BIKE

      I HAVE A BIKE!!

      Before today, if I wanted to visit Ben, I had to walk out my door and down the street for 16 blocks, which takes at least half an hour. Then I hop on the BART – add another 20 minutes, if I time it perfectly (another 40 if I miss the train by 30 seconds, which happens like all the time). When I get off the BART, I have to walk another 40 minutes to Ben's house. It's almost straight uphill, so it seems more like an hour. BUT NOW I HAVE A BIKE. 30 minute walk turns into ten minute bike ride. 40 minute walk to Ben's turns into riding a bike for 10 minutes and pushing said bike uphill for 20 minutes... so I don't actually save much time there. But the downhill trip back to BART will be much improved.

        Here's the story of how I got my bike. Like most of my stories, it is kind of ludicrous, but mostly because I'm sort of dumb sometimes.

        I'd been looking on Craigslist for a week or so, trying to find a smaller-sized roadbike that was in good condition and not too expensive. Also a bike that was lightweight, since the one at the Worker is made of cast iron, and is a DOOZY to lug up two flights of BART stairs at Civic Center, and I don't want to have to do that with a new bike. So my parameters were fairly narrow. I found one, though, listed for $180, but I talked the seller down to $130. Go me. Unfortunately, it was located in Sunnyvale, which is at the bottom of the Bay, and on the SF side, at least an hour's drive away. Cue driving-related panic.

        I Google-mapped the address and wrote down the exact directions. Confident in my ability to tell the cardinal directions apart without the use of a compass, I hopped in the van and headed down to Sunnyvale on the 880, happily blasting country music and NPR, and 45 minutes ahead of schedule. I made it to Mathilda St. in Sunnyvale before all hell broke loose. My directions said to turn left and go for two miles until I hit the Evelyn Street ramp. I drove and drove and drove and drove and did not see Evelyn Street. I figured my ability to accurately judge distance might be a little off, since counting mile roads at a constant velocity is a lot easier than counting erratically-spaced city blocks in stop-and-go traffic, so I drove a little more. When I reached the outskirts of Cupertino, another town that is south of Sunnyvale, I decided that I probably had missed the turnoff. Good thing I still had about 30 minutes to spare!

         I figured that I had probably just been trying to identify a pretty tree by the side of the road and accidentally missed the turn, but I decided that I should call Ben to see if he could tell me how far out of the way I had driven, just to be on the safe side. He told me that I should turn around and head back north, and just drive until I hit Evelyn Street, which is just what I thought I should do. So I did. I drove and drove and drove. I drove until Mathilda Street turned into Caribbean Drive, which was definitely not where I wanted to be. So I called Ben again, slightly panicky because my 30 extra minutes had almost expired. He was such a great guy about it too, even though he was in the middle of work, which for him is just a constant state of crazy. He told me to backtrack and drive to California St. and then call him back, so I did. Then he proceeded to stay on the line and listen to me be like “Umm... I don't see the street... don't see the street... where the hell is the street.... OMG THERE IT IS!!!!!!!” for several different turns while he walked me through the entire set of directions until I made it to that damn Evelyn Street. He was pretty much my hero today, because otherwise I would have had to ask some scary gas station attendant who may or may not have been some know-nothing teenager or who may only have a basic functional grasp of English.

         So I finally pulled into the parking lot of the storage place where I was supposed to meet this lady, and I got my bike, and everything is ok now. It's a red road bike, and it seems nice. A little rusty on the frame, but otherwise in good shape, I think. I know next-to-nothing about bikes, so it actually could be about ready to fall apart and I wouldn't know it.

         Well, anyway, moral of the story is 1) Ben is my hero and 2) I HAVE A BIKE.

Here is a picture. It's the Craigslist-posting picture, not mine, that's why it looks like that.