, I don't feel like moving at all, so that may be problematic. ;)

I finally worked up the nerve to try Resident Evil 4 again on the PS2. I was slightly less of a wuss this time, partly because I now knew what I was getting into. So I made it past the really scary first scene, and wandered around the little house-thing with my heart in my mouth, and then nearly got killed by bandits. Or something. Peasants with scythes. It was a little surreal, since I have no idea why they were there or trying to kill me, save perhaps to be there to make me practice my shooting. As it turned out, they were easier to dispatch with a knife. Go figure, AND I saved on ammo. Go me!

Thanks to toughlovemuse and my experience with DragonQuest VIII, I now know that it is okay for me to go into people's houses and break their stuff in order to get what's inside. There were no NPCs to bump into, so I don't know if I still apologize to them. ;)

I made to the first save point, anyway, and by then my nerves were kind of jangling, so I turned it off again. I get the feeling that this game is going to take a loooong time for me to finish. Maybe I'll get used to it after a while, but for now it's turning out to be highly stressful to play. ("OMG there's got to be a zombie right behind that corner! AUGH!" Ironically, I have yet to run into a zombie.)

That's that. My plans for the rest of the time I'm here include a shower and more coffee. I have to leave in about an hour and fifteen minutes, so I have plenty of time to get stuff done, as long as I don't try my hand at RE4 again.

Okay, it's technically not spring until Friday, but I took out my bicycle today and rode it to work. I am very pleased.

I am not in quite as good shape as I was last summer when I was cycling every day, but I did make it all the way up the hill that gave me problems the first few times last year, so I feel vindicated.

It's a glorious day, and I am feeling very virtuous.

I do wish, however, that it hadn't taken quite as long for me to get my stuff together today. I had to get the bike out of the shed, find my panniers, fix the chain which had come off the... umm... spiky turny thing whose name escapes me, and transfer a bunch of stuff out of my purse and into my panniers. Then I had to find my colder-weather cycling gear, pack my work clothes, and generally do stuff that I had taken for granted last year because it had become habit.

I'm pretty sure that now that I have all my ducks in a row it'll go faster. For the moment, though, I kind of felt like I was flailing around like a headless chicken.

Negotiating packing my lunch in all this was an added complication as well. Still, I prevailed, and here I am at work, none the worse for wear.

Thanks to the job and to my unexpected sick day, I have totally lost track of the passage of time.

I remember having a pretty intense dream just before awakening, but right now can't remember what it was about. It involved magic and spywork and something about those spiralling fire escapes we have in Montreal, I think.

The cats are confused, but were very happy to have me home all weekend.

I wrote a lot, but had started a new document, and my computer did the let's-randomly-reboot thing, and I lost ALL of it. That'll teach me not to save as I go. *sigh* I need a new computer, but new purchases are on hold until I move. Gnarr.

Work is pretty much as I left it. Right now it's the calm before the storm, I suspect: early mornings are usually pretty calm, and then things go insane starting at 09:00 all the way to 19:00. I'm glad I won't be here past 14:30. Also, the a/c appears to be malfunctioning or switched off: I'm really too warm, and the air isn't circulating at all. I may go in search of a fan soon.

:::ETA::: Done. I was way too uncomfortable.

The packing and cleaning were a wash yesterday and Sunday. I'm going to start again tonight. Yeesh. I refuse to freak out about this just yet. I got a grace period, anyway, since the person who was supposed to see the place tomorrow has (unfortunately) made different arrangements for her accommodations. Back to the drawing board to find a responsible tenant to take my place.

Otherwise, I'm feeling much better. Sleep is still a bit screwed up, but it should all be back to normal by tomorrow. I blame this on hubris: I was just patting myself on the back last week for not having had insomnia in a really long time.

I didn't take the bike into work today. I'm still a little wobbly, and I didn't quite trust myself in traffic and still overtired. Better a live and undertrained Phnee than a fit but dead Phnee, right? Right. Look at me, being all sensible and stuff. Shithead is telling me that I'm a slacker with no follow-through, but Shithead is an idiot and needs to shut up.

I've been reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (she of The Poisonwood Bible fame), and thoroughly enjoying it. She is a Like-Minded Individual who moved to Appalachia with her husband and two daughters to live off the land. The book is a memoir of their first year making a go of it on their own, and is both funny, touching, and informative. She's really done her homework on the industry of agriculture in the U.S.A., and tries not to be too dogmatic in her writing. She is finely nuanced in her thoughts on tobacco culture, for instance, having grown up among tobacco farmers who depend upon their crops for their continued survival. I don't have too much time to go into it here, but I may give this its own entry eventually. I'm taking my time reading it, to give myself time to reflect on what it says. While she didn't quite start from scratch (the homestead was already in part-time use), she does make having a garden and livestock sound feasible. She even makes her own cheese.

Okay. Back to work.

No more wearing contacts during night shift. I will wear my glasses even though contacts are more comfortable for biking. Owie.

In biking news, I made it halfway up the hill on Atwater (from Sherbrooke to Côte-des-Neiges) yesterday on my way to visit my parents. I stopped halfway up (wheezing attractively) and walked the rest of the way, but it's a long, steep climb, so halfway up is pretty good if I do say so myself. A little bit at a time, and soon I will be a biking machine!

I'm really enjoying being a cyclist thus far. Even the rain today didn't daunt me: I pulled out my rain jacket (which turned out to be a whole lot less waterproof than I thought) and put on an older pair of jeans. I packed my work jeans in a plastic bag, and rode to work in the rain. It wasn't great, but it was still better than BMW.

I promise that I will eventually start talking about something other than biking. It's just that it's the new shiny in my life right now, and at least I'm not talking about my upcoming move, right? ;)

Today (it's technically Monday already), apart from sleeping, I have obtained a car from Communauto, with which I will go grocery shopping, stop at MEC for some clips for my pants and some waterproof gear, and pick up a bunch of moving boxes. Then I will go to bed for the rest of the day. I am looking forward to bed.

The rain conspired to keep me away from my good resolution: I am not yet equipped to bike to work in the rain. So I walked to the metro instead, which still makes for a little bit of exercise.

This weekend's plans now involve getting some waterproof gear and some proper bike shorts so that this will no longer hamper my biking efforts. I'm not looking forward to hiking all the way out to MEC (they are far from public transport, drat them), but I may do so anyway to show support.

The biking is going well, otherwise. The last two days I actually managed to bike all the way up Courcelles, without having to get off and walk my bike at all. I am very pleased with this. I also got my lights attached to my bike with duct tape to prevent them flopping around, and this amuses me to no end. One day I'm sure I'll be technically proficient enough to install them without using The Force, but for now the duct tape will have to suffice.

The date has been set for the Great Move (when ai731 and t! move not too far away from the Godforsaken Howling Wilderness, and I take over the downstairs apartment): Saturday, August 30th. I am very excited, but also vaguely anxious because suddenly I have a lot less time to pack than I thought I did. Part of me knows that I have very little to pack, overall, and that I can do it in a few days' time. That means that starting now would be ridiculous and counter-productive. Another part of me is panicking because, and I quote, "it'll never get done in time." Ridiculous.

Oh well.

Tomorrow marks my eight-month anniversary at the RCMP. It feels like no time at all has gone by.

Firefox keeps a record of my subject lines, and apparently I comment on how quickly time goes by a lot. I'm moving in six weeks, and nothing is ready.

I'm going to bike into downtown today and bring my computer in for repairs. It's starting to shut down and reboot randomly as well as the aforementioned problem of the screen going dark at anything more than a 45-degree angle. No idea how long it'll take to fix, but I may be updating only from work for the next little while.

I need to get my act together and go soon. I have stuff to do before leaving, too.

George and Gretzky are giving each other a very aggressive bath. I am ded of teh ky00t.

Okay, my bicycle is mocking me.

1- The bracket for my old u-lock doesn't fit my new u-lock. *grr* I had to put it in my pannier in order to take it with me this time. I will have to take apart the old bracket (which is rusted and thus going to be a bitch to do) and install the new one.

2- The little flashy-light thingies are fiddly and impossible to install properly, at least for a layperson such as myself. The front light hangs loose (thus pointing downward, which is unuseful in the extreme) and no amount of coaxing on my part could tighten it further. It's also composed of fiddly detachable bits, one of which flew out of my hands and onto the sidewalk two floors below me while I was trying to install it. The only mercy is that it didn't fall into the greenery that inhabits our front yard.

3- The rear light thingy fell off mid-transit (see: fiddly and impossible to install properly, above).

4- For the first time in my bike-riding career, the cuff of my favourite jeans got caught in the chain of my bicycle and tore spectacularly.

5- I swallowed two bugs. The first one got caught in my throat, so I ended up making very attractive choking/cat-puking noises. Charming.


Otherwise, I managed to make the round-trip to work and back in exactly one hour. Thirty-five minutes to get to work, twenty-five to get back.

6- I got back unscathed in spite of the asshole in the black Ford F250 who deliberately tried to run me off the road on Rose de Lima, but then my body rebelled right after I wrestled my bike up the stairs. I abandoned the bike outside on my balcony, and downed a litre of water and Gatorade in the space of about two minutes. I've been sitting in front of my fan, recuperating. I feel better now.


On the whole, I am counting this as a win, though mitigated. Now I am off to see a movie. :)

My bicycle is back from the shop. Due to the rain, they actually had it ready one hour after I brought it in. I got myself a new u-lock (the old one is rusted beyond recognition) with an extra chain for the front wheel. Tomorrow I'm going to head out to MEC and get myself the rest of the gear I'll need to be riding around the city at all hours: a pannier, a reflective vest, front and back lights, and maybe some waterproof clothing, given the kind of weather we've been having lately.

I am debating whether to try biking to work on the weekend (it would mean leaving at the crack of dawn), or starting on Monday, when I'll be working night shift. Night shift means that I can dress in whatever I want without too many worries, and I'll be awake early enough not to have to worry about getting to work late.

Okay, maybe there's not so much of a debate after all. ;)

I have to make my lunch and go to work. Meh. I've been really out of it this week at work: tired and distracted, and I've made a couple of mistakes that, while not really serious, are also not mistakes I would normally make. Given that I'm going to be working straight through the next two weekends, I'm going to have to find a way to get my head screwed back on straight. I'm not sure why I'm this tired lately, but it might be the weather.

In other, unrelated news, my computer continues to be old. I should really take it to the shop to get that faulty connection fixed: right now when I tilt the screen back more than 80 degrees or so, it goes black. So I'm planning on replacing the laptop in about a year or so, but in the meantime I think I may have to get a little tune-up on it.