Last week ended with some work related news that I won't discuss here. Let's just say that things are in flux and the future seems murky at the moment. But then, certainty equals boredom, right? ;) Saturday was a good day. In the afternoon I headed over to Erik's to "poke a Honda" (say it out loud for the full effect) -- the CL350 was transferred back to Erik's garage when we went to Los Angeles so that he could continue to poke while I was off gallivanting in the land of swimming pools and movie stars, this explains why there have been no recent photos, as I consistently forget to take my camera when I go over there. We twiddled about for a while: getting the foot pegs fully mounted; test fitting the replacement side covers; wrestling with, cursing at, and ultimately drilling out a broken-off left-hand mirror bolt (looks like we might need to tap that now... fun.).
After that, we took out Erik's Honda XL250 (probably one of the world's most forgiving bikes) and found a big construction site with lots of flat, soft dirt. He let me bang around there for a couple hours, I'd guess. I was very comfortable on the bike even though I had my "first dump": I was riding around a ring that went over a dirt spine just to get the feel of how the bike can handle verticality, etc. when I finally decided I was done I thought I'd be super cool and drive onto the spine rather than over it. Needless to say it didn't work very well and I ended up grabbing the front brake instead of the clutch and just plopped right over. The ground was soft and I (mostly) got my leg out of the way -- no damage was done.
Sunday was spent working around the house: I mowed the lawn, cooked some chicken pesto cavatappi, downloaded some Veronica Mars torrents (Note to The Wife: This means you can watch VM on the computer! -- VM is "the new Buffy" according to my darling spouse, and yes, I enjoy it, too.), and generally farted around. Good times.