Rather a lovely weekend of gentle socializing and lots of alone time, stuffed into the giant book I'm trying to crank through and be done with. A long ride yesterday, an SBR barbecue, then today I managed to do nothing but have an excellent biscuits and gravy at Nini's, take a nap, read for many hours, and ride for an hour and a half or so, catching the sunset along Skyline Boulevard (which is breathtaking), then taking Page Mill Road in the dark, which was...challenging.
Kelly has a new toy, a big ol' superbike. I haven't been riding with other people, so I wasn't fully cognizant of how powerful these things are until she and I left a few stoplights at the same time. They're...very, very, very fast. Good for her. I'll be working on managing what little power I've got (and learning to wrench on it--have to get off my ass and do an oil change this month).
The autumnal weather brings me a flood of memories from my New England homeland, especially since it rained earlier in the week. This was extremely early in the season for it to rain: I know because every year September rolls around, and I think, "Oh, it's fall! At long last, rain will interrupt this endless, monotonous, searing, burning sunlight." And then it doesn't actually rain until late November. I loathe the weather here.
But I had 22 years in a place with seasons, and their turning seems buried in the foundations of my consciousness. I remember mist, apple cider, early sunsets, an edge in the air promising that it was only going to get colder and colder. And this general feeling of dank, chilly dampness, which as with all such things brings the prospect of being well-defended against it. I experienced that wearing a sweatshirt and windproof pants on the bike a few nights ago: a scarcely-describable pleasure of being insulated from cold and wet that would otherwise leave you miserable. Given a cold day, warm clothes or a fire (especially with a girl involved) are better than sex. Well, bad sex, certainly, since bad sex isn't really worth having. They might not be better than good sex. Maybe it depends on whether there's hot chocolate involved. Involved in the cold day, I mean. Not the sex.
It makes me think again about going back, but since it would involve leaving my friends and I'd have to get a real job (one that didn't readily acknowledge my level of genius and might want me to come in by a certain time or work an eight-hour day or something), I'm stuck here. I have a tacit assumption in my retirement planning that I'll get at least slightly rich at some point (my usual goal is "I want work to be optional"), so when that happens, I'll buy a place near the Berkshires and take charter jet flights back and forth.
(Oddly, while the Getting Rich plan is a running joke with me, I'm not entirely kidding. I'm smart and good at what I do, and when I leave the current job in N years, I'm planning to go into the world of tiny startups, where I get to design big things from scratch so I can make them work properly. Having had bad jobs before, I will choose startups carefully. Phase 3: Profit!)
Excellent.