OK, I really am lame. If I wasn't lame before (I mean I know I was) I am definitely without any excuses now. Biking, the March for Women's Lives in DC on Sunday, rocky emotional turmoil, and work have inhibited my ability to post even the most mundane comments about my life. I am off to San Francisco on Friday for a meeting, (not a bad business trip as they go).

I keep having grant plans for this. Setting up a blog roll, posting comments on people's sites, people linking to funny things I said about the WMD's or Grammy nominations or something. But I haven't even figured out to post my email. See beginning of entry.

I raised $190.00 for the American Diabetes Association. It's funny, I grew up in a household that discouraged such things on the grounds that people would feel inappropriately compelled to donate. I think one time some bright-eyed youngster put my Mom on the spot and she never recovered. Turns out, its kind of fun to raise money for something, even if it is a well-funded, non-controversial, mainline health consumer group. Someone in my family got diagnosed with diabetes this year, and has done really well since diagnosis. Which is good, because diabetes sucks. It's a horrible, horrible illness to have. So it seems like a good way to give back.

Plus, it gives me an excuse to get out and ride 30 miles, which apparently, I am not going to do on my own....

So I think last week I successfully got myself back into the biking mode. I rode in to work one time and rode to, well towards, Nyack on Saturday. Then I pried myself out of bed again this morning. Also I did a long walk through Central Park on Thursday, on the way home from school. I ride a bicycle that belonged to my last roommate, which collected dust and animal hair in our living room for almost a year and a half before I haltingly asked if I might borrow it sometime to you know, like, ride. She was more than glad to have someone to use it and she offered me the bike on the spot, and then it was my bike collecting dust in the living room. This bike is a Huffy. Remember Huffy's? Huffy's is the company that made the pink banana seat bike with the tassels dangling from the handles that the girl next door had. This is entirely fictional, as their was never, ever a girl living next door to me when I was growing up, much to my dismay. But my point is that my bike is made by the people that design banana bicycles. It's not so high level, which is mostly evidenced by the fact that shifting up on the left side doesn't really take me into a higher gear so much as it initiates a series of clicking noises.

Last summer I did the 25 mile version of the New York Century Ride on my Huffy, which was actually fine. At the end of the ride, as I watched all the riders come in I scoured the crowd for someone else riding a Huffy I told myself I stuck with the biking thing, I could by another bike, a decent bike, on that has more than 6 gears that work. I am doing another bike ride now, this time a fundraiser, the American Diabetes Association Tour de Cure and somehow I feel the need to complete that before I start thinking about buying a bicycle. Plus there are the financial considerations. I am buying an apartment in June. So for now I am laboring on my little Huffy, down through Fort Washington and Hudson River parks. Its quite lovely down there in the morning. I saw what I believe were cherry blossoms.

The thing about biking is, it appears to be a very gear-oriented sport. There is a very specific biker look to the outfits, and the paraphenalia. I rode to Nyack yesterday and I felt distinctly ill-equipped, partly because Nyack is a destination for people who do this frequently. My sweat pants and my orange pullover were billowing in the wind, my sun glasses were distinctly different from the orange and blue creatures that were speeding by me on the George Washington Bridge. Plus there was the speed issue. I was consistently being passed by everyone. If you go to Central Park you feel a little more at home, because you see other people in normal looking clothes, on their bicycles. But Nyack is a little intimidating. Plus its far. I only got as far a Tenafly, before I headed back.

I put up a comments section. So if you are out there, say hi! I'm not sure if this will be a permanent feature of Newyorquina, but I thought I would try it out.

This morning in Starbuck's I was sitting next to three friends who were having breakfast together. One guy was complaining about how hard his sister's visit with her daughter to New York was for him. Apparently, during one part of the visit, which involved dinner plans, his niece drank a whole glass of chocolate milk for before dinner and then didn't want anything to eat. This man, who was not old, maybe thirty five, was totally exasperated and was earning sympathetic noises from his two friends. He was explaining about how the sister offered her seven year-old child the opportunity to pick what she wanted to eat in the restaurant. "You don't ask a seven year-old what you want to eat, you just order for them. I mean, that's the way we were raised." He did make the admission that, he wasn't a parent, and maybe he didn't understand completely. But then he continued telling about another part of the visit where the mother failed to excercise enough authority when the child wanted to take the subway and the grown-ups wanted to take a cab, and gasp, there was a conflict. What a jerk, I thought. Too bad this girl has such a lame uncle. When I was a child, I remember thinking to myself, when I get older I will never do those things that adults do. Clearly, he never had that thought when he was little. Or he sold out somewhere along the way to being an adult. I wonder how old he was.

New York in April is always a profound disappointment for me. There is no promise of spring, no crocuses peeking out from under their mulch, no birds. Just cold and rain. Today is not so bad, but it's grey, grey grey. And yesterday was bitter, like the coldest day of winter.

I signed the contract for my apartment on Thursday. Before I went to the lawyer's office, I had the exact same feeling I had when I was young and had a doctor's appointment. I just didn't want to go. But the signing was really not so scary, and afterwards I was very excited. I picked up the board packet from the broker last night. It's totally overwhelming, like 30 pages of forms.