A Little "Yay!" Helps A Lot

In the middle of all this crazy stuff going on, I got a nice surprise last week! Local AnimationMentor AMigos Konrad and Justin stopped by with some goodies from them and other buddies at school! Konrad made a nice card and every-buddy signed wishing me a speedy recovery from my bike smash. Just the day before I got an surprise box delivered to my door. It was from Alison, and inside a really nice book with amazing illustrations by Shaun Tan. Since then I've been getting email from other classmates wishing me well as they hear about my mishap, also cool, since I'm not on campus anymore (waa). Thanks everyone, it felt great to have a bit of "yay!"

Saturday I finally got my first "full" paycheck from IHSS, which was for work in August. The July one was screwed up and they only paid me half, and April through June I didn't get any pay at all! Grr. At least the August check was right. As if that wasn't enough, I finally got the final payment for a freelance job I did in May! Yay! I almost felt like I won the lottery or something. Okay, it wasn't nearly like that, but it was a good week, anyway.

The bike I wiped out on wasn't damaged in the crash, but it's not a very good bike. I've been planning for some time to upgrade and for a while I was very interested in these chainless bikes. Trouble is, practically nobody has ever heard of them and guys at nearly all the bike shops I went to seemed to hate the idea of a bike with no chain, less maintenance, no grease, and smoother shifting. You would think it's cuz they make their living fixing standard chain-driven bikes...oh wait, they do. Hmm. Well, since I couldn't dig up enough key info, not to mention my own concerns about the bikes, I decided to order a regular mountain bike from IronHorse. I didn't go crazy with one of their pricier bikes, but the bike I'm getting has fairly decent components and it's going to be a gigantic step up in quality from my department-store bike. By the time the shop gets the bike in and built (about 2 weeks) I should be healed enough to start riding again.