Biking home from work one day – One of my favorite stories of road rage happened when I was riding home from work one night, heading West on Comm Ave.  Not surprisingly, a car pulled out in front of me as I pedaled up the BU hill, causing me to swerve over to avoid it.

 

“Whats wrong with you?!!  Where are your lights?!?!” the driver yelled over to me from the opened window of the car, once he had caught up to me.  “umm… on the front of my bike, dumbass…  Watch where your pulling out!” was my quick reply, as I pointed at the lights attached to the front of my bike.  Not missing a beat, the driver came back with the most over-used insult to cyclists; “Well, stay in the bike lane!” Keeping up the Three Stooges banter, I replied with a “I can’t, you were driving in it!  Now fuck off and die in a fire!”.

 

I guess this annoyed him enough that he could come up with a unique insult, though I’m still unconvinced that its actually an insult… “Ohh, so you think you’re some kind of stud, huh?” he hollered at me as he burnt rubber peeling away from me.  To this day I can’t think of how that could really be an insult, though it did give me a nice little ego boost to help me push home with, thinking to myself, “Yes.  Yes, I totally am a stud…”

 

A weekend of adventures: Part 1 – August 29^th

 

The weekend started off with my bike home from work.  The previous week was a pretty awful one; work had been everything going wrong, and required a lot of extra overtime.  I normally don’t mind overtime, but in this case it was just wasted time, where I was stuck in the lab waiting for tests to finish running.

 

But now that the weekend was beginning, I was excited.  Everything was already starting to look up: the weather was perfect (a nice change from the early week, where I had to bike in the rain from Monday ‘till Wednesday), and I had a bit of a tailwind.  However, I did get a few phone calls on my ride back that kept me busy and running, something that was a strong foreshadowing for the weekend.

 

Friday night I had a quick dinner of pulled pork that Rich and I had made earlier in the week, with a bit of pasta on the side.  As soon as I was done I got the call from Chirag (three in a row, in fact) asking where the hell I was.  It turned out that Friday was the beginning day of Chirag, Jig, and Dave’s going away party-weekend.  Because of thateveryone was hanging out at Tequila Rain and Jillians, either dancing or bowling.  So I jumped on my bike and headed over to join in on the fun.

 

The whole night blurred together for me, full of amazing drinks, great dancing, good music, and LOTS of hot women.  We had originally wanted to rent out Taboo lounge, but it was booked for the whole weekend; the UFC team was in town for the final match Friday night, and they were partying there all weekend long.  And with the UFC fighters came along all the groupies and hangers-on, and MAN did they know how to party.  Danny ended up rocking the dance floor with a girl who, we were later informed, was the girlfriend of one of the UFC champions, the fighter who took out Kimbo Slice.  This of course led to an extremely ripped guy informing us on no uncertain terms that Danny should NOT continue dancing with her, but it did give us an excuse to introduce ourselves into the UFC group, and get a chance to party with a few of the trainers / fighters.

 

The rest of the night was fairly standard for a night out at Tequila rain; everyone danced and drank, we shot the shit with some random people (in this case they just happened to be famous), and had a great time.  The real excitement only started happening after we left the lounge.  I unfortunately left early, so all of the rest of this story is second-hand, and told to me by people with… questionable recollection.

 

After I left, the UFC trainer that had originally talked to us about Danny came over and really started talking to Jig.  Turned out he had a bit of a crush on her, and so he invited everyone back to the hotel for the after party.  Jig, Dave, Danny, and Chirag went, and Big T decided to call it a night and head home.  And that’s where the insanity begins… Turned out that the “after party” didn’t exist: it was just a ploy to get Jig into his hotel room.  When everyone got there no one was in the room besides the trainers friend, who was trying to get extra sleep before the fight the next day.  So everyone left and went to someone elses house for a bit, afterwards everyone headed to their respective homes.  I got a call around 05:15 in the morning from Chirag, asking if I could let him in, since he had lost my key that I had given him.  We still haven’t found it.

 

After I let Chirag in, I went back to bed.  But I didn’t get more than two hours of sleep before the next call came in: this time from Big T.  “Dude… what happened last night, why am I at Longwood, and wheres my wallet?” was all I heard from him before his phone disconnected from me.  I tried calling him back, but it went straight to voicemail… so I went back to sleep.  Turns out that he had woken up at the Longwood T stop with barely any battery life left on his phone, and didn’t know where his wallet or keys had gone.  We still haven’t found them.

 

By that point it was nearly eight, and I had planned on meeting Maddie to go climbing at around 10:00… so I had just enough time before she called to get a quick nap in 🙂

So, this week has been rather boring, due to the rain, long days at work, and my own lazyness.  Over the weekend I vegged out with Chirag and Co, and biked around the city.  Saturday night was rather amazing since Dave finally got back from his training in Germany, and we ended up having a full potluck-ish dinner of Beef stew and BBQ, and Sunday we all chilled and grilled up some fillets, but besides those evening dinners, I pretty much just played Starcraft II, did Laundry, and biked around Newton / Watertown.

It was the definition of a lazy Sunday, where I had gotten up around noon or so, played video games, took a shower, and was actually mobile by three or four.  The clouds were pretty threatening, and the wind was DEFINITELY not my favorite kind, but I headed out for a short 10mile ride anyways, just running out to the Pike, around Newton Center where my Mom used to work, and then back again past the Charles.  Overall a really nice ride since the rain held off, but pretty standard and nothing majorly exciting went on.

Monday was a different ball of yarn though, since when I woke up the rain was just starting to peak, and I had slept in a bit longer than I’d usually like.  But I got up and biked into work anyways; screw the rain, I’ve got backpacking gear and the balls to use it.  I even wrote a Haiku to go along with my ride,

It’s raining today

The sorrow of every bike

But I have rain gear

Simple, I know, but I like being poetic every once in a while, when I have the chance.  And although the ride TO work was kinda rough, the ride HOME was amazing: I didn’t bother locking down my rain gear, so I just rode and got soaked.  Upside of wearing swimshorts and underarmor on my ride to and from work, I guess, but I was warm and uncaring the entire ride back; I even did a few extra laps on the esplenade to stretch my legs.  Of course, having a paycheck from work to deposit did help my mood a bit, I won’t lie, hehe.

And, since nothing good can last, I ended up being forced to ride through a whole field of broken glass when two cars smashed into each other on the road ahead of me.  I wasn’t in any danger, since they collided a few hundred feet ahead, but unfortunately I couldn’t get out of their “blast zone”, since all the other lanes were taken up by rather nasty Boston drivers.  And so my new “glass proof” tires got their first trial by fire.  And, thankfully, I’m able to tell you all that they succeeded, and I have no flats yet, at least for now.

So… we’ll see how the ride home on Tuesday fares; debating hitting up the climbing gym, but we’ll see how I feel when I finally leave…