PAgent’s Progress

I rode in this morning. That’s two days back-to-back, and makes ten trips in September. Which earns me a jersey. I’d cavort a bit, but I’m too wiped out.

The morning was overcast, which had three unexpected effects: 1) It was significantly warmer than it has been lately, 2) there was a lot of pre-dawn light diffusion going on, making it lighter than normal, and 3) I got some glimpses of a beautiful sunrise — hot pink, fuchsia, and orange.

As I said, it was a bit warmer than I have gotten used to. When I was talking to my brother (an experienced bike commuter) last weekend, he said the first thing he does in the morning is check the outside temperature, and use it to plan what he will wear. He selects from different thicknesses of tights, different layers, and various combinations of fingerless gloves, full-fingered gloves, liners, and overmitts, so that he will be comfortable riding to work.

I have not yet attained such wisdom. I was sweating within minutes of setting out, the little ensemble that has been just warm enough for the last week suddenly felt like a sauna. Other than that, it was a perfectly normal commute.

Well, except for the peckerwood in the red CRX that buzzed me on the bridge on Barbur. When your car is that small, and you move over that far to the right when there is a bike in your lane, I have to believe it is intentional. That it’s your way of sending a message. Here’s hoping your little plastic car develops some persistant and nondiagnosable engine problem, ultimately costing you thousands of dollars to repair.

After returning home tonight, I will have put about 200 commuting miles on the bike this month. Now, I know that some people could bang that out in a weekend (*cough* bbbach *cough*) but for me that’s an accomplishment. The trick will be in finding opportunities to keep it up over the winter.

And I should keep it up. I have noticed some of my slacks seem to be getting tighter, so I stepped on the scale this morning. Yup, I’ve put on some weight. Clearly, the additional calories that I’ve been allowing myself since I’ve been exercising regularly have not been fully offset by the exercise itself. That means going back to more, shall we say, regulated eating habits. Sigh.

I rode to work today. For those of you keeping track, that’s eight times so far this month. I have the rest of this week to make two more trips. The jersey shall be mine. Oh yes, it shall be mine.

I wore my Polartec tights today, and it made a big difference, especially to my aching knees. I wore them home as well, and didn’t get overheated. In addition, I have decided that I no longer have the luxury of pride when I am riding: I now try to take it easy on those hills. I don’t hesitate to drop to the smallest chainring, and in fact I’m trying to remember to drop to an even lower gear when I stop, so I don’t have to work as hard to get moving again. These are all changes that my knees have appreciated, and they aren’t aching quite so much any more.

***
My daughter approached me last week, and told me that she had to make a doghouse for school. This was on a Thursday evening, right before she needed to get ready for bed. “A doghouse?” I asked? Yes, for their class’s stuffed dog. She explained that she figured I could just bang out a doghouse from the spare lumber in the garage in nothing flat, and then she could decorate it.

Now, I’m not handy. But even if I was, I couldn’t imagine banging out a small doghouse before bed. “No,” I said. She began to whine. “Listen, why can’t you make it out of cardboard?” I suggested. She insisted it had to be made out of wood. Simply had to be.

“Listen,” I said, “If the teacher wants you to make a doghouse out of wood, she can’t expect you to get it done in one night. You check and see when it is due, and I’ll help you with it over the weekend.”

Saturday I found her in the garage. She had sketched out the dimensions of the doghouse she wanted (based on the size of the stuffed dog) and had a plan on how to make it. Unfortunately, her plan involved using two packages of balsa wood shims that she had found in the garage.

“You can’t use those.” I explained. Why not? “Two reasons. One, your doghouse would fall apart, and two, they are my shims, and I sometimes need them.” She started to pout, but I took her sketches and started figuring out how to make a doghouse from them. I drew some sketches, and took the opportunity to explain to my daughter how I could calculate all the lengths I would need using geometry. I sketched out right triangles, and wrote down the Pythagorean theorem, and basically emphasized the fact that yes, math does come in handy sometimes. I told her we would build the doghouse the next day.

The plans for the doghouse rolled around in my head for the rest of the day and overnight. I figured out a couple of flaws, and did a bit of a redesign in my head. Sunday morning, I got out the tools. Using only a circular saw, a saber saw, a random orbit sander, a cordless drill/driver, a box of wood screws, and the butt-ugly sawhorse I had built years ago, we put together a doghouse. Now, I’m not a great woodworker, and it wasn’t perfect, but my daughter thought it was great. She got her tempura paints out and started decorating it.

While we were working on it, I had asked her a few leading questions about this assignment. It turned out that no, all the students didn’t have to make a doghouse, just her. In fact, it turned out that she had volunteered to make the doghouse. When I was discussing it with my wife later, she opined that it wouldn’t surprise her if the whole idea of a doghouse had come from our daughter, with her teacher basically going along with the idea. Knowing my child, I suspect my wife is right.

But I do not begrudge the time we spent working together on it. I know I only have a short time remaining when I can make something with her, and she will think it is perfect simply because I made it. Soon, I know, she will spot the flaws in everything I do. I will embarrass her. What is handmade will not be good enough. She will want to buy things that have been assembled by professionals. I know it is only a few short years until my big clunky feet of clay become all too visible to her. But right now, her father is a skilled craftsman, capable of amazing feats of engineering, and that blocky doghouse, that has not one true 90 degree angle anywhere in it, is a work of art.

While driving home from work last night, I heard about the JetBlue flight that was circling LA with cockeyed front landing gear. As soon as I got home, I turned on the TV. Live coverage was on several channels. I heard all about how the plane was circling, because the A320 Airbus can’t dump fuel. I heard all about the theories on what would happen when they tried to land, from ‘the front gear will snap into proper position’ to ‘the landing gear will snap off and the plane will slide in on its nose’.

The wife and kids got home, and joined me in front of the TV. They hadn’t heard about the plane. The kids wanted to know what was going on, so we explained it to them as best we could. After a few minutes, it became clear that they were going to attempt a landing.

My wife looked at me. “Uhh…is this something we want them to watch?”

This was an excellent question. There was certainly the potential for carnage. Massive explosions, burnt and broken bodies strewn across the tarmac. My children could be scarred for life, or at least they could make the boarding process very entertaining for the forseeable future.

Since my daughter was very small, she has reacted badly to stress and violence in film. Time after time we would watch something that I considered pretty harmless, only to end up being yanked awake in the middle of the night by a traumatized daughter who had had a nightmare. That’s if she could even get to sleep at all, which was another problem. And it wasn’t restricted to scary movies. When the police were looking for a ‘person of interest’ in our neighborhood once, she was freaked out all night, and the next morning. She was freaked out enough that my wife called the police department to find out if they had caught him (they hadn’t, but they could confirm that he had left the area).

As a result, we have sheltered our kids from anything that might possibly result in sleepless nights for us. We usually make sure they are watching ‘G’-rated films, sometimes ‘PG’. We nearly always pre-view anything before letting them watch it. They don’t get to see a lot of the ‘cool’ movies that their friends get to watch, but we get more sleep. It seemed like a good deal. An acceptable trade-off.

That is, until recently. Until our children’s recent adventures in breaking boundaries. I couldn’t understand how a child so sensitive to the real and imagined dangers of the big wide world could be so blithe about putting herself and others at risk. It seemed to me that perhaps we have sheltered them too much. After all, scary stories have always taught children useful lessons: the woods are dangerous, don’t talk to strangers, listen to your parents. Have you ever read the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales? They’re pretty gruesome.

So what my wife was asking was whether we should take the chance that the kids could see something that could scar them for life, or at least disrupt our sleep for a while. And I decided to let them. Odds were, it would work out just fine. It might be exciting, but probably no one would be hurt.

And so my kids got to see a perfectly executed emergency landing, with the crew of the plane performing beautifully, the plane performing beautifully, and the emergency crews performing beautifully. Everything happened exactly the way it was supposed to happen, and the passengers got to leave the plane via a stairway, clutching their carry-on bags, instead of down a slide or, God forbid, in burning pieces.

The lesson I hope the kids learned was that air travel can be exciting, but that everyone involved works very hard to make sure it is as safe as possible. And that even when things go wrong, it can all turn out OK in the end. We let them see that trained professionals are constantly working to keep everyone safe. That’s the lesson I hope they learned.

Was it the right decision? Who knows? This was just another parenting pop quiz, sprung without warning. And there are no absolute Right and Wrong answers. Only consequences.

Nothing is certain but death and taxes. And The Crud. Parents of small children are very familiar with The Crud. Approximately two to three weeks after a child reenters school in the fall, they will begin to sniffle and cough. All the viruses that have been incubating in their classmate’s bodies all summer have joined together in a pestilential miasma that is guaranteed to wreak havoc on your child’s unsuspecting and unprepared immune system. And of course, the most predictable thing about The Crud is that you are going to get it, too.

The wife had a PTC meeting yesterday, so I took the kids out to dinner. We went to Sweet Tomatoes. I don’t know why kids love all-you-can-eat buffets, but they do. At least at Sweet Tomatoes it’s all the soup, salad and bread you can eat–nothing deep-fried in sight.

My son had been coughing a bit, and he looked listless. He didn’t eat much for dinner, and then asked to get some frozen yogurt from the infinite frozen yogurt dispenser for dessert. He assured me he could get it himself.

Nevertheless, I kept one eye on him. Nothing irks me more than kids running amok at the dessert bar, especially my own. I watched him get a little bowl, carefully hold it under the chocolate spigot, and pull the lever down. A stream of chocolate frozen yogurt descended, and he carefully caught it in the bowl, letting it spiral as the bowl filled. When I decided he had enough, I said so.

“That’s enough. That’s enough. THAT’S ENOUGH! STOP! STOPSTOPSTOPSTOP-”

The yogurt just kept spiralling down into the overflowing bowl. I snatched his hand off the lever and forced it up. It had stuck in the ‘open’ position, and it required just enough force to unstick it that my son hadn’t been able to do it with confidence.

He caught the last of the falling yogurt in the hand I had just freed, and carefully scooped it on top of the massive mound already in the bowl. He calmly licked the palm of his hand clean. Utterly unimpressed with the size of the serving he was carrying, he went around the counter to put sprinkles on it.

We have family rules about how much frozen yogurt you can get from the buffet. Rules that are violated only at the peril of losing all dessert privileges for an indeterminate period of time. When my daughter saw the size of the serving her brother was carrying back to the table, her response was immediate and predictable.

“Hey!! How come he gets to have-” Fortunately, my response had been planned the moment I realized how she would react:

“Grab a spoon. You can help your brother eat this.”

We sat and worked on the mound ‘o yogurt for a bit, but it wasn’t even halfway gone when my son leaned back and said, “I don’t want any more.”

Now I knew he was sick. I felt his forehead, and it was very warm.

I ran them home and told them to get ready for bed. While they were inefficiently doing so, I got out the Thermoscan and took his temperature. Nearly normal. Hmmm. Curious, I took my daughter’s as well. Barely a half a degree above normal. Then I took mine, 100.2 F. Damn.

I had The Crud.

I decided against trying to ride my bike to work in the morning, deciding instead to get an extra hour of sleep. I woke up feeling fine, but nevertheless took some of the decongestant/mucus thinner that helps me stave off sinus infections. Curiously, I didn’t feel badly at all today.

Tonight, my son is barking like a seal whenever he coughs. My wife is hoarse from a nasty sore throat that she has developed, and she is looking not unlike an extra from a George Romero film. As soon as she said “sore throat” I could feel my own throat clenching in sympathetic/hypochondriacal fashion. And I’ve been coughing a bit myself. But the big question is, how will I feel in the morning?

And will I feel like riding in to work? I have to make four more round trips in order to claim my jersey. I surely don’t want to wait until the last week to try and squeeze them all in. On the other hand, I’m not going to make that ride if I’m wheezing and coughing up lung tissue before I even start out. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

That makes me feel good about myself.

I’m fat. If you want to get clinical, I’m obese, at least according to BMI tables, height-weight charts, etc. I’ve pretty much always been fat. I’ve had a few dalliances with skinny, but they never lasted, and they pretty much ended when my metabolism downshifted in my late twenties.

Do I obsess over food? Yes. Do I eat for comfort? Absolutely. Do I eat food that is unhealthy? Almost every day. But the thing is, that’s true for most people, to one degree or another. By and large, I eat a healthy diet, I just consume more calories than I burn. My dietary choices play a big part of this, of course, but I’ve also got a wicked thrifty metabolism.

It’s funny, when you see someone who can eat whatever they want and never gain weight, you say “Gosh, I wish I had their metabolism.” But when you see someone who is obese no matter what they eat, you say “They should exercise some will power.”

Let’s face it, obesity is seen as a character flaw in this society. Not because it’s unhealthy (which it assuredly is) but because it’s unattractive. Fat, sweaty people are distasteful. I think so, too, and I am one.

‘You should just go on a diet’. Typically, diets don’t work all that well for me. There’s usually an initial weight loss, then my metabolism adjusts to the new caloric input. And I’m miserable. As soon as I relax the restrictions on calorie intake, because I can’t take it any more, I gain all the weight back plus interest. It’s that thrifty metabolism, remember? Of all the approaches I’ve tried, the South Beach Diet was the most successful. I lost 40 lbs on that one, but I’ve gained about 10 of it back. And it’s hard to diet. It might be easy for some people, but it’s slow, slow torture for me.

I’m hoping that the exercise I’ve been getting will make a difference. It should. I’m already feeling much stronger since I started bike commuting, but I’d like to lose a little weight as well.

Because it’s no fun being the butt of everyone’s jokes.

I see signs of the coming autumn everywhere. The leaves are beginning to turn. The evenings are getting downright chilly. Any day now, the grey curtain of damp will descend on Portland, and it will be wet winter weather until spring.

But today was beautiful. Clear, sunny and warm. A perfect day for a ride. And I wanted to ride somewhere that wasn’t to or from work.

Today’s ride stats:

Ride length: 17.5 miles

Max speed: 32.0 mph

Moving time: 1 hr, 28 minutes

Average speed (moving): 11.9 mph

Time stopped: 23 min, 22 sec

Overall average speed: 9.4 mph

No. of people who said my recumbent looked cool: 3

No. of those that were riding a recumbent themselves: 1

No. of other recumbent riders seen: 2

No. of upright riders that passed me: 3

No. of people who asked me where I got my bike: 1

No. of cars full of young males that screamed something unintelligable yet obviously insulting at me: 2

No. of times I swore I would never go up that hill again: 3