Winter Break Day 1: A Short Bike Ride to a Cafe

Dec. 27 was my last working day of Year 2018. It's 28th today, the first day of my brief winter break. I'm at a local Starbucks cafe as I'm writing this. I came here on my Kawasaki Vulcan S 650 ABS. It's been a while since I hopped on it last. The machine was dusty because I was too lazy to clean it after past rides. This morning I had plenty of time, so I pulled it around to the garage from the backyard where I park it at night, and cleaned the cask wheels. A ten-minute quick wash made it look nice and shiny. I was satisfied.

Deciding what to wear is an important part of one's motorcycling experience. It's cold and windy today. So wearing leather for both top and bottom is a must. I have two pairs of leather pants, one thinner than the other. I picked the thinner one, because I wasn't expecting a long ride. I also have a number of leather coats. They are different in color, length, and finish. I picked a long black coat by Y's. It covers my neck well. Also, the leather is thick enough to block the cold wind. There was one other reason that is totally irrelevant to its functionality. I just like the way Mickey Rourke rides a cruiser wearing a long black leather coat in Sin City, and wanted to mimic that style of his, though with a helmet on and also with the front all buttoned up, preventing the tail of the coat flying in the wind as in the picture below, I must be far from looking like him!

One thing I realized when winter break started is that I am awfully poor at handing free time. I am so used to busy schedule, with most of my energy focused on maximizing quality output in my business. But just because I have plenty of free time does not mean I should kill time for things irrelevant to work. Life is short, and time is the most precious asset in it. I want to use it for something that can contribute to it.

Since you don't want to ask yourself what to do every time you have free time, I usually have a set of core activities in mind and choose some from among these choices. They are: reading, watching movies, exercising, riding my motorcycle, and dieting. Today I have actually already done three of them: dieting, movie-watching, and motorcycle-riding.

As far as dieting, I made miso soup with no artificial seasoning and lots of veggies.

With movie-watching, I watched one Star Wars DVD last night, and another this morning.

And I just came to the cafe by motorbike.

So, two more activities, and I will have covered all five.

Right now I'm about to read. On the table right in front of me are "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari, "Crime and Punishment" by Dostoevsky, and "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley. I'll begin with "Crime and Punishment" and after that, I'll just go with the flow.