Good Intentions

Well, I have been back in Los Angeles for a week now and am only barely getting around to things like cleaning out my refrigerator and/or blogging. As promised, my heavily-backordered new helmet finally arrived in the mail while I was gone. I keep meaning to take pictures of it but, alas, have resorted to stealing the same from the Internet.
The one on the left is an approximation of what my old black helmet looks like; the one on the right is the very new and improved new helmet, courtesy of my sister-in-law as a thank-you for sewing her wedding dress.

I know it seems unbelievable, but I actually think the new helmet is bigger than my old Spaceballs-sized one. This matter was made painfully clear to me last Saturday morning, which began innocently enough when I went down to the parking garage in my apartment and proceeded to painstakingly dust away all the California wildfire ash that had settled on the Vespa during my prolonged absence. Since the Vespa had sat for over a month, I figured I would have to kick-start the thing for the first time and, like most new things in life, I viewed this with simultaneous excitement and trepidation. Alas, it started the normal way—pretty amazing since the thing is running off what appears to be a laptop battery. I was on the Vespa and headed out the garage door for a much-anticipated reunion ride when I remembered the complexities of something that only Angeleno apartment-dwellers can relate to:

Tandem parking.

That’s right—in order to conserve space, our apartment complex has given the Roommate and I one very long parking space to share and we have to park one behind the other. As a result, we are constantly doing the car-switching dance, which sounds similar to the “Neutron Dance,” I know, but is far less energizing. Bless her heart, the Roommate bears the tandem brunt far more than I do—although she either works from home or works late, she still manages a groggy smile at 7:15 every morning when I wake her up to move her car so I can go to work. Yet despite her unending car-switching charity, I was about to thoughtlessly drive off on the Vespa and leave her car parked in by the Jeep on a Saturday morning.

Did I mention how early it was for a Saturday? Sadly, I was still on “trial hours,” and therefore had undertaken the whole Vespa-dusting exercise at around 6:30 a.m., having run out of things to do in my apartment. Rather than wake the Roommate up to switch spots with me just in case she needed to go somewhere very early on a Saturday morning, I decided to just move the Jeep into a spot on the street.

And that’s right about the time when I tried to get into the Jeep while still wearing my new helmet. It didn’t fit.

The good news—the new helmet took a huge hit against the Jeep’s black door frame and walked away without a mark. The even better news—the new helmet apparently prevented the concussion I surely would have experienced had I hit my bare head against the car that hard; I think this bodes well for similar protection in the event that my head ever makes contact with another vehicle and/or asphalt. The best news of all—it was so crazy early on a Saturday morning that nobody was around to witness the sheer “America’s Funniest Home Videos” idiocy of it all.

So, despite the fact that my Vegas trial has put me behind, I am participating in NaNoWriMo 2007 through the end of November. I always intended to do a late-October post encouraging any interested writers out there to join me, but said post never came to fruition. Still, check it out and consider doing it next year. Once it’s over, I’ll rejoin the living and kindly post on all your blogs again, which I have been reading.