After more than a year of riding, before today I hadn’t yet taken a passenger. My girlfriend and I talked about taking the bike into the city for a movie but never got around to doing practice laps in the garage to build confidence. Remember that I mentioned I have a girlfriend, it makes the next part better.

Twice this morning on my ride into work, I came to familiar stops and awkwardly tilted to the right. That’s awkward because I always tilt to the left, dropping my left foot to catch the weight of the bike at stops while my right foot holds the rear brake. The first error could have happened any day, but two on the same short trip to the office? Oddly, it wasn’t until I reached my destination that I realized the impetus to my bobbles–it’s bloody windy.

Short story shorter, the forecast called for rain today but it was dry in the morning and I wanted to ride so I could pick up (and affix) the personalized license plate waiting for me at the DMV. The weather was clear all day…until I left work to go home.

There’s something coolly romantic about riding in the dead of night, and I don’t mean the idea of it. It’s when I’m on the empty streets, calmly counting down timed stoplights with the cold ocean air on my neck that I feel the banality of the ride give way to romance, the feeling that the moment is more than the sum of its parts.

The most common question I get with regard to the Ninja 250 is how well it tackles the freeway. I had doubts myself, and I got the bike with the understanding that I’d be doing mostly city riding. Any unpleasant exertion from the freeway would be only an occasional annoyance since I planned to rarely hit the superslab.

I’ve lived in San Francisco for going on five years but the irregular seasons here still baffle me. Through August and early September, I was dreading the end of summer and the start of rains, sure I’d have to soon hang up my leather jacket until spring. The baffling bit is that last weekend, the first weekend in November, was the first time the fall season showed its face. The rains retreated earlier this week but left behind a lingering dampness, an endless mist, enough to make things wet, not enough to soak a rider.