Excuses

For those of you not on top of the saga of how I came to be a hog-riding hardcore biker*, my brother-in-law Billy put the idea in my head at the beginning of the summer. He got himself a Honda CBR125, which is, in his words, "a scooter that looks like a motorcycle". We have one car in this household, which doesn't generally cause any problems, though there is the odd occasion where Rebecca is out and about with the car, leaving me to rely on London's shoddy public transportation system. For times like these, and in the event that I go somewhere like San Diego for a postdoc, I thought that a small-engine motorcycle, similar to Bill's, would be handy. The thinking was that I would not want to have to rely on any 4-wheeled vehicle that the $3000 I spent on the motorcycle (about $3600 if you include the equipment and the motorcycle training course) would buy me.

I'm really methodical, and when I dive into an area about which I know very little, I research the hell out of it. It took about 8 weeks for me to actually purchase my motorcycle, and I ended up buying it from a guy in Sarnia - about the nicest guy I have ever met in my life. Seriously, if he had my mailing address, I wouldn't be surprised if he sent me a Christmas card asking how I enjoyed riding the motorcycle this fall. Of course, by the time I actually got the motorcycle home, it was already mid-September, and I had yet to take the motorcycle safety course, and I certainly wasn't going to venture out into traffic without having some formal training on riding the thing.

Two weeks ago, I passed the motorcycle safety course at Fanshawe which, if nothing else, gave me the confidence to drive around on London's streets. And then it snowed. Fortunately, it warmed up again this week, and I rode in to school for the first time this week on Tuesday and Wednesday. Yesterday I stayed home to finish writing questions for exam for the stats class I am teaching through distance studies, and today I am home again copying the questions to a word processor document that I can provide to the UWO distance studies coordinator. It's currently 17 degrees and cloudy, and we will probably not see this weather again for another 4 months, at least. So I came up with an excuse for one last ride around the neighbourhood, and rode over to the gas station to make sure that my tank was filled to the top, and that my tires were inflated to the correct pressure in anticipation of storing my motorcycle for the winter.

Now all I have to do is clean out my bloody garage. I'm not so good at finding excuses to do that, however.

*Note that I am most definitely not a hardcore hog-riding biker. Those guys are grizzled, and ride those big loud low-riders. They dump guys like me into garbage cans.