Learning to Bike

Reserved for a post about my biking adventures.
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I’ve tried different forms of writing on this blog. From just flat out relating to what happened to being as vague and sentimental as possible (apparently no one understood that), the strategies each have their own merits. However, I’m going to try a new one this time. I’ve never done this before, so bear with me and my questionable artwork. With no female present to abuse cameras, I will attempt to recreate various scenes using Microsoft paint. Fortunately, no one present was fat enough to cause image size problems, so I assure you that all draws are in fact to scale. No artist’s bias to speak of.

So when I got home from a highly successful day at tennis, I realized that it’s a pretty nice day outside. Wanting to take advantage of the new bike, I yelled at Eric to get over here. He conveniently arrived exactly as F91 vs. Nony (epic starcraft match) was beginning. EE Han Timing … not.

My parents, for some reason, didn’t believe in my biking abilities. They forbade me from riding in the streets. How dumb. So when we left (with my dad watching closely, no doubt wondering if I’d come back in one piece) we had to walk our bikes up my street. As soon as we got to Kirby (the big street) this is more or less what happened.

Note the yellow line. That’s how big this road is.

So when Mr. Very Ugly finally decided to slow down, we ran across the street and got to the park. Here, I put my biking prowess on full display by actually succeeding at getting on the bike! Unfortunately, I was unprepared for such a momentous occasion and promptly rode off the path.

Yes, the little kid existed. I may or may not have fabricated the words. In other news, do not question the shape of his head.

After walking my bike up to the road where this path came out, we arrived in a random neighborhood. Without Kevin Lu to guide us we were hopelessly lost, so we charged off in an arbitrary direction.

Things were going just fine until we reached the first great obstacle. Eric calls it a “hill,” but in my opinion “mountain” or better yet “frickin ginormous mountain” would be better suited. Allow me to demonstrate the size.

My elementary school art teacher always told me to make the sky come down the ground. I think she would be proud.

Somehow, Eric managed to get up this “hill.” I’m convinced he took a shortcut. Not knowing of a shorter path, I was actually forced to walk to the top of this geological irregularity. Upon reaching the top, we sped downwards at an extremely fast rate. Being the daredevil that I am, I only held my brakes for half the way down.

As we were racing along, we realized that a lemonade stand was coming up. Since I am always prepared for everything, I pulled out my wallet and handed the nice little girls 50 cents for their lemonade.

I was worried about the appearance of a second gender in this narrative, but in retrospect my art skills handled it flawlessly.

By the way, that lemonade cup is seriously drawn to scale. It was probably about 2 millimeters tall.

Since my thirst was not quite quenched by that 2 mL drink, I proceeded to steal some of Eric’s Gatorade while he was trying my bike out. He may have suspected something, but I’m sure I covered it up smoothly.

Maybe he suspected something

After discovering that we had in fact picked the hilliest place known to mankind to bike around, I was pretty tired. To resolve this issue we found a stable equilibrium and proceeded to practice simple harmonic motion.

I wouldn’t be smiling if I could see the text above me.

After all that adventure, it randomly decided to start raining. With the sun out. My parents actually predicted this. When it rains and the sun is out, they say that “the fox is getting married.” Yeah. It’s legit according to Wikipedia. Well, legit in Southwest England, but we’ll give them a pass on that one. The rain was so weird. As Eric so poetically described it, the rain drops were “the size of hail … but rain.” Thanks to our expert planning, we were actually quite close to our house. Here is an amazingly accurate diagram of our path.

Perhaps I should be more explicit on that middle step.

Upon arriving at my house I responsibly turned down Eric’s offer to play pingpong in favor of doing AMT homework. Then I proceeded to watch liquibition and write this blog.

So, who wants to help me train for Tour de France?