It was Monday when my friend and networker extraordinaire Joel emailed me out of the blue asking if I could come give a talk to his Cub Scouts troop Thursday night about endangered animals. I barely hesitated to say sure, and only after I signed on did I wonder what the heck I was going to say.

I mean, it’s not like I had a ready-made presentation stowed on some hard drive somewhere that I could call up and dust off. And as the workweek would have it, I had little time to build one until yesterday afternoon when we finally shipped the latest issue of my magazine and I had an hour to decompress — and did so finding information on condors, and tortoises and Channel Island foxes, and the like, pulling it together in a hastily crafted powerpoint slideshow just in time to leave and bike up Overland (along the way rediscovering the steep hill north of Palms Boulevard that I’d long forgotten about) to Santa Monica Boulevard to Wilshire and the Electric Fountain at that decidedly nonbike- and nonhuman-friendly intersection where I stopped to relax and unsweat since I was a few minutes ahead of schedule.

Looking down into the pool of the fountain I entertained the notion of going in for a splash but put such silliness aside when I spied several ladybugs flailing around on its surface, the water of which was moving in a slow counter-clockwise flow.

A few minutes later I’d pulled 12 from the water and transfered them to the leaves of the jasmine growing around the perimeter, where they could dry off and fly off… hopefully not back in to the water.

The subsequent talk to the cub scouts held adjacent to El Rodeo Elementary School was deemed a success.

Since most other empty beer containers found are regularly left by inconsiderate public drinkers down by the curb or in the ivy or behind our mailbox, that’s pretty much the only reason I can come up with that you’d blatantly trespass onto our property with a large bottle of alcohol like it’s not our house, but yours — or Joe’s.

Point in fact, it’s not yours, nor Joe’s.

Putting aside the general creepiness of some stranger so out of it as to not even think twice about coming to our house to pour one out for the dearly departed and then leave the bottle and the remaining disgusting beverage for me to dispose of, I’ve tried hard to craft the following request while remaining aware of your loss and considerate of your feelings in such a time of sorrow:

KEEP THE FUCK OUT, PLEASE

The Hollywood Burrito Project made, packed, carried and delivered fresh and hot burritos to 30 homeless people on the streets of Hollywood.

The desk is cleared, the day is done and there’s a bike to ride home. The relief and satisfaction in putting another issue of my magazine to bed is grand. Too bad it only lasts until about tomorrow morning and then it’s back at it.

Susan I had initially planned on cleaning it up and renting it out for at least double if not near triple what the rent had been (Joe’d lived here since 1986), but on further review we’ve decided not to have to bother with all that and instead go ahead with our ultimate plan of reclaiming the space to the house by reconnecting the first floor to the second with an interior staircase and turning the 3 rooms, 2 half-baths and sliver of a kitchen up there into a master suite.

Flickr photoset of those thumbnails is here.

It’s gonna be a long, expensive process but so worth it to have the house all to ourselves and so much sooner than we’d expected.

The good news is I’m decidedly not at all as behind as I was 16.5 hours earlier, and the bright side of all this is that I got home in about 23 minutes because the 405 to the 10 to the 110 to the 101 looked like this  the whole dang way:

FTW!

Immediately after that first post there was some drama I never reported about. See, I moved the pot atop a fence post so that it could get more exposure to the sun and not long after that — maybe a few days or a week — damn if the pot hadn’t been knocked over into the neighboring yard, either by cat or squirrel or wind.

Peering over the fence down into the out-of-reach abyss where the pot was still intact but the cactii were strewn about it, my first thought was that unless I wanted to trespass into that backyard (which I didn’t) I’d just have to reconcile that my cactus dreams weren’t meant to be. I was appropriately bummed.

Then the next day, I got out of my wahmbulance and MacGuyver’d myself a trespass-free solution. Using the long arm of an old tree-branch trimmer I tied the pooper scooper to it and also knotted a long piece of twine from the handle of the scooper with hopes of being able to extend it to the ground on the other side of the fence and retrieve the pot and pads by pulling the twine and opening/closing its poop-scooping jaws.

Well it worked for all three cactus parts, but the pot proved to be too large and heavy for the scooper to handle (I’d later retrieve it when I opted to trespass into that yard after the incident with our cat Jiggy and the baby opossum that turned out to be a baby skunk).

Though I wasn’t sure if the fall and the prolonged exposure hadn’t damaged the pads, I still went ahead and re-plunked them into a larger pot of soil, placing it on the ground and surrounding it with some heavy-duty garden wire.

And dang if all three hearty pads didn’t rebound magnificently. As you can see below in the upper left, the first bud has turned into a prickly juvenile pad of its own, and the other two smaller pads are now hosting growing buds, too:

Amazing!

I’m talking about yesterday’s freeway ride — the second in which a group of renegades who ride under the name “Criminanimals” entered the gridlocked 10 heading east. Pedaling through the traffic they transitioned to the 405 North then exited.

At first glance this seems like a really cool thing the really cool kids did. But me being a stodgy codger I second-glanced and came to my own personal conclusion that my little two-wheeled addiction is good enough for me and I don’t need to seek thrills of that nature. That’s a roundabout diplomatic way of saying I crunched the risk v. reward numbers and came away calling bullshit.

The first ride took place a couple/three weeks ago and was a success in that no one got dead, injured, ticketed or arrested. Word, pix and vids of it spread around the internest and among the various cycling groups and it was enough to generate a lot of woohooing and bring about an encore, and that too apparently and thankfully went off without a hitch as well — not counting a CHP officer’s involvment.

Several people who I’m acquainted with joined in the madness and several other people I’m acquainted with were in support of it and lamented not being able to attend. I’m not going to judge anyone for their decisions or endorsements, but I am going to call the events out as stunts that have the potential to do more harm than good, not only to the bodies involved, but also the efforts that strive to legitimately bring bikes out of the gutter pan and into traffic lanes.

One might say that’s a bit hypocritical of me, since I’ve illegally corked my share of intersections during plenty of group night bike rides these past two-and-a-half years, and in fact I’m reconsidering my future participation in those. I haven’t made any decisions yet, but we all evolve. Last year the bulk of my mileage was group-oriented riding and recreational. This year of the 2,300 miles I’ve cranked around the city so far, more than 1,900 of them have been solo, commuting to work and the occasional errand.

Last year was about partying, this year’s about business. Does that mean the party’s over? Unknown. But I do know that for the first second-Friday of the month since my involvement with Midnight Ridazz began in December 2005, I missed the ride not out of a prior obligation or an insurmountable sudden onset of lazy, but out of a genuine lack of interest.

We’ll see if that trend continues, but in the meantime at the core of my cycling advocacy be it for fun or a paycheck, I don’t claim to be a role model. I’m just a guy who likes to ride his bike. Safely.

Ridiculous.