2-19-11 8:42 pm The Bike

We looked at a new bike for me today. What a thrill! It's a 2010 Raleigh Venture, a cruising bike. I've wanted to bike to school rather than walk on days when time matters, with out my back hurting from bending over uncomfortably on my old mountain bike.

I'd really like to know, after the mountain bike craze, who all has those uncomfortable things stuffed away somewhere in storage? Maybe other people only buy comfortable equipment. I, however, fell for the craze, regardless of how torturous that thing felt - even when I bought it. My back, the seat, my shoulders, it's made for riding down a mountain side, and I have yet to, and may never, engage in that activity unless I somehow find myself at the top of a mountain, coincidentally with a bike, and a bear starts chasing after me. So, there it hangs in my garage, my Balance Mountain bike with G.R.I.D. (gravity reduction integrated design) engineering, just waiting for some crazed maniac to take it on the kind of spin for which it was designed.

The Balance has been in our painful possession for over a decade. It's time for something new, and this little silver-painted gem, with it's wide seat and upright handle bars fills the bill nicely, and for a nice price too. What about that spending money? If it fills the bill for a car, well, it's quite a deal, and it's good for the environment.

Still, money spend is money out of our wallets and into someone else's. So, giving Harold a hair cut today felt particularly sweet. We began as newly weds, trying to save money. We just kept on doing it. Calculating the amount of money we've saved because I've cut his hair for pretty much our entire marriage, I'm sure we've saved enough to purchase new bikes like the Raleigh, several times over. Let's see: 16 years of marriage multiplied by about 8 cuts per year puts us at about 128 total cuts. If the average cut costs (ed) about $20.00, we've saved about $2,560, if my calculations added up correctly. I think I'm good to buy the bike, and still consider it resource gathering rather than squandering. Maybe we should get one for him too...