New friends, maybe…

Since I try to keep my mind open to new things (you might know this about me by now), I’ve been kicking around the idea of my own motorcycle since that uber-fun ride on PG’s bike. So I mulled it over, and decided to check it out. One of my clients told me there is a motorcycle dealer in Port Williams, which is near where I live, but kind of out of the way, unless I’m coming home from Wolfville. I decided I’d pop in the next time I came through there.

This weekend past was Apple Blossom Festival in the Annapolis Valley, meaning a parade and all kinds of shit stuff. It was my Saturday to work, and we closed early to avoid the parade crap. My route home involves turning left at the first set of lights from work, zipping across the connector and up onto my street. Well, the connector was closed because all the floats for the parade were lined up on it. This meant I had to drive to the next highway exit over and take that connector, which takes me to Port Williams (Wolfville is past that exit, a little further east). The dealer closes at noon on Saturday. With all the extra Apple Blossom traffic, and leaving work reasonably on time, it took for frigging ever to get through New Minas, and I rolled into Port Williams right around 12–a couple minutes after by the time I got to the dealer. They were still open. I asked the guy working what he recommended for a noob and he suggested a Yamaha 250 v-star, showed it to me and told me the general price. I went home, found another one on Kijiji.ca (a great site, BTW) for quite a bit less, but I wanted to know if it was a good choice. Enter PG and Norm into my thinking.

The thing is, I didn’t want to involve PG in the process because I don’t want him to think I’m stalking him. I just wanted to take the motorcycle course and get a bike and do my thing without bringing him in in any way. So I mulled things over, and txted him to say I might want to pick his and Norm’s brains. On Sunday, I txted him again to see if they were around. He was at his own place, and I told him I thought I needed Norm’s brain more, anyway, so he txted Norm, and let me know Norm was home and I should just drop by. So I did.

I like Norm and Paulette. They’re super-nice people. I told him my adventures and the advice of the motorcycle shop guy, and Norm said, "You’ll be sick of that in a week. You need something better." His advice is a Suzuki Boulevard 650, and he looked it up on Google and showed me pics. Then he went on Kijiji to see if we could find one. There’s one in the city for around $4000, which I may or may not be able to borrow, and Norm is going to keep an eye out. This is the time of year that bikers upgrade to bigger and better, so someone may be unloading a Boulevard. We’ll all keep looking. I ended up sitting and talking with Norm and Paulette for over two hours, just shooting the shit about everything, including PG. He had invited them to his place for a barbecue later. We talked about PTSD–Norm has it from childhood sexual assault; I think I probably have a touch of it myself for the same reasons–and our triggers; we talked about tattooing, massage, children, houses, motorcycles, retirement, pets, relationships, sex…you name it, I think we covered it. It was great, and I only tried to leave about three times before I actually got out of there. You know that, "Well, I really should be going." and that ends up followed by some other topic and more time goes by.

I went about my business, puttering around, going for a drive out to Berwick to eyeball a house for sale out that way to decide if I wanted to call the realtor. I don’t. And on the way home, I got to thinking how long I had ended up sitting there talking and wondering if maybe I had overstayed my welcome. You never know with new people, but it had all felt pretty comfortable, so I wasn’t really horribly worried. And Norm REALLY REALLY wants to do my tree woman/tree of life tat, which is going to take 12 hours or more, so quite a few sessions, and will keep him in massage for a while. He had a bad car accident some years ago which left him a paraplegic for a time. You’d never know to see him now. Nice recovery. And massage will do him a world of good. So anyway, last night around 10 pm, my phone rang. When I answered, I got the "You have a txt to voice message. To accept, press 1" and the number it was from was completely unknown to me. Anyway, it was from Paulette, I’m guessing, and it said "We really enjoyed your visit today. It was great talking to you. We think you’re an amazing woman."

Guess I didn’t overstay my welcome. And I really liked them, too. And I would never have met them without PG, so go figure the Master Plan. Anyway, I have to get ready for work. 2-8 shift today. And tomorrow I’ll hear from my banking goddess what my chances are for a loan or new mortgage or both. (Get the loan first, then go for the mortgage, pay off the loan and reduce my payments). We’ll see. I’m not going to stress over it. If it’s meant to be, it’ll fall together. Life is good.