Time to settle back in (Plus a happy story)

I’ve been so slack with my writing lately. There has just been a ton of work to do inside and outside my house, plus I had to find a car for missus Outsider, take my motorcylcle in for service, and get my youngest ready to go back to school. Yeah, it’s been an expensive few weeks.

Now, I’m certainly not hurting for cash, but a bit of pocket money wouldn’t go astray. And then I remembered that back in October of 2005, I bought myself a sweet little BMX bike. I already had a cruiser that I had been racing, but I wanted a 20″ dirt jumper to relive my youth (which wasn’t that long ago anyway). Apparently, having a wife and kids and a job and a mortage changes things. I no longer had the urge to catch big air off large mounds of dirt. As a matter of fact, this bike got ridden about a dozen times before I packed it back up and shipped it to the US with the rest of my stuff. And since we’ve been back, it’s been ridden once by my youngest, who decided that longboarding was cooler.

Fast forward to last night. I put it up on the local online classifieds, asking a couple hundred bucks for it. Less than 30 minutes later, my phone rang, and the caller wanted to know if it would suit her 14 year old son. After a short discussion, she agreed to come by today to see it. Normally, I might expect them to just come get it and hand it to some ungrateful kid, who would probably wreck it, or lose interest quickly. But this kid’s eyes lit up when he saw it, and he seemed pretty stoked. When he handed over his cash, his mum explained that he worked for the money to buy it, and had been searching online for weeks, but kept missing out on the good deals. Now, when she said he earned the money, she explained that he flew with his dad across country, helped load a moving van, then kept his dad company for the drive back – coast to coast. He didn’t ask for anything, but was given $200 for his efforts. And he spent that money not on a Playstation, XBox, or Wii, but on a bicycle. I was told that he kept his first bike inside, and kept it nice and shiny, even though he rode the heck out of it.

Kinda gives me hope for the future. I was honored to sell that kid my bike.