The blog was down for a bit — in fact, it looks like much of the internet was. Everything seems to be better now, though.

Personally, I'm looking forward to some downtime of my own. Yesterday was exhausting. Getting a haircut after work was enough to make me ready for bed, but I trudged over to City Bikes anyway and took a bunch of test rides before finally settling on this:

The Jamis Coda Sport. It seems nice enough, and is maybe a little faster than my old bike... but I still miss that thing. It's not just the mountains of filial guilt associated with losing a present from my mom; I'd also gotten very used to it and its quirks. I realize the Jamis's fancy Shimano shifters are classier, but I liked being able to skip up several gears immediately with the old grip shifters. The saddle was a little more comfortable, even after I upgraded the godawful factory default on the Jamis. Most important, of course, is that the old bike was prettier.

I'm sure I'll adjust. For the record, the City Bikes folks were extremely helpful. I paid a little bit of a premium for buying there, but a year's worth of free tuneups makes it seem worthwhile. Everybody there was very nice and knowledgeable. I guess it's easy to be nice when you know the person you're talking to is about to hand you several hundred dollars, but they actually seemed genuine — the salesgirl who helped me with the bike even walked down to their warehouse to check if they had a larger frame for me, then suggested we race back to the shop when I ran into her on my way back from a test ride. Hijinks! Surely that's worth an extra c-note.

The whole experience was a pleasant contrast to Big Wheel in Lyon Village, where the customer service ranges from sunny apathy to confrontational recordstore-clerkism. Okay, I have once had a City Bikes mechanic answer an inquiry about a spoke wrench's price by saying, "For you, it'll end up costing a lot because you don't know how to use it." That was a little prickly. But from the looks of him, I'm pretty sure that the guy in question is Alan Moore, and I love his work, so I'll let it slide.

After fulfilling my duty to consumer culture I headed to DC9 and joined Kriston, Jeremy and Heather to see The Black, of which Jeremy's sister's boyfriend is a member. They played a great set of what I can only characterize as Texas songs. Jeremy and Kriston were in heaven, and I left feeling strangely upbeat for a 25 year-old whose new tendency to get exhausted at 9pm hints strongly at impending lameness.

And that's how I spent my summer vacation. Now it's time to plan for the weekend. Who wants to crash the Howard University Homecoming?