When More Than Half Empty Is More Than Half Full, and Topping 4,000

If I would have driven to school yesterday I would have saved just as much gas as I did by biking.

The weather forecast had called for snow, but only with a 45% chance, and with no real accumulation, so my hopes for a second snow day vanished as fast as the white cat harbinger that Bandida yowled off the porch soon after I awoke at my normal 5:30 and checked email for the predictably absent cancellation news.

I packed my lunch, bundled up in my warmest for Mom Nature’s coldest, checked email again (uselessly, I knew; it was more than a good half hour after the normal schedule-change posting time), and pedaled out the driveway, pointless flurries stinging my face.

By the time I reached school, though, snow had begun to cover the roads, and dormant school buses were hunkered down in their weekend spots. I braced for the possibility of having to stick out a two-hour-delay pause in my life, since there was no way I was going to turn around and ride right back home only to have to come back in again.

Two other teachers were already at school–their cars were parked out front–but the custodians’ little cleaning supplies carts were poised in the hallway mid chore and unattended as though the cleaning god’s raptor had come with the snow and whisked them–but not me–away in great rapture of the Rapture. I put my lunch in the fridge and called M. She had, just minutes before, about the time I would have (albeit in a state of dejected hopefulness) checked email one more time before walking out the door if I had planned to drive to school, received notice: school was closed for the day.

I pedaled home for a second breakfast–and in doing so broke 4,001 bicycling commuting miles. That’s almost as far as it is from my house to the cool-looking North Pole High in North Pole, Alaska.

Other bike commuting stats since I started keeping track in August 2009:

• Gas saved: over 133 gallons
• Money saved (at the IRS’s business rate): $2,040.51
• Hours on the seat: over 314
• Calories burned: over 238,916

Full disclosure: I have time to write this morning only because I’m driving today.