tcepsa | Incredible crazy awesome day!

Had a total blast working with Em to fix my bike. She is a bike-fixing maniac, I tell you! A tornado of bike fixing prowess! It was awesome. We took pretty much the whole thing apart (removed both tires and the cranks to check the axles, got a bikeshop near her to remove the back gears, repacked the bearings in both wheels and cleaned pretty much all of the above). Not bad for seven hours. We even found time to snag some nutty bars in there. I managed to come away with a bit of sun on my arms, but hopefully that will not cause too much discomfort at Emerald's place tomorrow. Oh! And got new cones for the rear wheel because one had a small pit in it and the other one contained--I kid you not--the Pit of Despair! It went about 1/3 of the way around the cone. The fact that there were bearings left was amazing to me. This reaffirms my determination to do my own work from here on out, because about a year ago I paid a bike shop like $80 to do a tune up. If I'm paying a bike shop $80, I generally expect that to include something as straightforward as checking the cones for wear and repacking the bearings. I only rode the bike maybe five times after that. It takes more than five times to create a pit 1/3 of the way around a cone. Conclusion: bike shop did not, in fact, check the cone for wear. Bastards...

But it's okay now because I have brand new cones and shiny new bearings, all gliding through a veritable sea of lithium grease and tightened to within micrometer precision (okay, so maybe not micrometer, but it's some of my best work to date when it comes to repacking bearings ^_^ )

Plus Em is just a fun person to be around. She's got this energy, this zest, that I just can't help but pick up on which is why I am now also rather on the hyper side. There's more reason to it than just her though, which I'll get to in a second.

I got back home like ten minutes before the first wave of the storm hit, so I got to watch it from my balcony. I think it was probably one of the best storms I've seen yet (taking into account things like visibility to me, time of day, etc.) Lots of lightning and thunder, the way I love 'em. Great way to start the evening :-D

I watched a couple more episodes of the new anime that Ryan introduced me to last night, Bleach. It's quite good and I love the style. I've only been through about three episodes, so I can't make too strong a recommendation for it yet, but to my friends who watch anime (you know who you are) I think you'd enjoy it.

Then I switched over to Linux mode, did a little research on programming topics of this and that (trying to learn XML and SOAP, mainly) and then fired up a Blender tutorial that I downloaded a few days ago. I love these animated tutorials; it's really helpful to be able to see what they're doing as they describe it--at least for me.

This particular tutorial was about animation. Yes, frauen und herren, madames et messieurs, ladies and gentlemen, I can now do animations. Bow to the Snowman, as he bows to you! Cuteness in action! ^_^ (warning, it is a 4 MB file. But it's totally worth the wait! You can say you were one of the first to see my first movie!)

Current movie quotation stuck in head:
Yzma: Take it, Kronk. Feel the power!
Kronk: Oh yeah. I can feel it.