Girlycycle and Pizza Pie

My favorite neighborhood sighting today: a woman on a big street motorcycle, with big black saddle bags dripping fringe on either side. The most eye-catching feature, however, was her helmet--burnished gold with bright pink trim. And the coup-de-grace: a big pink stuffed puppy dog strapped onto the back side of the high seatback, cheerfully glowing girly pinkness at the general public.

I have really been enjoying my frequent walks around my neighborhood lately. It's a great little community, full of older houses and small privately owned shops and restaurants, and a lot of people get around by walking or riding bicycles. I have also been going on extra walks with my friend Jen, who is blind. She needs the extra exercise, I need the outdoor exposure, and we both benefit from being with a friend in the afternoon. A truly symbiotic experience. And today we discovered another mutually beneficial aspect of our friendship: she loves to be read to, and I love to read out loud. So we spent some time today with me reading her some of my more entertaining and older blog posts to her. It's more fun for her because I can use a lot more variation and inflection in my voice than the reading program on her computer manages. I think I do fairly well at not sounding like a robot when I read. Plus, I can correctly pronounce all those made-up words I like to drop into my writing from time to time. The screen reader evidently just plods through phonetically as best as it can, which takes all the fun out of making up words in the first place.

I was overcome by a pizza craving on the way home from Jen's house. Fortunately, a mere two blocks from my apartment building is a tiny little family-owned pizza place. They are super nice folks and you can even order single custom-made slices with anything you want on them. I decided to go the more economical route and just got a whole small pizza--I can justify the extra five bucks of expense by the additional two meals I will get out of it. Walking home was a terrible ordeal, however--the pizza smelled absolutely delicious and my stomach was rumbling angrily at me and it was all I could do not to just open the box right there on the street and stick my whole face into it. MMmmmmmmmm....piiiiiiiizzaaaaaa...(animal-like sloppy devouring noises)