Last week The week before that The week before that The week before that The week before that You get to the point where you're so used to bad news that you don't really recognize the good stuff when it hits you. But we should have a lease this afternoon, and it should contain no surprises, and there will be terms that we've agreed to. It's based on a layout that's been conditionally agreed to by the State. It's going to cost us an ungodly amount of money per month, but if the projections hold (and the projections are conservative) we'll be paying 4x that ungodly amount in salaries by this time next year and by this time 2017 will be profiting... an embarrassing multiple of that amount. It's all projections, though. "Helplessness" is putting all your energy into a business you can never practice, you never want to practice, and whose practice you have zero competencies within. A friend is taking all of the house plants and the aquarium. We're under contract with the movers and the car hauler. I thought long and hard about paying $900 to have a $2600 car moved a thousand miles but the fact of the matter is, there are no $3500 cars worth owning. At least, not at this stage in my life when I need a back seat that will hold a booster and a vehicle that will get me where I need to go on shitty icy Seattle roads. At this very moment, my wife is seeing her last clients as her former business entity. Change of address forms have been filed. A box full of cuttings of the plants that matter to me (some of which were on my desk back when I started working after college in 2000) are in transit to my father-in-law, who will root them and get them ready to live again. We've started that "do this one last time" process. Yesterday was the last ride down the Strand before boxing up the longboard. We've also started that "things you were supposed to do while you lived there" process. This weekend was the "take pictures at the Hollywood sign" trip. I'm going to be in dire trouble in about 12 years. Dire trouble. God as my witness, I have no idea why my 2-year-old daughter poses like Kathy Ireland. She brought home a 5x7 piece of paintboard with a green smear on it. I asked her what it was a picture of. "Paint." Then my wife asked her what she'd painted. "Probably a picture." She'll never be Damien Hirst with that kind of thinking.
Naaah. Shit was getting twitchy towards the end. The Benelli decided to pull its whole "I'm italian and I have electrical problems" thing about two days before we were done and that encouraged me to give it a rest until I can rip the front off and waterproof the dash. And drivers around here have been extra-special bad lately. You know how sometimes you can sort of feel seriously bad shit about to come down? That was September. Fortunately for me, none of that bad shit came down on me. Unfortunately for my buddy Joe, he got squeezed between a Lexus and an Audi at what he thought was 35. Turns out it was 65. He ended up with stitches and PT and a totaled Buell XB-12R rat bike. Nothing says "grabby front brakes" quite like Erik Buell and his amazing inverted rotors... We tried that design on a Formula SAE car and discovered exactly why nobody does it like that. As did my buddy, at 65mph, on the 101, staring into the face of a bunch of shredded skin. The bike is going in the back of a moving van. Then it's going into a garage where I can get on it fer realsies, where my tools will be two steps away, rather than five flights of stairs. I'm so eager not to have the trunk of my car function as my toolbox.