I did look at the bike in Oakland. And it's a fine bike, except for a few quirks:

• Some cosmetic damage that would cost a few hundred dollars to fix, if I wanted to spruce it up for sheer niceness or (more likely) resale value. That includes one blinker lens.
• The registration lapsed sometime in 2005 and it hasn't been ridden since. It seems to run fine, but the owner hasn't communicated anything to the DMV. The DMV here can get a little prickly about things like that: you have to pay even to register cars as non-operational, and the longer you go past the deadline, the more the registration eventually costs. Unclear if those fees would be assessed on me or the owner.
• The owner doesn't want to sell the bike. She lost her job, adores the bike, and got a vaguely panicked blank look when I said I'd buy it. What the hell, it's a solid, running bike, and beyond that, one Ninja 250 is as good as another as far as I'm concerned. She said she didn't want to pressure us (Kelly came along for an experienced viewpoint) into a decision, maybe I should go home and sleep on it. I made life easier by deciding that if she'd sell for $1800 instead of $1950, I'd take it, but otherwise no. (She'd mentioned $1800 as the minimum in the craigslist ad.) Of course, since she doesn't want to sell it yet at any price, the $1950 is firm.

So I still don't have a bike. I did buy a helmet, though, and a jacket that I'll probably return as being not quite right for what I want. And I almost brought myself to buy incredibly swanky riding gloves--the cheaper pair is $75, the swanky pair is $155, but the swanky pair has (in my opinion) far more than $80 worth of swankiness in them, and if I find this as fun as I think I will, I would probably just buy the swanky ones anyway. Really, I'd be saving $75.

(You can do this hobby a bit cheaper than I'm doing it, but what fun is that? Plus I realized that after my head, I want to be most paranoid about my hands, which are both more delicate and more critical to making a living and doing fun stuff than most of my other parts. Plus, carbon fiber knuckle armor. Kick ass.)

Anyway, I hate shopping, and I did a lot of shopping and driving around today, and I'm tired. (Kelly and I had breakfast at Buck's, which is on the way to the archery range; then I went up to meet some of the South Bay Riders at Alice's Restaurant in Woodside. This is still on an easy loop over to the archery range, except that on the drive over from Buck's, something nagged at me, and I had a vision of my arrows, still leaning happily in their case against my bedroom wall. Shooting would have been nice, but not worth an extra hour of driving home and back.) Time to pass out, and tomorrow I get to see the girl again.

Life doesn't suck.