Shew! What a busy weekend!
The greenie & I went for our first run together in over 6 months on Saturday morning. To be quite honest I was more than mildly surprised that I remember how to ride, the sequences of the gear changes, braking with front & rear brakes, and pulling away without stalling, you know, that kinda thing. When I was learning to ride I stalled at least once every time I tried to pull away. Most frustrating, and the more frustrated I got the more I stalled. Saturday I was fine, maybe it’s just a false sense of security, but I didn’t stall once! It was a short but great ride, great because the bike really is running better than ever, and short because I had to hurry home to go to…
The massage course I told you about. Sports massage. It was run by the lady I normally go to when I need pummeling back into shape, and it was a very informative and practical course. By the end of Sunday we had been taught how to give a full body massage in an hour. It’s actually a pretty difficult thing to fit into one hour, doesn’t leave you too much time to work on problem areas. We paired up and practiced our techniques on our partner. I can truly say that by Sunday afternoon I was all massaged out. I think students get a little over-zealous when they find a knotted muscle. After a practice leg massage, full leg massage, practice back massage, and full body massage I felt quite pummeled. It was a lot of fun though, and the time flew by so quickly.
I’ve tried a little practicing on my Hunny, he’s not an easy candidate, his muscles are quite a bit thicker than your average bloke, but he says I’m not doing too bad 
With two days of course, and an assortment of other activities it hardly felt like I’ve had a weekend at all, but that’s okay, there is always the next one. Oh no wait, that one is fully booked also. *sigh*
From 9AM to 4PM each day this weekend I’m going on a sports massage course. I have a secret desire to be a physiotherapist; for the moment this is as close as I can get to that. I’m very excited!
The course has an interesting set of requirements, amoung them:
Short fingernails
Shorts that are loose enough to be pulled up (we’ll be practicing techniques on eachother)
A bikini top or tank top that can be easily removed (for same reason as above)
Hunny’s quite excited about this too, he has volunteered to be my number one guinea pig. I’m not so sure about that. The guy is pretty huge, it’s like massaging two people…
One thing I’m worried about: my hands and wrists are going to get incredibly tired. My usual day job that has them typing is no preparation for deep tissue massage.
I have had this post planned for a while. It’s taken a number of different tones over the past 6 odd months, starting with Jubilation: “Yippee! My bike is back, and she looks better than ever!”. Then it moved on to “Finally! My Bike is back!”. Some relief and jubilation in the tone. Then it was “Well I eventually got my bike back, but at least she looks great!” Annoyed but happy.
At about 4 months in, I was planning a hate post for the guy that was repairing the damage to my bike: “The stupid bastard still has my bike! I can’t believe someone could offer such shoddy service!”. At 5 months I was in tears, would I ever get the damn bike back? I hated my formerly trusted mechanic for making such an idiot out of me.
Last Friday, at six and a half months, greenie came home. I thought I’d be elated, but the elation hasn’t come. Rueful relief is more like it.
What follows is a post of the tribulations and excuses that made this a six and a half month journey. Not great reading for you I am sure, but hopefully therapeutic for me.
At the end of April this year Hunny and I did a 4000 km trip from JHB down to Port Elizabeth, along the coast line to Cape Town and back. Hunny on his Suzuki M109R, me on my Kawasaki ZZR400. The little 400 coped extremely well with the long distance. Our average pace was probably between 130 – 140 km/h and she did just fine.
On day 6 of the journey I had a lapse in concentration at a crucial spot, hit some gravel and we came down. Not a scratch on me, but the greenie took a bit of a hit:
Good thing Hunny brought duct tape, we were able to stick her back together and carry on. The damage seemed to be only cosmetic, except for my right foot peg which he were are to get welded back on 400km’s later. No right foot peg made for some interesting riding and a couple of cramped muscles, but that’s another story.
We arrived back in Joburg on May 2nd, and that afternoon took the bike in to our trusty mechanic Norman to ask him what we should do. Norm agreed that the damage was repairable, no bent frames, just cosmetic. And that’s when the waiting started.
Norm doesn’t do the paint & repair work himself, he sends it out to another provider. This guy (don’t know his name) was supposed to come in and pick up everything paintable (we decided to give the greenie a complete respray) and give Norm a quote. Well, paint guy took his own good sweet time, and came back with a fairly expensive quote, so Norm asked another guy for a quote, but it was in the same ballpark, so we decided to go with guy one, because we knew he did a very good job. So we finally got a quote to submit to insurance, this was 6 weeks later …
It’s notable that at this point, when Hunny went round to nag Norm for the quote, they tried to start the bike, it wouldn’t start. Norm said he’d look into that.
Anyway, insurance approved the quote, so now things were supposed to start happening. My work colleagues and friends were already asking me on a weekly basis “So when you are you getting your bike back?”. Embarrassed to say we didn’t even have a quote yet, I explained that we know Norm takes a little longer, but he does a really great job. (Which he does, but at what cost? My sanity?)
Time went on, and I kept asking Hunny what was happening with the bike (He was dealing with Norm at this stage), but progress was slow. We had planned a bike trip on the long weekend starting 9th August, and Norm had promised to get the bike back to us by the end of July. July came and went, and so did the long weekend, with only excuses from Norman. He had the paintwork back by this stage, but had done nothing at all with the bike in the meantime, and the bike still didn’t start!
At this point I’m feeling like the biggest idiot. It seems there is nothing we can do to get Norman to do his job, and because the insurance quote was approved for him to do the work, we couldn’t take it away from him without additional expenses. We know that he does do a brilliant job, and I was convinced that the result will be worth the wait. By this time I had asked my work colleagues not to ask about the bike anymore.
My birthday was on the 14 of August. When we didn’t get the bike back in time for the long weekend, I told Hunny that if it wasn’t back in the garage by my birthday, I’d call the 30 odd guests that were coming around for my birthday bash and tell them not to come. It was an empty threat, but Hunny did go to Norm and tell him that was my birthday, and Norm promised to (his own words) “pull finger” to get the bike back to me on my birthday. Birthday came and went, as did party, with no bike.
Somewhere around about here I decided to give Norm a call myself, just so he could lie to me also. He made some empty promises, weak excuses, and basically told me he was doing me a favor, and losing money, to salvage the bike because it should really have been a write-off. I told him that if it were written off I would have a new one by now. It was a cheap second hand bike when we bought it, so the quote to repair was ominously close to write-off value. In hind sight that would have been the wiser option, but it seemed silly to write off a bike for cosmetic damage.
And then the wait continued… Hunny was visiting Norm on a weekly basis to get the latest collection of excuses, and we were both feeling incredibly despondent about the bike. I started worrying that the insurance would refuse to pay the claim because too much time had elapsed. Hunny had Norm phone the insurance company. He fed them some story about waiting for parts and got their agreement to still pay once the claim was submitted.
At this point it was the non-starting of the bike, discovered before we got the quote, that was holding up matters. Norm suspected it was a compression issue, but just wasn’t getting around to doing anything with it. Hunny had a huge blow-out with Norm about that, and Norm assured him that he’d get to it within the week. Hunny thought they had reached an understanding. When he went around a week later to find that absolutely nothing had been done, he lost his cool. He went around the next day to fetch the bike (minus fairing etc) to take it to another shop so someone would at least look at it.
Randburg motorcycles got back to us within a week, having diagnosed some problem (I forget what…) and fixed it, and said that while there was a compression issue, it wasn’t too major and was likely long standing, we’d probably bought the bike that. They’re probably correct as twice while riding the bike I’d had a lack of power on pull-away, but that was twice in 6 months, so not a big deal.
Sadly the bike now had to go back to Norm to be fitted with fairing & etc, because he still had those parts. This was around mid October. Norman did get around to putting the bike together (minus the new exhaust) and we were getting hopeful that the end may be in sight. Norm then took the bike for a ride (its first in 6 months) and said that there was still something wrong with the engine, but he’ll take a look at it. Surprise surprise, a week later he’d still done nothing. In that time I’d been to visit him because I thought it only fitting that he lie to my face also, but Hunny had had enough. He went around that afternoon, came to an agreement with Norm that he’d take what the insurance gave him, we’d take the bike and the still not fitted exhaust, and we’d call it quits.
So the next week the bike was back at Randburg motorcycles, with my new favorite mechanic, Danie. The last time the bike had been with him it was missing some major parts that would have allowed him to test drive the bike, so he was quite apologetic that we had to bring it back. He explained that he was very busy at the moment, but would get back to us in a week, and amazingly he did! Wow! He thinks the bike it much better, but not 100%. It needs some new parts for the carburetors which will need to be imported from Japan at 6 -8 weeks delivery time, but we can take it home in the meantime.
Sourcing parts is the major problem with buying grey imports, we have learnt our lesson. We can also get a set of second hand carbs from bikeshop-online, they have 11 sets, and if the one we take isn’t hundreds, we can swap out through all 11 sets. It’s a tough call.
So end status is that yesterday Hunny rode by bike home from Randburg motorcycles (I haven’t ridden in so long I have probably forgotten how!) and it’s now in our garage with a stunning paint job, a carburetor problem and without its new exhaust. We still need to collect the new exhaust from Norman and get it fitted elsewhere.
If you are still reading, I think you can understand why my enthusiasm for getting my bike back is not what it should be. But she looks pretty, here are some before & after pictures.
Full view …
Part of the screen snapped off entirely, but duct tape is amazing stuff. This held together for the remaining 1 000 odd kilometers.
The missing piece of fairing from below the indicator is still somewhere outside Wellington. Paint guy did a great job of fixing that …
When I was a teenager mood rings were all the rage, along with Doc Martins, laddered stockings and auburn hair die. I still die my hair auburn from time to time, but my stockings stay intact these days, and I haven’t seen Docs in any stores form quite a few years now. I did see toe mood rings in my local chemist the other day, and I almost bought one, but well, toe rings kinda went out of fashion with the nineties too.
I have one of two problems: either I have no emotional intelligence whatsoever, or I’m way over stimulated in that department. I think it’s the second, but if it were the first I wouldn’t know, would I?
So what am I getting at with this? I have trouble knowing where I stand with people. I spend a lot of time analyzing people’s behavior and reactions towards me, trying to figure out how they feel about/towards me. So like I said, perhaps this means that I’m totally out of tune with other people’s emotions, or I read to much into what people say and do. The most difficult person in my life for me to read is probably my husband. He’ll testify to the number of times I ask him if he’s okay. If he goes quiet for a bit I start thinking something is wrong. Then I ask him what’s wrong, and he says “nothing”. Then I start thinking “oh crap, must be something big”, meantime the poor bloke was probably just mulling over something about work. I have learnt one thing though: he goes quiet when he’s hungry, so I only start worrying now if he turns down food
Which gets me back to mood rings: it’d suit me well if I could stick something like a piece of mood litmus paper on my Hunny (and a few other folks) that’d just give me a overall status to how I’m fairing: Red means I screwed up big time, Green means we’re all dandy, and a couple colours in-between that say “watch out, heading for trouble”, ” just plodding along” and “it’s not you it’s me” …
It’d free up a bit of my brain capacity for sure …
I spent most of this past Saturday at an introduction and training session for a Direct Marketing Business venture. You know the type: Join our scheme and buy our product at a reduced rate and sell it to your friends for a profit and then get your friends to join our scheme and sell our products and you make a profit on what they sell etc …
You wouldn’t usually find me at a gathering like this, I’m quite a reserved person who likes to make calculated decisions and these folk are all rah rah rah song and dance and yippee and jump in head first, but it does seem like a reasonable venture, and I was invited by someone close to me so I went.
I’m undecided still as to weather to join the venture, but what did make itself pretty clear to me on Saturday was that I don’t love or want to pursue money. The closing presenter – a guy earning more than a million rand a year (70 + K per month) – made the statement that this will only really work for you if you have a burning desire to change your financial future. If he’d pitched his argument at having more free time I’d probably be sold on the idea, but I’m not easily baited by money. In fact, subconsciously, I’m quite determined not to make money the primary deciding factor in any of my major decisions, though I’ll admit that good fortune allows me to be that way. Of course if I spot this nice red shirt here for 300 bucks and that one there for 200 bucks, I’ll take the cheaper option, but I’d like to think that I won’t change jobs just for cash.
So while I think this particular venture – despite it’s misgiving of being very similar to a pyramid scheme – could work, does work, and could actually work for me, I’m concerned that it might change me into one of those people: the people that live their lives in pursuit of more cash and the next sale.
So my pondering is thus: can one join a venture filled with people whose motivation is money, and not give in to the environmental peer pressure, yet still make a success of it? Hmmm, I don’t know …
Posted by: Alex
