Month: July 2018

The Full Bus Bike Rack, the Sad Bicyclist, and the Kind Commuter

I like bike/bus commuting. Or, let me put it this way: if I have to spend 60 to 90 minutes each way commuting, I prefer to include my bike as well as the bus. I like being able to ride my bike home directly. If I’m taking a bus home, the bike lets me catch any of about five different buses that all go within about five miles of my house.

But. The catch. There’s always a catch, right? Here’s the catch: Metro buses only have space for three bikes on the front rack. When that rack is full, any other riders with bikes have to wait for the next bus.

This almost never happens. It’s amazingly unlikely. Until a few weeks ago, I’d had maybe one time when the rack was full in 18 months of daily commuting.

Then something changed. Now the rack on my normal 7:15 bus is almost always full before it gets to my stop. So I leave the house at 7:05, wait about 10 minutes, and the bike rack on the bus that pulls up is full. I have to wait for the next bus, which comes between 7:30 and 7:35. By then I’ve been at the stop about 30 minutes. Unfortunately, traffic is worse at that time, so that trip takes several minutes longer than the 7:15 trip.

That means that instead of getting to work a little before 8:00–and thereby being able to leave between 4:00 and 4:30–I get to work at between 8:20 and 8:30. So then I have to stay at work 30 minutes longer, get home 30 minutes later, and spend an 30 minutes less with my family. On those days, I get home at closer to 6:30, which is barely early enough to do bedtime with Benji.

So when the bike rack is full, I leave the house at 7:05 and get home at 6:30. That’s just frustrating. I already have a long commute, and then having the stupid bike rack full makes my commute and my whole day even longer.

Today, the third time this happened this week, I saw the rack was full and just sat down and cried. It was so frustrating, so unfair, so infuriating, so disappointing and discouraging, after weeks of dealing with this happening repeatedly, it finally crushed me. I didn’t even care that this line of like 20 or 30 people all waiting for a bus was watching me have a meltdown.

I sat and cried, and you know what? From that long line of cynical commuters pretending not to see me fall apart came a really sweet young lady. She came over and asked if I was okay and if she could do anything. When it was clear there wasn’t anything to be done, she offered to just give me a hug–which I accepted. Then she sat and talked with me until her bus came. She’s going into her sophomore year in college next year and hopes to play viola professionally when she graduates. She was incredibly sweet, kind, and amazingly empathetic and mature. I was deeply impressed.

I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere: people aren’t all terrible, or the power of kindness, or something. I’m not going to worry about the moral of the story, but I know she gave me a lot to think about.

Because that’s who I want to be. The person who sees someone in pain and doesn’t just pretend it’s not happening. Who steps out and gives kindness when it’s needed–not on a big national scale, worrying about big political disasters and impacts to millions of people, but at the one on one level where we all live every day. That’s what we all need.

Sleeping on the Job

If you’re like me, you’ve heard urban legends about the transformative power of power naps. The anecdotes I always heard involved some high-powered, on-the-go person who carved out just a few minutes a day to rest at work and voila! Life miraculously makes sense again. More energy throughout the rest of the day, more effective at work, etc., etc.

Sure, sure. Whatever you say.

A few months ago, I was extra-exhausted at work. I forget why, but the afternoon doldrums hit particularly hard, and I could barely keep my eyes open. It felt like given even the tiniest opportunity, I’d fall asleep right at my desk.

I figured, okay, I’m not getting anything done anyway. I’ll go just sit in one of the phone booths with the light off and rest for 15 minutes. To be safe, I set an alarm on my phone.

Needless to say, the second I got relatively comfortable in that dark little room, with the whoosh of the elevators and the murmur of devs talking about things I don’t understand… I feel asleep.

About 10 minutes later I woke up, disabled unneeded the alarm, and went back to work. At first I felt a little groggy, but within a few minutes I actually did feel better. The entire rest of the day, in fact, I felt more alert and engaged. So much better than I’d felt only a few minutes before.

Since then, when I’m overwhelmingly exhausted and ready to drop off at my desk, I’ve napped at work. Every time I fall asleep, and every time I feel 1000% better afterwards. I have been astonished at the difference such a short rest makes in the remainder of my day.

I guess I’ll join the ranks of the power nap evangelists, because I’m a total convert.

Oh, That’s Saturday

Thanks to Ian, I get to spend most of every Saturday biking. It’s the part of the week I finally don’t worry about anything harder than not getting dropped. It helps keep me sane. I ride on Saturdays rain or shine, heat or cold; the only exception is extreme wind or ice.

The other exception is when I’m sick. This week wasn’t my best for health: On Tuesday I got a cold from Benji. But I spent all of Wednesday, the Fourth, lounging in bed watching Netflix (thanks, Ian!), and by Thursday I felt much better. Friday I planned to do the usual Saturday ride, maybe albeit a little slower than usual.

Then, on Friday night, I got some kind of what I suspect to be food poisoning. It wasn’t pretty for about four hours there, is all I’m going to say about that. After which I went to sleep (it was the middle of the night, naturally) and woke up feeling normal. Definitely some kind of food poisoning, but to be on the cautious side, I decided to move my ride from Saturday to Sunday.

It was then decided (to use passive voice for its intended purpose, which is obscuring how/and who) that Ian would get a little mini-vacation day, while I took Benji. Thus it was that I got to see what normal people might do with a Saturday, given the whole day in which to achieve…uh…achievements.

Okay, let’s not get hung up on the use of “normal”; moving along, let’s instead get to the point of the post, which is this list of things I got done on Saturday:

  • Sort through a bunch of old clothes and bag a bunch up for Goodwill.
  • Wash a ton of dishes left from Friday night. It was a lot.
  • Drop Ian off at the place where he was going to hang out and do some stuff by himself.
  • Take Benji to Hillcrest Bakery for a little treat (where he ate the entirety of an enormous chocolate croissant, but only after agonizing between that and an apple fritter the size of his head).
  • Go grocery shopping with Benji. He stuck with me most of the time, but we went by the kids’ room where there’s a super nice attendant who will watch your kids while you shop, and he wanted to go in to play. So I finished up without him. When I came back to pick him up, he said, “Oh no, it’s time to go already?!” Then he started negotiating about when he’d get to come back.
  • Pick up CSA veggies and do the CSA kids’ garden. Benji also found a rainbow array of glass chips in the parking lot of the CSA parking lot, which is graveled with a ton of glass chips. I don’t know where they get them, but they aren’t sharp anymore. He did that, and then he picked some carrots and beets and a zucchini in the kids’ garden. Learning moments: Those squash plants are prickly! Also, to pull veggies, you need to grip at the base of the stem, near the dirt, rather than at the top of the leaves.
  • Put away all the food and wash a bunch of the veggies (although I did save the lettuce for Ian).
  • While also getting Benji some lunch, make two loaves of zucchini bread to use up the zucchini ASAP. To use up everything we got, I put in twice the amount of shredded zucchini, and the recipe turned out just fine–if anything, moister and more tasty than usual.
  • Make teriyaki sauce for the first time (easy) and start marinating some meat for today’s dinner. Hope that turns out okay!
  • During quiet time, wash dishes from the zucchini bread and eat lunch.
  • Mow front yard… it’s really mow the weeds, as the grass has stopped growing for the summer. We don’t water and I always look forward to the grass dying so we don’t have to mow any more. I’m sure our neighbors love this strategy.
  • Start weeding front yard. It may be dry, but that doesn’t stop the weeds from growing… and boy howdy, do they grow. There’s still a lot to do. While I was finishing that up, Ian got home from his adventures.
  • Take Benji to Bridle Trails for a 3-mile, zucchini bread-powered hike with Grammy and Papa Gary. As a bonus, we found ripe salmonberries, huckleberries, and some tiny native blackberries. Yummy!
  • Get leftovers together for dinner, probably the easiest part of the day. After that, Ian took Benji for a bubble bath and bedtime, and I collapsed on the couch for a couple episodes of Queer Eye (more on that another time).

Apparently that’s what I can do with a whole uninterrupted day. I can definitively say that if I wasn’t gone for 4 to 6 hours every Saturday, our house and yard would look much nicer, we’d have a lot more baked goods around, and–most difficult of all–I’d be able to give Ian a better break, plus get more quality time with my child.

Well, as time goes by, we keep finding a new balance for what works for us. I guess the thing about balance is you don’t just get it and you’re done. It’s a process that requires constant work and adjustment. On a bike, if you aren’t constantly making tiny tweaks (and sometimes large swerves, depending!), you’re going to tip over. Maybe that’s also true in life.

Fourth of July: God Bless ‘Murrica

This year I spent Fourth of July in bed watching Queer Eye on Netflix because it was my first, most miserable day of a virus shared (no surprise) by my adorable child. Although I missed Benji’s appearance in the town’s children’s parade, I didn’t miss the opportunity to hear my neighbors setting off fireworks until the small hours of the morning.

Which got me thinking.

Fireworks set off by individuals (as our neighbors did last night until all hours) are truly the perfect American way to celebrate our country. They:

  • Terrify to babies, pets, and veterans, all of which we profess to love, and infuriate our neighbors trying to sleep;
  • Generate literally tons of garbage that someone else (ahem, City of Bothell!) has to clean up;
  • Also generate completely unnecessary air pollution that can’t be cleaned up;
  • Start fires that rage out of control, cost millions to stop, and — bonus! — destroy vast swathes of nature at the same time, all out of carelessness; and
  • Have the potential to cause physical harm to the lighter and viewers.

And yet we persist, because we don’t give a sh*t that what we want harms others.

God Bless Murrica. Amen and good night.