I rode on Monday, at 15 degrees. My colleague thought I was joking after I said yes to his “Was that you I saw riding this morning? Please tell me that wasn’t you.” but I wasn’t.
I sheltered my gloves and lined my sneakers with plastic grocery bags, a stunt I have little faith in but will probably repeat anyway on the next cold morning–yesterday when I rode, at 21 degrees, I felt even colder, without the bags.
Today will feel tropical at 27 degrees. I’m hoping.
This morning I realized why I was surprised when yesterday a friend associated our bumper sticker (“War is terrorism on a bigger budget”) with me–I’d forgotten that M and I had used that sticker to cover up what was there previously: “Sassy Girl.”
Another piece of bumper sticker news: I’ve often thought it’d be great to have a bumper sticker on my bike that says “My other car is a car.” I just googled the phrase and found that such stickers exist–but my bike fender’s not wide enough. Oh shucks, guess I’ll have to save a couple dollars.
After making my legs burn on my second bike ride home this week (I completed my 483rd 2009-2010 commuting mile this evening), I decided for the second day in a row to heap physical insult on injury by splitting firewood.
I nearly finished up the pile of easy-to-split pieces–I won’t think about that other pile right now; even though it’s not terribly big, it’ll be more work than all the rest busted apart, probably–and had but one large piece to finish up in order to feel accomplished, when I realized I had a problem on my hands: I know it won’t be the end of the world (for crying out loud, she could want to study art or English), but apparently N is planning to be an environmental philosophy major when she grows up and flits the coop.
You simply can’t argue with a convinced tree hugger.
I was tired and couldn’t think right off the top of my head how to creatively get her agreeably out of the way, so we went inside for her bath and then her snack, during which I helped with some of the yolks but none of the rest of the five (or was it six?) whole hard boiled eggs she put away.
A few weeks ago M headed out for a five-day hiatus from everyday life, leaving N and me to father-daughter bond and miss her dearly.
N did much better than I, from all appearances.
For example, when my mom called to say she was making a run to her favorite bulk foods store, N didn’t say, “Great! What should I get?” And then when my mom gave some suggestions, N didn’t say, “Great! We want some of that!”
And when my mom said, “Don’t you want crushed pecans?” N didn’t say “Great! Get us five pounds!”
“How about sliced almonds?”
“Great! Get us five pounds!”
“Walnuts?”
“Great! Get us five pounds!”
So I’ve been making nutty granola, perfect for fueling my bike rides to school:
After a week of rain, Sunday’s perfect afternoon weather was, well, perfect:
On Friday I rode bike to school for what I expect will be the last time before my commute is cut from 13.2 to seven miles by our move next weekend. I’m sure that the new ride will go much faster, except for the dirt road section.
On Saturday, I–not by myself, mind you–completed everything and more than I’d hoped for the day, including putting in the new beams that will replace a supporting wall.
The offending wall between the current dining and living rooms:
Another wall, this one along the upstairs corridor and to be replaced with a banister:
After 12:30 at night, long after my sister served up a gourmet pizza supper, I stumbled in our apartment door, filthy with drywall remnants, exhausted from swinging a hammer, and excited that our new house is, well, becoming.
I was glad to have reserved today for not much besides church.
“I feel like I’m a bottomless pit,” I told M this evening while we ate the two pounds of boneless, skinless chicken breasts that I’d fried in olive oil, corn flour, and salt and pepper, and served with buttered toast and boiled, chopped broccoli. “At supper last night I was full, but I felt like I could have eaten even more pizza, as in 20 minutes’ more.”
I wiped up the stove’s grease spatters and we trekked upstairs to our landlord’s birthday party, where I had two big slices of ice cream cake, no eye batting required.
I guess I’m just getting ready to jump back into that other bottomless pit: house projects.
With the advent of our frantic get-the-house-ready just beginning to glow in my mental cheeks, riding my bicycle to school has taken a back seat.
Today I couldn’t have ridden anyway; I had a meeting after school and M had her evening ESL teaching job. Tomorrow I maybe wouldn’t have ridden, anyway, since there are forecasted rains, but now I definitely won’t because my dear brother-in-law (remember him from here and here? And here?) is meeting me out at the house to make a pre-renovation shopping list.
And I’m counting on such interruptions stealing my pedaling drive for the next several weeks, too.
All is not lost on the exercise front, however: I have agreed to play in the end-of-year faculty vs. faculty basketball game.
Now, I haven’t played basketball in, like, forever, as anyone could have discovered just watching my almost perfectly aligned but grossly short shots that first morning I drove to school early to practice there all by my lonesome.
The janitor lady turned on the gym lights for me, and my dribbling dribbles echoed around the room, mostly accompanied by panting jumps and periods of reverent silence as the retched ball sailed towards and then uninterruptedly away from the net, rim, and backboard.
I got better, though, and when my half hour of self-infliction ended at 7:00 am, I was quite sweaty and breathy, definitely more so than after my more even-keeled bicycle stints.
Today I took another jab at basketball, since those meetings were keeping me off the bike, and I’m guessing that tomorrow morning I’ll do the same once again, even though I’m forever destined to be in league with the likes of Dave Barry, who is quoted as saying, “I haven’t been able to slam-dunk the basketball for the past five years. Or, for the thirty-eight years before that, either.”
I rode bike to school this morning even though the temperature, which was slated to rise to nearly sixty by the afternoon, hadn’t yet met my minimum requirement of twenty-five degrees.
It was definitely cold, out there at twenty-one degrees. My fingers and toes required constant wiggling; my goatee touted ice crystals; only once did I panic–there was nothing else to do–when I found myself crossing ice spots.
This afternoon, then, I found myself in balmy fifty-eight-degree sunshine–but buffeted head-on by the very winds that chased out the cold, I reckon.
I definitely felt not too bad about having eaten the Pop-Tarts left over from yesterday’s pre-writing-test sugar injection into my school’s student body–even though I heard on an NPR health program last weekend that “Pop-Tarts are not a breakfast food.”
This was just a practice-wearing-the-new-helmet session….
For the second time this year, my bicycle ride home on Wednesday took me an hour and a half. It was a gruelingly crawlful evening commute; whenever the wind let up even a little, I felt like I effortlessy burst ahead for a few yards before it whisked against me once more.
All I could do was chug along and try to think happy thoughts about other things. There was nothing at all else to do; wind is something not fought with valiant hopes of victory.
When my brother-in-law tooted past me in his pickup truck, I gave a friendly wave knowing full well that if I frantically and successfully beckoned for him to pull over and wait for me, I would think better of forsaking my exercise routine and tell him to drive on. Much later, when he tooted past me in the other direction, I again waved and told myself I was making too much progress even to want a ride.
I arrived home both exhausted and invigorated, the latter albeit mostly by the thought that I wouldn’t venture out on my bike for at least a day or two.
On Friday morning I hit the pedals again, this time without a high wind warning and in hopes that the morning gusts would help at least as much as hinder my ride, which they did. The tremendous gust from the poultry feed truck barreling past helped me, too, with a blast of forced air to my back that boosted my ride and spirits if only for a moment.
Of course, the afternoon ride would be the true test of the wind’s helpfulness, and I soon pleasantly realized that by that time it had either pretty much petered out or decided that it was going my way as long as I was heading in the same direction.
I made that ride in the best time ever, fast enough even to know it while I still rode.
