Things are looking good for my bike, the plastics are all ready to be sprayed now, so it’s just a matter of getting a design to them now and off we go. My mirrors should be arriving at the end of the week, and then I can just pick up the indicators at the same time. The rest of the parts should be here by next week. So after spraying everything and putting it back together I’ll be back out there just in time for the good riding weather.

Apart from that I still have to replace my helmet, I’ve decided to get a decent helmet this time around, so a much more expensive helmet was in order. I’ve decided to get a Shoei XR-1000 along with a second visor (chromed/smoked/iridium I haven’t decided yet), so that’s going to set me back quite a bit of money: ~R4700 before discount & insurance payout. But I guess it’s worth it in the end, the helmet is really comfortable and weighs nothing compared to my old helmet; either way, it’s a very good helmet and well worth the extra money I think. It’s just a matter of deciding which one I want to get seeing as there are quite a lot to choose from, preferably something to match my bike after it’s custom sprayjob — not much point in paying that much money and not having it all match nicely. All in all this accident has been a really costly experience, and I was only intending to upgrade my helmet sometime next year.

Now to the bad news and the rant part of this blog… I got a rather nice letter in my post last night. It went on about how I was speeding, completely unable to control my bike, and a bunch of other things which I can’t remember right now… I was pretty astounded with all the false accusations — perhaps someone forgot that they said “I didn’t even see him”, so how would they know all of these things? Maybe there were witnesses? How accurately can you judge speed? 60kph is going to look pretty fast when you’re standing on the pavement, and if there were witnesses they would be able to tell that I was very much in control of my bike. So the letter basically boiled down to this: “you have 10 days to pay up, or we sue you”, which is all fine and good, except the letter was written on 30 August and I only received it last night, so that gives me a whole 2 days to respond… *great* so these people will be hearing from my lawyer.

They want to claim from my third party insurance now as I pay for fully comprehensive insurance, and she (the driver of the car) has none. In some countries you get the royal shafting (in more ways than one) if you have an accident and no insurance since it’s illegal; but not here. It’s up to the lawyers now to decide who was at fault and let them sort it out between themselves, if she’s found at fault this might backfire and she may have to cough up the excess for my claim, if I’m found at fault, I guess I’ll be paying the excess for her claim on *my* insurance, *and* my premium will go up. In my opinion, if you’re on the road you should have insurance.

Onto other things, my other domain finally went live, more than a month later so grave.za.net now works as well — mostly. I really don’t feel like going to the effort of getting it registered as separate from the .org one so that I can use my subdomains. I will eventually, but for now, the subdomains don’t work for .net and everything else just forwards to .org.