[culcune]

Bike is (finally) in the driveway now. Could not pick it up on Friday before the business who volunteered to receive the bike closed, so had to wait for today. Only got so far as removing the cardboard, taking a couple bolts off the steel frame, and taking out the box that holds the trunk which had the battery and some other stuff conveniently locked inside of it to save shipping space. I did not get to much of anything, and not looking forward to working on it after work due to the late summer heat. My goal is to have it put together and running by Monday 9/8--the ribbon cutting for the new home/shelter for girls. There will be many local dignitaries and donors, etc. I am sure there will be an initial surge in raffle sales, so hopefully we can pay off Excalibur quickly so he will consider doing such sales in the future. The woman who runs the home already has 1000 raffle tickets printed up, but she managed to get the name completely wrong (Baodiao) even though she has the link to the bike, AND I spelled it out for her twice on the phone?! I don't know the actual drawing date, but I think the goal is to sell the tickets for $5, so 'profit' for the home will be over $4k, in theory.

I have photos of the box, the box removed, and a few things unwrapped and un-taped from the steel crate. That is it so far. Once I get to dig in more, I will take more photos. Since my camera is an old-fashioned stand-alone camera, and I have to remove the chip to download into a computer, you guys will have to wait until I have time to do all of these steps--I hope the wait will be worth it (the step by step should be useful for someone who mail-orders one and feels slightly intimidated by the process, since pretty much every Chinese scooter is made nearly identically).