i want to ride my bicycle.

i decided to go on a bike ride this evening in my new neighborhood. what an amazing series of moments it turned out to be. observe:

two adorable hispanic women in long skirts running down the street the opposite way as me at a pretty hefty pace from the smallest kitten i've ever seen.

one man in a dark blue sedan swerving in the street. calls out "sorry pretty lady." and then again once i'm a good ways down the street "my name's herb by the way..." thus crossing that street off any future bike routes.

i greet creeper chris with the obligatory yet stoic, "hey." he proceeds to ask me where my car is. i say it's neither here nor there. thus crossing that street off any future bike routes as well.

i then proceed to ride by a hoard of small children. one whispers to another all too loudly "flaca" which is enough to make any 26 year old woman feel wonderful despite the dinner of french fries she inhaled just moments before.

the next street over and i pass by the adorable hispanic women again. i ask them if they've managed to get free from the cat. we chuckle together while one translates to the other cheerfully.  next time i'll speak in spanish.

on my final lap (read: no more non-creepy men streets left) i see a small boy trying desperately to push is bike with training wheels over the enormous mountains they call speed bumps. i insert a witty comment as to their size and the difficulty of riding a bike in this neighborhood. the boy runs to his mother terrified of the tall white girl on the multi-colored tie-dyed speckled bike.

then i return home.
and thus my world is a better, brighter place.

fragile? i think not.

as a society, i now believe that we are simply too careful with cartons of eggs.

observe: austin traffic at 4:30 this afternoon on 71 heading east from target proved to be a bit stop and go. in true intramural champion ('02-'06, '07-'09) style, i managed to catch the grocery bag of bread and eggs no less than seven times successfully. so i really only missed once. i soundly reasoned that i should leave them on the floorboard of the passenger side of the car since they didn't really have any place to fall from there.

fast forward: i'm at home. i'm imagining the worst. i was planning on making fried eggs on toast for dinner. i currently have no back up besides the black eyes peas in the garden i keep forgetting to water. i open the carton. only one egg is damaged. 1/12 which roughly translates to 8.3% of the carton. not bad by my calculation.

from now on, i won't be so darn careful.

dominating at dominos.

yesterday i joined some of my new neighbors for a bbq quickly turned domino tournament. i won.

the ever sharp 95 year old miss rosa trash talked 19 year old dwight and i incessantly. i made snarky comments about my undisputed winning streak. avon watched with the occasional chuckle. mississippi stopped by to grab some food and take it back to his place to watch the rest of some really important ufc fight.

dwight and i ran into gorde as we walked back and was upset that we had domino's pizza and didn't invite him. (a hard thing to explain away to a man with a severe mental handicap and a severe love of pizza!)

it felt like a family gathering. i feel like i'm home here. and i like that.