Wednesday, April 25, 2007

We could crawl but I'd rather drive she said!

Once again a big gap in my blogging but frankly I've been too fair puggled from my new mode of transport to get up the energy. You see both I and Rosa have been getting increasingly fed up with the gym over the last four or five months as it became massively over-susbscribed and starting letting families bring their weans in on weekends so we decided it was time to tell them to get tae and invest in a different keep fit so there was only one solution.

I bought a bike.

Not a motorcycle that would make me feel all easy rider in a Julian Cope/Jimi Hendrix stylee or even a cool wee moped that would go with my German army parka and give a whole Quadrophenia vibe.

A pushbike.

Now I'm given to understand that a lot of people actually enjoy bicycling. I've even met a few and some of them have even been British but they were all quite strange anyway. I mean the biggest biking event in the World is the Tour de France and every competitor in that is on drugs, they tell you it's performance enhancing but I honestly believe you need a good puff of crack to even consider going in for that and there's tons of bikes in the Netherlands which is a country full of peeps on drugs. Marieke, Rosas brother Eds wife, is a very keen biker and generally seems a nice normal girl apart from her deep hatred of baboons but looking at the evidence she's probably secretly mental.

Anyway so we spent a wad of cash on a bicycle and associated paraphenalia, though I did manage to avoid buying a dayglo bodystocking or anything like that, for me to ride to and from work on. I was a little worried that I might crap out after a day or two so I implemented the cunning plan of spending all my travelling cash on beer thus forcing me to use the bike albeit with a massive hangover. So there I was first thing in the morning, MP3 playing cool indie-rock into my ears, rad skater helmet on my head when I realised the really really major flaw in my plan.

I live on a hill.

Quite a big hill actually. In fact now I come to mention it there's a bloody extinct volcano in between me and my work, not exactly Mount Etna or anything but enough to make sure that I've got to go around the bloody thing and frankly going up hills is a hell of a lot harder nowadays than it was when I was 12. This is compounded by the bike having 21 gears. What the Hell am I supposed to do with 21 gears? When I was young 8 or 12 gears was a lot and they were generally the sole province of nutters with racing bikes, I spend most of the time guessing what gear I should be in and hoping that the chain won't come loose. Even worse it seems that there are drivers out there who want to kill me. Now I'm quite used to peeps wanting to kill me, usually within an hour of meeting me, but these peeps haven't even met me and they seem hellbent on running me over. It's not the peeps in Micras or Fiestas either it's always blokes in gigantic 4x4's with massive bull bars who seem offended by my very existence. So every morning I arrive at work wringing with sweat, a fearful gleam in my eye and very very shaky legs. Bloody bike!

To be fair I'm actually enjoying some of it. Every morning I get the choice of riding along beside the most beautiful river in the world and saying hello to Dundee's very own highland cattle or taking different routes and rediscovering parts of my home city I've not seen in years, it wakes me up for work in the morning and let's me de-stress in the evening as I concentrate on trucking right and listening to my music and I do feel a weird twisted sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. Now all I've got to do is move somewhere flat.

As I made the move to shrink my carbon footprint Rosa went the other way and bought a car. It's quite a nice Hyundai Elantra 1.6 litre and was definitely needed as the wee Micra whilst a good car was really not designed for the amount of countryside driving the girls work runs to so even though it seems strangely grownup it's a good buy.

And for the last big buy of the month I'm typing this on our new computer that my very good friend Pete built for us at an amazingly low price. To be honest whilst the dual-processors are incredible and Vista Ultimate 64 is really really cool we really only needed an PC that took less than an hour to startup but Pete seemed so excited it seemed churlish to say no. The decision to have it built definitely had nothing to do with the way my XBox 360 hooks up to the media centre allowing all my music and videos stored on the PC to be played through it. Honest.

Don't worry kidders we are still working on the wedding an a'that but I'll bitch about that another time. :)

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