There will be no bike There will be no joy

For years I've yearned for the type of friends who'd pull up one morning at some ungodly hour and rouse me from some mundane dream to go on a spur-of-the-moment adventure trip to rock climb or mountain bike or possibly sky dive---HELL! maybe even to go find Bigfoot. Instead, over the years I've collected the type that would rather order greasy food and mindlessly press X or Square on a PS2 controller. I've even got one that lives with his mom and rolls for initiative on weekends in some dingy basement somewhere and it's ridiculous.

So it is with great joy that I've made a new friend at work who actually likes adventure. He's been prepping for the 07 season of mountain biking and asked me to tag along. Thing is, I don't have a bike and even used ones cost upwards of 1500$.

I started training so that I could go because I wasn't going to pass up the one kind of friend I've waited about two decades for and even though I was putting most of my pennies away to buy my first house, I was going to do the unthinkable and scrape a chunk off my tax return to pay for a 2nd hand mountain bike of AWESOMENESS!

Mr. Mountainbike was really stoked when I told him my plan and has been reminding me daily to get my taxes done sooner, rather than later, so that I could get hooked up to the super bike of AWESOMENESS and so about an hour ago I actually completed the family tax returns and asked my accountant (also known as Software Out of a Box) how much we could expect back.

The grand total for one gainfully employed designer in the video game industry, one girlfriend and two dependent lovable, gorgeous daughters is just under poorteenhundredandzerocents.

Thank you Canadian government, thank you oh so generous employer, and thank you Fate for reminding me that I've a ways to go before I give my poverty a good kick in the crotch. With more hard work and insanely vast amounts of overtime I might actually get beyond not being able to afford anything exotically fun.

There will be no mountain bike. There will be no joy.