spoiled chinese girl

Just got back from a 3km bike ride. Well, 3km in distance, but I did a lot of laps of a parking lot in between the going there, and the coming home. Was interesting because it was a high school parking lot, and there were still people out playing basketball after school, as well as a few teachers who were going to their cars. I don’t think the students really cared, but I know for a fact the teachers kind of were aware of me and were watching me to see what I was doing, and why I was there.

It was absolutely awesome. The ride was either slight uphills or slight downhills. Not any flat ground at all. The ride also started with a pretty steep downhill, which means the ending of the ride is a steep uphill. I also had to ride around with traffic which was scary.

Fantastic even. Even though there was traffic, and speed humps which never are going to mix well with a super-rigid track bike, it was fantastic.

I need to readjust the saddle on Rachel though. I think that’s all it really needs. Maybe a shorter stem will bring the handlebars closer to me but I think moving the seat forward will help just as much, and be most economical.

I’m going to try for a ride tomorrow as well. Practice practice practice.

Too much unicycle riding has taught me to lean into turns with my body. Track riding requires a lot of handlebars and an upright rider. These things do not mesh very well. Especially not at the velo.

And I love her for it.

I took Rachel (my new track bike. Yes, I named my bike. F*** off. I also named my car, my unicycles, and a good portion of Phil's as well!) out for about 10 minutes today. It gets dark too quickly, and I don't have ANY lights on her, and the only reflectors are in the cheap pedals that I haven't had time to get changed out yet.

But I'll say the investment of the brake was a d*** good one. I never realized just how hilly my suburb is. And there's no f***ing way my legs were able to slow me down any while I was riding. (And I rode down the GENTLE slope too! lord knows what would have happened if I went down the firebomb of that side-of-a-mountain hill I live on!)

Squee

So six days after doing the velo….

I got my very own track-ready bike.

-58cm Black with Yellow steel Rossin track frame
-Carbon forks (not original steel – brake ready)
-Miche 165 cranks
-Miche BB
-Black Mavic Open Pro Rims with silver spokes
-American Classic front hub
-Miche Rear Hub
-48×16 gearing
-Vittoria Rubino Pro tires
-Deda Stem
-Standard drop bars
-Miche Post

I swear london hates me or something.

Last week while going to London to visit the Forest City Velodrome, the going there was fine (we were late for our own stupidity) but the going home SUCKED.  Why did it suck?  Well for a good stretch of the highway 401 heading East towards Toronto, they had shut down the highway to one lane.  At 4-5pm in the afternoon on a Saturday.  Why?  Because the signs had us believe Road Painting Ahead.  But in actuality, there was a big long chunk of the highway that was shut down so that there could be three people with what looked like floor-buffers in tight succession working together.  And the highway was shut down for a while after that as well.  Making me more than 2 hours late for my… uh… “date.”

This week going to London (why am I going to london so much anyways?) for the Santa Claus parade, they shut down the entire highway for a grand chunk of it, forcing everyone onto this backwater EDR (Emergency Detour Route) which took forever.  I was over an hour and a half late this time.  Seeing as how I planned for a 30 minute buffer due to traffic, I was an hour late for the parade.  Thankfully we’re unicyclists, and we have no float to set up, just unicyclsts to get together.

The parade itself was okay.  A lot of kids aren’t impressed with unicycles keep telling you to catwalk (a wheelie on a bike) and a lot of others keep yelling to do backflips, which I’ll never understand.  The one group of kids I kind of thought were funny even though they were jerks, when they said “Do a trick!” I stopped riding and hopped for them.  “Do something better!”  So I hopped in a 180°… and that’s really the extent of my tricks.  But it wasn’t impressive apparently.  Meh, whatever.  They’re the ones heckling people performing, not me.  I got to high-five a lot of kids too, and tried and missed many others.  High energy but very tiring and extremely hot.  It was a really warm day for a parade, not like last year where it was freezing cold.

What absoloutely SUCKED was that we kept getting really squished in.  We got put in behind a truck-float thingie, and a bunch of firefighters who were collecting canned goods.  And they kept creeping up on us.  To where we had less than I would say 20 feet of space for our 11 cyclists.  While yes we can FIT into such a small space, it’s not impressive looking since we can’t DO anything.  It got worse when they were even overtaking us, with their people who were collecting food in shopping carts were lined up right to the float infront of us, which doesn’t help US any since then no one can see the cyclists.  Also there were a lot of the volunteers walking through us creating more obsticles than we really needed.  I’m all for them collecting food.  But the parade only goes so fast.  After talking to the marshals who talked to the group they finally kept well away from us giving us room to show off and just be merry and ride around.

The drive home was thankfully uneventful, I cruise-controlled it most of the way home at about 130km/h, dropped off the kids I was driving back with their dad and drove home and got into bed around 12:30.

And was up before 4am to drive my mom to the Airport.

Thus, I’m skipping the Milton parade today, in an attempt to sleep in (got home at 5, slept from probably 6:30 until 10ish) and trying to organize a few things at home.

Sweet.

Oh. My. God.

Alright, so I did some promotional work (i.e. standing out on a street corner trying to hand out stuff) for a marketing company that’s based out of Vancouver but trying to organize a Toronto location.  They were doing stuff for the Toronto Film Festival that happens in the middle of Setpember, and I wasn’t working and was available.

So for 5 days out of 7 I worked silly shifts trying to give people newspapers they generally already picked up themselves from lots of available newspaper boxes in the morning (while I was trying to hand them out at night) making my feet hurt in shoes that weren’t meant to be stood in for hours on end, talking myself hoarse, and being rejected left, right and centre.

I was told that it might be feesible to be paid in the last week of September, but maybe it would be the first week of October since the paperwork was being sent back to Vancouver (in hardcopy) and then their accounting department would cut cheques and mail them out.

Surprise of surprise, mid-October arrives and no cheques.  E-mails addressed to the one person in charge are being ignored, so I instead decide to e-mail EVERY SINGLE ADDRESS I can find, off their website, the people I’ve dealt with during that promo, people I’ve talked to regarding new promos… and finally a reply, pretty immediately after that mass e-mail.  We’re being assured they were behind, but “on top of it” and when end of October arrives, they’re going on about how “The cheques were sent, accounting though has confirmed your cheque has not been cahsed” and offers an e-mail payment.  Of course the e-mail payment itself doesn’t arrive until the second week of November?

Guess what.  When they calculated my hours, they somehow missed an entire shift for me.  (They paid me and Phil the same and I worked one more day than he did)  So back to the drawing board.  Again with the e-mails.  After being told that I was lied to by the person who was organizing the street team and saying I wasn’t getting an extra hour’s pay for doing the work of two people for four hours, I was being told there was a second payment coming.

And I waited.  And waited.  And waited.  I patiently wrote e-mails to my contact every three or so days.  And I did this for two weeks.  Finally after that I again pushed the tactic of e-mailing everyone I could in the company in an effort to get a response, with a flair or “I hope everything is okay with you since you haven’t written to me since over two weeks ago”

What a non-surprise, due to the fact I e-mailed everyone I could in the company, I not only got a reply from the girl I’d been trying to contact for more than two weeks (the last e-mail she sent me prior was on November 8th.  I just got my reply this morning so it was probably sent on Friday) I actually got my payment.

Mid-september I did the work.  I got paid at the end of November.

That’s balls.

I definately learned a lesson here, any & all promo work should be paid cash up front.  I’m not giving them a link or anything cuz I don’t want to advertise for them.  If you leave a comment I’ll tell you who it is if you’re interested either for working for them, or avoiding them.