Hahaha. Why nice guys suck. (For better or worse...that ain't me.)

I rode down to Scotts Valley yesterday (the long way, and I still timed it wrong and had too much time to kill) to meet up with a guy from SBR who offered to help me go over my bike and look for anything amiss. Engines are one of many things I've never felt the urge for, but this guyis so comfortable wrenching on bikes, and the bike is so simple and accessible compared to the car, that it was just a ton of fun. I mentioned my scraped curb feelers (little knobs of metal screwed into the bottom of the foot pegs--I scraped the left side last week, and someone had already done the right side), and he said, "Yeah, I usually take those off, since they just make noise and freak out the rider." I said, "Yep, freaked me out last week." "Well, let's make that the first thing, then." And we were off on a host of minor tweaks: remove the curb feelers, scrape the ancient stickers off the gas tank and tach, straighten out a bent clutch lever I hadn't consciously noticed, adjust clutch and brake levers for play and tightness, replace the reservoir brake fluid, on and on with these little things that make the bike perform just a bit better and more safely, but also just provide a good feel of being on a machine that you know and have cared for. We even took the back axle out, to reverse a sleeve that someone had put on backwards (practically harmless, but you couldn't see the measuring markers for the chain-tightening turnbuckle). Cleaned and lubed the chain, discovered I need a new chain and sprockets. Cleaned the whole bike with Lemon Pledge, cleaned off some minor corrosion with WD-40, so forth and so on. It's just fun, and pretty easy. (She'll probably need a valve adjustment [yes, along with carburetors and a choke, she lacks self-adjusting valves], which is a tedious process that will be done by some lucky shop.) Anyway, lots of fun, lots of good information to pass on to other people, and not really that hard.

I got textile overpants, which are great, except I got the 38 Short, which turns out to be too short once I'm actually on the bike. Dammit. Have to go down to San Jose a third time. And on the bike, no less, to make sure I don't have the same problem again. Freeway trips on the bike just aren't that interesting, and I don't particularly like going freeway speeds.

I have some genuinely new and unfamiliar challenges at work, involving taking a larger architectural view of things, communicating that to a variety of other people, and ultimately providing technical direction. Not beyond my ability, of course--you have no idea what it takes for me to cop to that--but definitely something I've never done before. This must be what normal jobs are like in companies that give you increased responsibility over time.