Crash...

Yesterday I had quite the afternoon. I was leaving my house to go to my brother's house. I was gonna drive my car, but when I looked outside, it was too gorgeous to not ride Miss Sally. So I get ready by putting on my leathers and gloves and boots, etc. I am heading down the road, enjoying the beautiful day and I get close to the 8 on ramp. While making my right hand turn, my back tire hits an oil slick, or some reflective paint, or some sand or SOMETHING that causes my bike to slip. Now, this could have put me down right away, but I remembered my saftey course info and straightened the bike up and proceeded to hit to the brakes. Since I was in a right turn when Sally slipped, I was headed straight towards the opposite lane. I had about .5 seconds to react and I realized that I wasn't going to be able to stop in time. I had two options at this point, continue braking and hit one of the cars sitting in the opposite lane that were waiting at the stop sign (not fun), or I could crank the bars and take a dive (also not fun). I decided upon the latter. So I pull hard right on the bars and shift my weight to the right side and drop the bike. We slid on the ground and the bike ended up pinning me to the ground. We slid to a stop about 3 feet away from the cars. One of the guys in one of the cars got out and instantly helped me get the bike off me and helped me wheel it to the side of the road. I had done everything that I was trained to do and I was able to get up and dust myself off and walk away. The bike needed a little bit of TLC, but my dad and I were able to tweak most of the parts back into place and she is still ridable. I was able to "crash" correctly which means that I am able to keep riding. They say there are two types of riders: Those that have crashed, and those that will crash. I hopefully have experienced my one crash to meet those expectations. In short, I crashed, but it was with purpose (good purpose) and thanks to training, proper gear and safety classes, I walked away with a bruised leg and scraped elbow and a dinged up bike. What could have been terrible, wasn't that bad. Still scary, but all is well.

Food...

I don't know why I haven't begun doing so already, but I am now planning on taking photos of most of my food stuffs that I make. I already started to do so on facebook, but I will try and blog about it too.The first entry is what I made and plated in my culinary class on 2/7/11. This is a braised herb pork tenderloin with sweet braised red cabbage, maple glazed carrots and finished with a red wine dijon sauce.

I shall post more as I make them, not just from class, but from my own personal kitchen adventures as well. Hope you enjoy. And if ya want the recipe, I'm working on getting them all written up and posted with the photos, but that will come in time.

Robbed...

My storage unit was robbed on 2-1-11. I went in yesterday to see if there was anything missing and file a report and all that jazz. I was ROBBED. They took my bass, my guitar, my entire DVD collection, all my performance DVD's, DVD player, my entire CD collection, my desk accessories, etc, etc...Let's just say that they got A LOT of my stuff. And that is just the noticeable stuff, not to mention all the stuff that could be missing from all the boxes that were opened and lying around. The bass, guitars and dvd player type things, those can be replaced. I would prefer to not HAVE to replace them, but it is what must be done now.
But they took my DVDs and CDs. I had easily over 300 titles. All gone. I had a lot of boxed sets: Indiana Jones, Rocky, Back to the Future, Jurrasic Park, etc. I also had an EXTENSIVE collection of Kirsten Dunst, Jim Carrey and Tom Hanks films.
I also had 300+ albums in there too. All gone. All my musicals, New Found Glory albums, My un-opened Black Market Hearts and Piehead CDs.
Worst of all, they took my home videos and performance DVDs. The stuff that isn't worth a damn to anyone but me. No more high school plays. No more college shows. No more short student films. No more musical theatre performances. All. Gone. These were things I was supposed to be able to show my kids and grand kids. "Look at Daddy when he was in college...etc." But the bastards robbed me of that.
I had so much stuff. Granted, I am glad that they just got my stuff and no one was hurt, but it took me my life to collect all that stuff and I really am not looking forward to starting over.