Majcher.com

Busy couple of days. On tuesday night, Bernie and I attended a "curator's reception" at the California Academy of Sciences. I recently bought myself a membership to the museum, and one of the perks of the level that I signed up for is occasional swank events like this, with lots of free wine and snacks. It was like a science fair for grown-ups; each of the departments in the Academy had a representative at a little table, with some of their recent work or research laid out and presented. Lots of skeletons and skulls, things floating in jars, bugs on pins, rocks and minerals and fossils laid out with little labels, that sort of thing. One woman in particular was very excited about her trilobite collection. It was pretty fun - I like science. The other thing of note was that almost every single attendee was white, and over 45. Just saying.

We went to Toy Boat for ice cream afterwards, and I made myself sick on a big ol' hot fudge sundae. Mmmmm.

Last night, I went to my last motorcycle repair class at Subterranean Cycles, which is owned and operated by our old housemates, Pat and Abi. The class was three wednesday nights, three hours each, and covered pretty much anything your average motorcycle owner would want to know about taking care of their bike. I learned a lot, and that's after living with those guys and hanging out at the shop for a few years. If you own a bike in SF, I recommend it.

Of course, on the ride home, my bike died. It was sputtering and stuttering and backfiring a bit that afternoon, but I had attributed it to a low, then freshly filled gas tank, maybe some rust or sediment in the carburetor, but I stopped dead around Geary and Van Ness. No lights, no power - the battery! I had been a dumbass a few days ago and left the keys in, and the bike on, all day, so I took the battery in and put it on a trickle charger, and re-installed it. Apparently, I didn't screw one of the battery contacts down tight enough, because the nut that held the bolt in had come loose, and fallen off somewhere on the streets of the city. I cajoled a security guard into giving me a piece of masking tape, which held things together for a bit, but after stopping and starting for a while, I finally parked about ten blocks from my apartment, walked home to get the two nuts I had removed from my jacket pocket a few days earlier, walked back to the bike, screwed stuff down, and finally rode home. Well, at least I got a good walk out of it, and it wasn't anything serious. Still. Dumbass.