I just drove a motorcycle from one house to another with a truck...

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I just drove a motorcycle from one house to another with a truck... [edit: because I don't know how to ride a motorcycle yet, but like I told Alex, I know how to drive a stickshift vehicle and how to ride a bike, so isn't a motorcycle just a stickshift bike?]


And none of the truck, the motorcycle, or either house is mine.

Welcome, I'm George and I do strange things. So do you, but they're probably not strange in the context within which you live... maybe they'd be strange to an Egyptian microbus driver? Or to an East Bay programmer? Or to a conservative Texan rancher? I like all of these people, so I've come to terms with the fact that I do strange things.

Anyway, Alex and Connor just gave me a motorcycle (to borrow and learn on and look after), a book (Long Way Down, which looks awesome), a bunch of tips about where Alex used to live in Oakland including Rico's Diner which is within walking distance and serves everything necessary to make your own tater-tot burger, a map of the locations where people *legitimately* hitchhike the bay bridge (otherwise it costs a minimum of $7.50 to get to the city and back), and a pocket wi-fi internet tablet computer dealy. Thanks, dudes.

Alex had some great stories, too - he recently got paid to help make a keg robot for yelp.com's main office in the Bay Area. How cool is his job?

Also, he suggested I write my story of how I got addicted to travel and wander around and have crazy adventures and found Burning Man as a how-to for adventure, and that Step 1 should be find gold. I mentioned that a year or two after I spent the $12,000 in gold I found at the Wellesley dump, I made another $12,000 by getting an engineering job for 8 months and living relatively cheaply... but he said that didn't make for nearly as good of a story.

Feel free to stop reading now, unless you're really bored...

To do list for tonight or tomorrow (or soon):
- Drop the motorcycle off at the house (hopefully the contractor and his helpers will be there to help me unload it? Or someone else in the neighborhood...)
- 3:40pm - take the motorcycle permit test
- before that - study for the permit test and figure out how to get there
- finish a long e-mail to Meg
- get some work done on the house, or at least figure out what I'm working on next
- plan saturday - ikea? home depot? uban ore? the Habitat for Humanity Re-store? The Used food store? More work on the house?
- Ask Ronnie about my sleeping bag... maybe add REI to Saturday's list to get a sleeping bag and a headlamp (and wrist-lamp if they have them)
- find the bike part I just bought and put in a super-safe location I don't remember.
- Add Casual Carpool info to HitchWiki and digihitch, if it's not there yet
- Install that bike part on my bicycle so I can bicycle.

Bicycle?

Comments

George said…
All that motorcycle/truck shuffling was after working from around 12:30 to 6ish with a son-in-law of one of my mom's jewelery students at his warehouse. He's accepted me as a sort of apprentice, and I'm learning all sorts of stuff about all sorts of stuff, including electrical wiring, composting, farming, bio-fuel, nail-pulling, and more I can't think of right now. It's a great partnership so far! Hooray for the bay area!
October 21, 2010 at 11:30 AM
Colin said…
isn't a motorcycle just a stickshift bike?

Yup. A 500 pound bike that goes 70 miles per hour. Or if that isn't scary enough, think of it as a very powerful sports car that you drive while strapped to the front grill. Oh, and it can fall over at any time.
October 21, 2010 at 7:49 PM
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