Japanese Telling of "The Stolen Bike"

For the past week I've been able to practice a pretty consistent schedule of Japanese study.  Perhaps it was this that fueled an over-confidence in my Japanese composition skills.  Both my essay this week and last covered a considerably larger portion of the page, and this week I decided to exercise some additional artistic craft with the story, heretofore unknown by Kaneko-san, of my stolen bike.  In my naivete I neglected to calculate the weight of importance that grammatical tense plays in setting up suspense and delivering a punchline.  In my first paragraph, I gave no allusion to the fact that I currently have my bike back in my possession; that awaited the first line of the final (read: second) paragraph.  Preceding it was the sentence, "I had planned to buy a bike in April."

I don't know how to say that sentence, really.  "I had planned..."– complicated thing to convey as it turns out, and even my superb (read: dubious) intuition about how I'd like the Japanese language to work turns out to be a little underdeveloped.  Poor Kaneko-san was confused, despite my asterisk directing him to the bottom of the page with a list of unknown and questionable items.  Without reading ahead to the last paragraph (incorrigibly detail oriented as he is) he corrected the tense concoction I had created in a manner still not clear to me.  In truth, this was one of several creative ventures I attempted here and elsewhere resulting in a lot of confusion.

Perhaps I've not gained as conclusive a lesson in Japanese grammar as I might have if I played a little more by the rules and stuck with what I know.  But I've learned (I think?) what doesn't work and if the goal is to learn more Japanese, then I'm chipping away at it bit by bit (dandan) everyday.  There's no finish line awaiting me.

I wonder, though, if I don't have an underlying ulterior motive, one most certainly met in today's lesson.  Despite my botched particles, strange tenses, and questionable vocabulary resulting in a lot of red pen usage, I felt a small victory as Kaneko-san read the first line of the last paragraph and gasped.  In the midst of confusion, a punchline delivered.  Communication success.