Trust me. You forget.

While I bragged on Penelope and Mendacious' blog that I had been blogging every day, it occurred to me today that although this is technically true, I haven't shared anything about the fascinating goings-on of my actual life for almost a week.

You haven't missed much.

Until tonight, that is. Because tonight I am Home Alone-- Ben's gone to his sister's in New Jersey for her college graduation, and I am left to my own devices with the following items for amusement:

1. A copy of Liza With a Z, which arrived via Netflix this afternoon

2. A box of "slightly damaged" hair dye I bought at Giant Eagle for $2.49

3. My old bike, which Ben recently repaired for me.

While a good dance number or a chance at a browner shade of hair are appealing, I could not resist the siren call of the bike, which is interesting, because I haven't actually ridden a bike since I was about sixteen, and my dad, who among family and friends is known as Safety Man, would have strongly cautioned me to not ride my bike if no one was home to save me when I inevitably fell off and broke my head open on the sidewalk.

But I was sitting the garage, reading the circulars from last Sunday's paper, and the bike was just sitting there, mocking me. It's the same bike I've had since I was in the eighth grade (although still in pretty good shape, owing to the fact that, as Safety Man's daughter, I never really rode it anywhere other than the evenly-laid sidewalks of the subdivision I grew up in), but it seemed so much more ominous now that I was pretty sure that I had forgotten how to ride it.

So after a quick phone call home to tell my mother that I was planning on riding my bike without any supervision, I dragged it out into the driveway and cautiously mounted it. (Mounted it. Ew.)

Turns out, I had not forgotten the basics of biking-- like pedaling and breaking. It was the steering that had kind of faded from my memory, so that the first five minutes of my bike ride were spent going straight down the middle of the street, with cars unable to pass on either side, because I was too timid to veer off in one direction or the other. Soon, I remembered the relative safety of the sidewalk and went there, only to be forced off by a little girl on a bike with training wheels who had pretty much staked her claim on the flat, straight strip in front of the elementary school.

(Curiously enough, this is the same elementary school I attended for kindergarten and first grade, and they used to have bike rallies there at the end of the year, but I never participated because I wasn't good enough to maneuver through the traffic cone slalom.)

All in all, I rode for a total of ten minutes or so, and did not fall off, although I did have to do an emergency brake-job into someone's front lawn after I lost control (apparently, if you go too slowly on a bike, you start to tip over). And I have to say, I'm excited to go biking again, mainly because I look forward to a day when I can legitimately wear bike shorts. Also, all the little kids in the neighborhood seem to think it's cool that I'll ride bikes with them, which means they are less likely to throw juice boxes in our lawn, which seems to happen pretty frequently.

Now I just need to plan a route where I don't actually have to make any turns or ever, ever, ever leave the sidewalk...