Dear abusive motorists...

1. I am sorry if sometimes I change lanes without indicating properly. This is usually because:

a) unlike you, I can't brake and indicate at the same time, especially going downhill in wet conditions on my heavy bike.
b) I am avoiding the potholes that the council has kindly left in the road for us, and if I hit a pothole and fell in front of your vehicle we would all be worse off.

2. Yelling abuse (I think your precise words were "fucking idiot") out the window of a 3-ton petrol-driven death machine towards a woman on a reasonably fragile 20kg sustainable transport appliance tends to provoke the old cliche pick on someone your own size. But, then, yelling abuse from the window of a moving vehicle indicates an unwillingness to accept responsibility for the consequences of one's own negativity, so maybe that's the wider issue.

3. Maybe I should grow my hair long again. If you're more obviously female you get less abuse.

4. It really is a lose-lose situations for cyclists. Either we are a menace because we are in front of you and you can't overtake; or we try to avoid being in front of you, weaving through lanes of traffic, which also gets us declared a menace. Some of you are at least honest enough to admit that you don't think we have the right to share the public highway with you, but that opens another debate, about this culture's granting of a sense of entitlement to those on fossil fuel-driven transport.

5. I don't obey the road rules all the time. Neither do you. I try to avoid hurling abuse at you for your mistakes. May we forgive others as we forgive ourselves.

What I do when I'm not cycling...

... I car-share. I pay a fee of $95 a year, and I can pick up a car for $15 an hour. This is ideal considering that I only ever need a car for (a) special-occasion excursions; (b) getting my musical gear to gigs. I absolutely love the Mitsubishi i-car which Cityhop provides. If they ever make an electric one of those (EDIT: oh wait, they have!), it would be the car I would love to drive (that or a new-model VW Beetle). And apparently I'm not the only cyclist in this position.

I really should keep posting here more often. The 705se is working very very well. I had a bit of a (non-cycling) accident recently, and I've used a combination of the bike and the Auckland train system to get efficiently from Grey Lynn to the Manukau SuperClinic. The only real downside I'm finding is that such a heavy bike, going at a decent speed, tends to stretch out the cables on the calliper brakes quite quickly. I do hear the most recent models have disc brakes, but I'm definitely not going to upgrade the bike again any time soon. And I have to remember to not go full-bore speed on rainy days.