well last night I had another one of those 'firsts' on a bicycle. my friend Jay had taken the train round the bend, and got off a stop short so that he could cycle his way down middlefield in the pleasant blazing heat. Needless to say, rather than finding any of the markers to get over to say The Castro, he rang up my cellphone.
A cellphone call in my Prius is merely a flick of the buttons on the driving wheel. On a Bicycle it is a religious commitment to the Holy Laws Of Physics and fast flip topping!!! Where upon I explain to him that he clearly had missed all the first tier markers having just rolled over a freeway.
Fortunately for the commuters, he was on the appropriate cycle, in the cycling lane, and not in his usual CrushTheEarthLingsFlatDeathMobile that he he was suppose to bring with him to Planet Earth. You know how those little logistical flaws happen. No matter how many 'todo lists' no matter how many times one makes a list, checks it twice, gonna find out who is going to be blasted by lasers into recombinant genetic proto-material, everyone tends to forget something when dashing off to catch the typical intersteller flight to some back waters bay area on a planet that the best the hitch hicker's guide could say was 'mostly harmless'.
So it is not like I hold this against Jay. These things can happen to anyone. I have sort of come to expect those little
Operator. I need an exit.that arise from time to time.
Needless to say, afterwards we took a lovely little male bonding ritual moment up the Steven's Creek Trail to the bay, to see the transmogrification of the wetlands into not as wet wetlands which is the inevitable downward spiral as an eco system evolves. A lovely little bicycle ride for anyone in the general area.
Granted of course, breezing by NASA Ames, one gets the lovely sight of the Duck Sucker and the Numerical Aerodynamic Simulations Facility, which was architected in that early Normandy Beach Bunkeresque motif to give it the symbolic representation that it was clearly NOT the super secret Space Alien Detention Facility and should not in any way be confused with the Real Super Duper Secreet Space Alien Detention Facility that NASA has always kept at the base as a part of the ongoing, and at times lucrative trade in the typical sorts of H-1B opportunities that arise from time to time as space aliens escape from Area51 and arrive in the bay area looking for a bright new day in america. Which of course is cut short as they wind up sucked into the Moral Morass of the Hiddeous Clique of Persons who trade in Pre-Owned Intellects.
But of course eveyone has been through the process of working with these unfortunate victims of a repressive economic system that leaves so many Space Aliens suffering from massive inferiority complexes and a complete uncertainty about their future. So why cry over spilt brain matter?
The jaunt out and back gave me several opportunites to show Jay the various ways he could have found his way through this bicycling wonderland to my digs. But of course, as I noted about the Middlefield Road entrance to the Steven's Creek Trail, by the time he would have noticed, and processed the information from the sign, he would of course have been a block and a half on down the road. At which point, one might as well just keep on keeping on.
We would finish off the evening's ride with a Jaunt to Gumba's which has a lovely menu with a lot of fun stuff and very few space aliens and is mostly zombie free. Needless to say, by the time we stopped kvetching it was a bit too late to catch the train from Sunnyvale - so we threw it into the flying machine and bolted up to Milbrae so that Jay could catch BART back to the far side - where he belongs.
Today, on the other hand, I opted to cycle down to Apple to have lunch with a friend and his co-workers. They have a lovely cafeteria that seems to be mostly Zombie Free, but I am still not sure if Apple has actually abandoned it's policy of using Illegal Space Aliens. One of several things that most of us had hoped would be cleared up in Sarbanes-Oxley, when they criminalized the process of commiting corporate crimes criminally. Another one of those nice down and back cyclings.