Tales of Slow Brave Athena

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May 12, 2007

long, good day

I had a bad day yesterday at work, the second or third bad day in one week. To make matters worse, I underate at lunch (because I worked through lunch, and I didn't think I could take the extra five minutes to walk to the soup stand), so I was hungry most of the afternoon.

By the time I got myself home, I was mad at myself for not taking care of myself, as well as for expecting that my coworkers would communicate with me when there was a huge project that they were very late with.

I had planned, and indeed, looked forward to seeing T. Colin Campbell, author of the China Study talk about plant-based diets. I thought I had got my sweetie's buy-in, that he would go with me. But by Friday morning, he was making lots of "you'll have a great time" type statements.

Anyways, I couldn't bare the thought of doing alone to the talk, and I wanted a friendly face to commisserate (sp?) in case I started to cry again. Indeed, my Saturday plans seemed suspect too.

I had planned to go to the St Johns parade. I had wanted to go to VegFest. I had a giant beer tasting party to go to at 2pm, and I expected that I probably wouldn't get out of the party in time to go back to VegFest. And now I was unsure that I'd even want to leave the house come Saturday morning.

Anyways, Saturday morning came, and Sweetie volunteered to go with me to the parade, so up to St Johns, we went. First stop was Adam's house, where the whole scooter club were busy decorating their scooters with stuff from the dollar store. It was clear immediately that I had not taken the whole decorating thing seriously enough... and I kept thinking about how I could apply these ideas to decorating my bicycle for bicycle parades.

We spent another couple of hours waiting for the parade, in the parade line, and at Sandie's house. I chatted with other scooterists, with bicyclists, and for the most part, anyone who would talk to me. I knit compulsively on my project, a cashmere moebius cowl I had been hoping to finish in time for Mothers Day.

Then, the parade started. Then, we find out we've won best vehicle group, which can't be because the vehicles are attractive: we've a mix of plastic scooters, motorcycles, and mopeds. We don't have a single vintage in the group, unless you count a fifty-something BMW. Maybe it's because we're a mixed race group in a mostly segregated city? Or that we're maybe 40% female?

Or maybe it's the fact that we're huge hams, we don't organize or coordinate any of our antics, figure 8s and loops, and that's obvious. We almost hit folks in the crowd, and they love it, we ride with some skill and obvious joy, and dagnab it, we really like each other.

Anyways, we had a great time. A great time. No collisions, no one dropped a bike, no children hit.

Then, we headed across town to go to Fred Fest. Basically, this was a fundraiser for a sick Brew Crew member, celebrating Fred Eckhardt's birthday. We were immediately overwhelmed by the length of the lines, and number of people there, but once we got into the beer line, time went pretty fast, or at least fast enough. We chatted with our neighbors in line, and others too. Beer luminaries were there. We had some incredible beer, luckily in very small quantities, with some really good food.

By the time we got home at a little after six, it had been a really long day. But a good one.

Posted at May 12, 2007

Comments

Posted by: Lara at May 15, 2007 4:06 PM