The Beauty V The Beast

17 June - Set my alarm for half six to ensure I’d get up for the Australia v Brazil game - for some reason I thought it was on Saturday and one of the mailroom clerks at 2oo Burrard confirmed this - aparently its on Sunday so my early morning wakeup was pretty pointless. There was no way that I was going back to bed so wandered down the drive for a coffee then killed a few hour waiting for Dream Cycle to open so I could get some electrical tape to fix up the new bartape on Celeste's new handlebars. The steel bar in the wrist brace that I wear has gouged through the cloth and basically shredded the tape almost completely unravelling it. Managed to fix it up and reinforce it some and while at the shop bumped into Sasha, one of the new Flash couriers who was buying a very expensive new wheel for his fixie. Had a coffee with him and then went down to Strathcona where I practiced my skidding and dismounting skills (its not enough just to ride a fixed gear, you've got to do it with style, man!) and after that tried to get ahold of ozzie Marcus who I’d planned to do some tourist stuff with. He completely flaked out so nothing happened and it started to rain so I worked on a biker training document that I’d promised to write during our work meeting t'other day. First document preparation i've done in almost a year and I forgot how much I love Word (although OpenOffice has to suffice) and how much I hated writing f**king training documents. Caught the train downtown to pick up baby Blue from Simon's - one of my coworkers, Ben, has been riding him for the past week and a bit after his frame cracked. Riding back home was incrediblly difficult - it was raining, whih is never pleasant but he weighs so much compard to Celeste, a complete beast of a bike, and it felt bizarre when the bike wouldn’t slow down when I eased off the pedalling. I kept on catching myself and forgettingthat I HAD to use brakes when I wanted to stop - it's strange that it took such a short time to totally acclimatise to the fixie. I don’t know how I rode around for so long carryingso much excess weight. Had a burger with Shadow and some of his crew at Stormin Norman's (he's been bugging me for ages to try a kangaroo burger) and then visited the very sedate nighttime markets in chinatown (well, at least sedate for your average nightime chinatown markets) with Julie where we ate a random sampling of the local 218 flavour ice cream shop (Wasabi was particularly unusual) and a couple of steamed pork buns, energy replacement source of choice for the modern ninja warrior (nine out of ten videogame characters prefer it as their health boostup of choice, the rest are just on mushrooms).