Today on the drive home from church I used a GPS device to track my exact bicycle commute. My previous estimate using Google Maps was 7 miles, but thanks to our long driveway, I learned today that it’s actually 7.1 miles.
Of course, this route hasn’t always been my only one, so to be fair when including the driveway in my past several years of commuting, I added only a modest 65 miles to my cumulative total.
Not bad at all, for a lazy Sunday.
These last few weeks of this pregnancy have been rather tiring for us all, of course M in particular with her lingering cough and cold and otherwise generally unfulfilling restless rest. I, on the other hand, most ever an easy sleeper, have even had time to dream.
The other morning I awoke with a stiff neck, quite unrelated to the singing coaching I’d been providing the high-school-aged Alison Krauss. Her voice was great, but the way she was singing–or maybe what she was singing–just wasn’t at all right. Somewhere in the jumble homemade ice cream was being made in a hand-cranked mixer the size of a water heater; a look inside at the metal ice cream container revealed a very, very long container. Fifty gallons, I think.
It is no dreamy joke, though, that during the last couple of weeks our neighbor as well as a colleague of mine as well as another household within the same five mile radius were robbed in the daytime while they were at school by someone seeking designer hand bags, clothing, and jewelry. (Some candy and dog biscuits were taken, too.) N happened to be with me when the neighbor filled me in with the details even as the sound of in-process deadbolt installation floated down from the burgled house; N subsequently worried a fair amount that someone would take her special (plastic) ring. We did our best to assure her that we didn’t have anything those people wanted.
“If anything,” I said, “They’d take my guitars. But those are probably too traceable.”
That evening I was playing my newest song on my still-unstolen electric guitar when the neighbors started shooting their handguns at a target in their front yard, and they left on all their porch lights for the next few nights. We closed and latched our driveway gate, and before bed wondered if our worthless dog’s contribution to our security would be enhanced by her being tied or roaming free at night. Since she was already loose and it was cold outside, we decided that chaining her could be counterproductive.
The feeling that a criminal element was afoot put me in mind of Herman, the old man who rode with us to church most Sundays back when I was in high school. One week when the whole town was on alert after an armed duo killed a convenience store owner during a robbery, Herman said he was sleeping with a loaded gun on his bed stand. Mom somehow mentioned that she didn’t think Jesus would do that, and the next week Herman told us he’d put away the gun, that he’d rather be killed than kill someone else.
At the same time, I’m in the middle of reading Sherlock Holmes stories and feeling rather horrified at criminal evil and grateful for the just Dr. Watson and cocaine-loving Sherlock. I know, however, that a loaded gun by my bed would make me feel much less safe; I would worry about the imminent danger of accidental harm. Even without a loaded gun at my bedside, though, I know our security out here in the country is rather nonexistent. After learning about the robbery, N asked me to pray that we would be safe. I overcame my internal struggle–I’ve written before about the “God lobby” and God not doing that great at protecting the innocent, but shoot, I really hope God does keep us all safe–and said a quick line that seemed to satisfy her.
When it comes to safety, though, I haven’t forgotten about riding my bike for exercise. While starting tomorrow I’ll be sidelining my cycle’s saddle more in order to make possible a speedy homeward commute should labor hail during a school day, I am not losing sight of attempting to lean up (or is it ‘slim down’?).
“You eat not as though you’re hungry, but like you’re afraid you’re going to be hungry,” M told me one time not too long ago.
It wasn’t an unsolicited observation; I’d just asked for her weight-loss strategy recommendations. For part of our eleventh anniversary celebration, we’d watched our wedding video again, and I couldn’t help but admire my much thinner stature of a decade ago, and so in the name of someday having trimmed off some of my more apparent excesses, I decided this year I’ll try to eat from de facto–not de futuro–hunger.
Hopefully that will benefit my family, and in a sense make us all more secure–even if it does mean that those fifty gallons of ice cream will have to remain in my dreams.
I’m a creature of recurrence, I guess you could say.
Last week, while I was riding on it, my bicycle seat fell off. My seat post bolt, which holds the seat mounting bracket firmly in place, had snapped.
Thankfully I was only twenty yards from the entrance to my school, so it was no big deal. I declined M’s offer to come pick me up, though; I figured I could just ride home standing up the whole way, which I realized that afternoon was a really bad idea, as my additional leg torque and handlebar tugging would surely, I was sure, result in additional bike damage. I ended up pushing the bike up even small hills–and I was so tired from the constant standing I could barely pedal down them.
This is not the first time this exact sort of seat loss has happened to me, which led my bike mechanic to exonerate me of liability. “It’s not like you’re 250 or 300 pounds,” he said. “It must be a design flaw in your seat post.”
Indeed, a few days before this, I’d noticed my seat was a little wobbly, and had tightened down that very bolt just a bit, to snug things up. I guess the bolt had stretched toward a snapping point, and the additional tightening just speeded up its final demise–which was a scenario exactly like when I first lost my seat a year ago.
Maybe I’ll recognize the symptoms in advance of my next unseating and avoid the whole ordeal (although hopefully there won’t be a next time, since my new seat post is a different design).
But don’t worry: this sort of inconvenient symptomatic forgetfulness doesn’t involve just my bike.
As I commuted in our car between two cross-county schools for last Friday’s faculty inservice day meetings, the car started jerking and bucking. I was certain the front wheels would both fall off within the next eighth of a mile, so I pulled over and hiked the eighth of a mile to a nearby Realtor’s office to call M so she would not panic if the police called to ask why our car had been abandoned.
A mechanical friend was willing to come look at the car after work, which would be three hours later, so I decided to walk a bit farther to Martin’s to use the free wi-fi (I had my school laptop with me).
On the way I stopped at a completely unhelpful Chevrolet dealership. “I saw you standing out there,” a man in the office said. “That’s the Z– family estate up that driveway where you parked. Both Z and his wife are passed, but that’s their land.”
Once at Martin’s, I realized that towing might be inevitable even if I did inconvenience my friend to come diagnose the problem, and so using the laptop (I love Gmail) I called around and found someone whose rollback was only twenty minutes away and would only charge $65 to carry my car across the county to a repair shop we’ve patronized before.
I read a bit and watched for the truck, which turned out to be a rollback indeed–that was mounted on a large pickup with two very large men already in it. I abandoned all hopes of a comfortable ride in a cool truck, and I certainly didn’t try to buckle any sort of seat belt, considering the man in the middle with whom, along with the truck’s passenger door on the other side of me, I was feeling way too intimately associated. I held my computer bag and laptop up in front of me to act as an airbag, just in case.
“That’s the Zs’ land, up there,” the driver said after we’d loaded the car and were on our way. “I stopped there once to see a grass fire, and they put me to work.”
The man in the middle grunted.
“That’s a ‘79. 354 block,” the driver said a bit later. “Beautiful car.”
“Yes it is,” the other man said.
Then, still later, “Look at that. This truck just passed 350,000 miles. I bought it new in ‘96 for $35,000. That’s a penny a mile. I’d like to know the gas I’ve put in it. Eight miles per gallon.”
I didn’t offer any math advice.
Anyway, to make a long, boring story less long, the mechanic found no problems with our transmission or axles. Whew.
“Let me go home and look at my files,” I said. “I think I remember having this problem before.”
Yup–as my car file showed, that time on a trip a few years ago when I was afraid to drive on because of exactly similar symptoms and we ended up spending the night in a Super 8 to await a nearby garage’s morning opening–a hotel stay that cost us…yep…about $65, if you include the breakfast at Subway the next morning–was caused by what I now know (again) to be leaky camshaft seals.
If only I’d remembered the symptoms from the first time! No wheels were in danger of falling off! I could have saved $65 and a squishy rollback ride!
Oh well! Better luck next time!
Whether or not you’ve noticed, my commuter biking miles haven’t increased much for a while. Lay blame where you will–Lance Armstrong, laziness, our now having two vehicles–but I claim pure industry.
At last, after a summer filled with overwhelming kitchen work, I’ve turned my attention to other matters: promoting my band’s new album, mowing our field, cutting brush out of our fence line, cutting and splitting firewood, putting on new guitar strings, and the like. Our little world is being put in order and readied for the oncoming hibernatory introspection that only wintertime in all its predicted ardor can promise; preparing seems the most natural thing ever.
And so that’s what I’ve been doing. Cheers!
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:
Full disclosure: I have time to write this morning only because I’m driving today.
This week I passed 3,000 bicycle commuting miles (in nearly two school years’ time).
That’s farther than from D.C. to San Francisco or Ottawa to Houston, and down and back from Bydgoszcz to Λεωφόρος Κηφισού.
While the storms that crossed our region have cost much of many, for me they provided a surprise two-hour delay. I relished that email notification, especially since it arrived along with verification that our band’s new album is now for sale on iTunes and CDBaby.
I used the morning hours to update our website, read books with my daughter, enjoy the fresh smell of rained fields, and bicycle off to school at a more-than-sane hour.
Along my ride, who should putter onto my rear-view mirror but my brother-in-law J. I had a good lead on him, but knowing he would eventually pass me–he was in a truck, after all–I put the sneakers to the pedals and, with the wind behind me as it was (and the slope being downhill, all in all), enjoyed the glory of maintaining a noteworthy distance for quite a little distance.
“I bet he’s thinking, ‘Now I know why he eats so much!'” I thought to myself.
I called him later to find out just how fast I was going: 30mph.
“That was impressive,” he said. “Now I know why you eat so much!”
Today as I rode my bike up the slushy gravel road amid the forest noises of melting snow, what did I see about 15 yards ahead, in my tire track, waddling towards me, unphased in the least by my presence, but a skunk.
I’d almost had a run-in with a skunk once before, back when we lived in town and I barely noticed it in the dark of the morning as I pushed my bike up the driveway. But this was the middle of the afternoon. Was it rabid?
I couldn’t simply move to the left tire track; that wouldn’t have given me much room to sneak past it. I couldn’t jump off the road a ways just to let it pass; the drop to the stream on the left and the steep bank on the right had me penned. I climbed off my bike and walked back down the road a few yards.
The skunk kept right on approaching.
This wouldn’t do, I decided. I wasn’t going to reroute myself, which would have added a long time to my ride, time I didn’t have because I wanted to get home to spot the damage the neighbor’s escaped cows were wreaking on our yard. In deep thought I looked down at the ground, where I found inspiration: snow balls.
One after the other I threw, most of which scattered around the stinky varmint, who raised its tail and squeaked a couple times and kept walking towards me. I persisted, however, and soon enough it moseyed up the steep bank and I continued home.
I broke my cold-weather-commuting low-temp record today with a ride in 9 degrees.
I’d been worried about appendage separation due to the frigid air, but the absence of natural wind very much diminished the expected harsh brutality of the ride, and my fingers and toes didn’t even really feel cold until near the end of my ride.
Plus, I’d been assured by my dear wife. “Don’t worry,” she told me before I set out. “You’re very attached to your [appendages].”
One of the great jokes from A Prairie Home Companion this past weekend: A female brain molecule wandered into a man’s head. Finding it empty of other brain molecules, she called out, “Hello? Hello?” From far away she heard a response: “We’re all down here!”
In my feet, of course. On the way home this afternoon, a pesky dog gained a certitude of wisdom, and I’ve written this poem about the experience:
I have kicked in the side of the head
the dog
that once chased you as
you jogged
and at which
you were incredibly
peeved
for so long
Congratulate me
the kick was delicious
so instinctively
executed
But this is not to say
my toe didn’t hurt
for a while
Or to say I didn’t look in
my handlebars mirror
a lot
just waiting
for the dog’s owner to come after me
in a car
with who knows what
(Thanks, William Carlos Williams for the inspiration.)
