First of all, congratulations to Autumnalyssa, who won the random drawing for a Let's Panic! bag filled with all kinds of stuff, and whose mom taught her that you shouldn’t grow pot in the backyard if you have a gregarious six-year-old who might invite the mailman around to see her snail collection. Autumnalyssa's mom might have been interested in talking to my mom, who tethered our dachshund in the backyard. Dachshunds + irrational barking = NO MAILMEN. I don't know if dachshunds eat pot plants. Actually, never mind, they do.
Secondly, because I seem to have this need to blog all of a sudden but nothing in particular to say (WHY SHOULD THAT STOP ANYONE??), I will share with you my latest Craigslist selling success. And cause you to wonder why I did it, and for how much, and wouldn't I have been so much happier keeping it?
I know, but listen. Jack bought it as a gift for me a couple of summers back and it took me two years to admit to myself that I liked the idea of a seafoam-green Electra Amsterdam so much more than the reality of it. I still feel sort of bad about selling it, and not just because I probably could have gotten $75 more than I asked, but because Jack went to a lot of effort to get me something he thought I'd like, and that riding bikes would be something fun that we could do as a family. So by parking this in the garage and letting it gather dust for two years I didn't reject just the bike, I rejected marriage, family, exercise, all the bike paths put in by the city at great expense to the taxpayers, and the entirety of Dutch culture.
I learned a valuable lesson, though, which is that some things are so very personal that you need to pick them out for yourself. This rule applies to:
- bicycles
- maxi pads
- Hulk action figures (THEY NEED TO HAVE JOINTED HIPS AND SHOULDERS, OKAY)
unless you are highly communicative and the person shopping for you has a complete grasp of how your brain works. I guess I'm not communicative enough for Jack to intuit my many highly specific needs; certainly we don't talk about feminine hygiene nearly enough for me to send him to the store to purchase "the usual."
Ironically, we all tried to take a ride downtown together the other day, but Jackson was so nervous riding on the side of a busy street (we had no other choice -- actually, our other choice would have been to put all the bikes in the back of Jack's truck and drive downtown, but taking the bikes for a Sunday drive would have given Jack an aneurism) that halfway into town we had to turn around and go back. So, going for bike rides might not be the happy family activity we'd hoped for after all. Sigh. The good news is, once my new eBay'd bike basket arrives I can probably start biking to work. If I can convince them to build me a shower in the parking lot.