IT’S OVER!!!!1 Woo!!

…that is all I have to say about that right now, except to add that I’m extremely tired.

OK, I will add that all 5 of the remaining students came, and I got the sense that we did a good job engaging them and getting them to think about bicycling and bicycle safety in a new light.

PS – This is unrelated to bicycling, but I’m super excited about it: Ian and I have ordered a bed frame and two side tables, all of which were on sale at Bothell Furniture. Oh boy!

My entire week — and a good portion of earlier weeks — has been consumed with organizing the Bicycle Alliance’s first Traffic Skills 101 class. Originally I conceived it as a way to say thank you to volunteers — essentially another incentive for volunteering. We can say “Another advantage of volunteering for the Bike Alliance is that we offer Traffic Skills 101 exclusively to volunteers for only $20 (to cover the cost of materials). If you took this class elsewhere in the Puget Sound area, you’d pay $60 to $85.”

Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out that way. We invited some specific people, mostly volunteers, and filled the class — that’s 9 or 10 students with two LCIs. But then students started dropping the class. Things came up. They hadn’t paid anything, so they didn’t lose anything by backing out. This happened to me in April with the Salute to Volunteers Night at the Mariners, too. People RSVP’d; we bought tickets; and then they didn’t show. Anyway, some other people got invited to the class who haven’t volunteered. Eventually we got down to 5 students, and I was willing to take almost anybody — but that was yesterday afternoon, and the class starts at 4:00 today (Friday the 13th, as many people have pointed out). It was too late of notice.

Every and I have decided to cancel the class if we only get 3 students. But I’m still feeling discouraged and disappointed by the bad turnout: I’ve put in tons of work finding a venue, planning the curriculum, organizing food and miscellaneous details, planning a route, ordering materials from the League of American Bicyclists, …well, the list goes on. On top of which, Every and I will both be working Friday evening and Saturday, with no particular recompense. I’ve worked more weekends and evenings than I want, with no surcease in sight.

So I’m feeling discouraged. But I’ve also learned something:

• People don’t value what they don’t pay for. Offering something free or very cheap — like a baseball game or a bike class — seems to make it less meaningful, less of a commitment.

• Commitments don’t mean as much as they used to. At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, “back in the day, giving your word meant something.” If you said you were going to an event, whether free or not, you went, even if something better came up. Now, though, people seem to always be on the lookout for what’s most beneficial for them. Saying you’ll go to one event doesn’t mean you’ll go, per se; it more means you’ll go if something better doesn’t come up.

This is really frustrating, but I’m learning tricks to deal with it.

1. Make people pay up front.

2. Ask for a refundable charge. Require people to write you a $50 check to register and give the check back when the student finishes the class.
3. Take the student’s firstborn child hostage. Return the child when the student finishes the class.

In any case, I’m teaching a bike class this weekend. It’ll go from Friday at 4:00 pm through Saturday at 2:30 pm (with a break for sleeping and such, of course). I’m really looking forward to Saturday afternoon.

Today I had the distinct honor of going into the Seattle Tennis Club, “an exclusive, multi-faceted family club which proudly offers its membership an array of athletic, dining and social opportunities.” I’m sure my net worth is far too low to qualify me for membership; besides, to become a member, you have to be recommended by a member of two years’ standing. It was quite the place.

I went there not to play tennis, mind you, but to liberate two panniers full of old, bounceless balls. A Bicycle Alliance board member who is an avid tennis player (almost made it to the national championships this year) gave me the in. What took him one phone call could have taken me days of begging and pleading. What will a bicycle organization do with two panniers’-worth of tennis balls? You can guess, and if you give up, here’s the answer.

Even though tennis balls are mostly air, hauling both panniers full of them sure felt heavy.

OK, so yesterday was Tour de Fat, and I “worked” all day — which makes today feel like Saturday, except that we’re going to church today. And I took Friday off, which made yesterday feel like Monday, which would make tomorrow Tuesday. Except I have tomorrow off, too. Very confusing.

Tour de Fat! I didn’t bring my camera, and I’m pretty glad I didn’t. Hauling that thing 17 miles each way along with all my other treasures. Here are some Flickr pictures that capture the tone of the event.

By bikejuju.com

By bikejuju.com

By bikejuju.com

By bikejuju.com

By lamppost

By ebis50

By ebis50

By bikejuju.com

I put a picture of a cruiser bike last because I’ve never seen so many cruisers all in one place before. It was astonishing. Anyway, from my perspective, Tour de Fat involved a bunch of people walking by the Bike Alliance tent. Some of them stopped, and I or one of the other volunteers at the table talked with them. We encouraged people to win a free messenger bag, and lots of them entered the drawing. We encouraged people to become members, and two people did, which isn’t much but it’s something. We also received a few cash donations. People in strange costumes rode by, usually on strange bikes. Hours passed. The wind stopped blowing our papers and tabling supplies around, which was a relief. The sun came out in the afternoon and I finally stopped feeling chilly. My head got hot and tired of wearing my winged helmet, no matter how cool it looked. I got to see most of my coworkers in absurd costumes, which was quite worth the bike ride. But overall, for me, it just felt like another tabling event. I’m grateful I don’t have to do another tabling event today (the Bike Alliance is making an appearance at the WA State Individual Time Trial in Tenino today, but thankfully other people are covering it). Actually, the best part of Tour de Fat for me was getting a free copy of the Chinook Book, which normally costs $20.

After I dragged myself home and showered, a couple friends and I met up at the Redhook Brewery for dinner. It was a lot of fun. We left when the live music started up and we couldn’t hear each other anymore.

Today I plan on being a homebody and doing chores around the house, with maybe some napping thrown in for spice.

I sketched this two-headed cat-vampire-cow during the AmeriCorps training. See the right side bar for other sketches.

Nonprofits seem to operate in their own strange sphere in the world, some alternate reality that for-profit and governmental agencies remain almost entirely unaware of. It has taken me quite a while to figure out how to live in this parallel world; maybe the air is more rarefied, or the water a little bit purer, or the nutrients a bit more nutritious. Whatever the reason, I found myself slowly adapting to my new environment. Now, after 6 months with the Bicycle Alliance, I think I can quantify what I’ve come to appreciate about working there.

1. Diversity. “What?” You may ask. “How can you say ‘diversity’ in an organization run almost entirely by white, middle-class baby-boomer women?” It’s true that if you take a superficial look at the Bicycle Alliance’s staff, it does seem to lack a certain breadth or depth. Yet each of the staff brings her (or his) own experiences to the organization and those contributions run the gamut. Name it and one of our staff people has probably done it. Plus, the diversity of people who walk in the door astounds me on a daily basis. I’ve started saying “You never know who’ll walk in,” and it’s true — working in Pioneer Square means interacting with everybody from homeless men to hot-shot tech people to everything in between. The vibrancy, the life, the variety of perspectives continually astound me.
2. Passion. It’s quite true that people don’t work at nonprofits for the money. You have to truly care about the nonprofit’s mission in order to stay and succeed. At my old corporate job, we had no common bond, aside from “It pays the bills.” At the Bicycle Alliance, when we sit down for lunch together, we all have the shared love of bicycling drawing us together. Regardless of our differences, we all firmly believe in the importance and value of bicycles as a transportation option in the future, and we believe in making that a reality.
3. Cool. I mean cool in the relaxed sense, the hakuna matata sense, the sense that although we’re all working hard to achieve important goals, we aren’t killing ourselves along the way. It means we’re taking time to go for a bike ride on a sunny day. It means that timing vacations just right isn’t really that important, but that having a relaxing time and coming back rejuvenated is. It means that I know if I wake up one morning and cannot drag myself in for love or money, that’s OK. Nobody’s going to flip a lid because I didn’t show up. It means that we’re having a favorite cinnamon roll contest and everybody will bring in a delicious offering. It means we can take time for personal concerns and not worry about an angry boss looking over our shoulders. It’s working to live, not living to work.

Those are just a few of the reasons I love the Bicycle Alliance. I’m not sure how I’ll go back to working a boring, cubicle-bound corporate job after my AmeriCorps tenure ends. Fortunately, I’ve learned another beautiful thing about nonprofits, which is summed up neatly in this exchange from Shakespeare in Love:

Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre [my note: read "nonprofit" here] business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do?
Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
Hugh Fennyman: How?
Philip Henslowe: I don’t know. It’s a mystery.

Lately, I’ve been working on creating a checklist for the volunteer program at the Bike Alliance. I figured a checklist was a pretty simple thing at heart, right? How could you have different ways of writing or interpreting a checklist?

Well, a quick unofficial survey of Bike Alliance staff members showed that people think about checklists differently.

Some people use checklists as a “Done” list rather than a “To-do List,” and would like to see everything in past tense:

• Did laundry

• Reserved Zipcar
• Went to Safeway

This seemed counter-intuitive to me. Yes, when you’re done, the list would document what you completed; but if that was its primary purpose, wouldn’t we call it a “Checked List” rather than a “Check List”?

Then there are the people who just write shorthand checklists:

• Laundry

• Zipcar
• Safeway

A shorthand list like that works because you already have context and an entire idea string associated with each of those words. You just need the list as a reminder of what to do. So when a person writes a shorthand checklist like that, here’s what they actually see when they read the list:

• Wash the towels, bike clothes, and perma-press clothes.

• Reserve a Zipcar for the trip to Spokane this weekend.
• Buy groceries for the salad to go with tonight’s dinner.

That kind of list works great if you have the context, but if you don’t have the background knowledge, those keywords won’t trigger any meaningful reminders for you. You’ll just know that you need to do something with laundry, but what? Wash it? Dry it? Fold it? Put it away? And which laundry?

Another other kind of list people seem to use is a more detailed list that contains tasks broken out into sub-tasks:

• Do laundry
  • Towels

  • Bike Clothes
  • Perma-press
• Reserve Zipcar
• Go to Safeway
  • Lettuce

  • Carrots
  • Broccoli
  • Tomatoes

This type of list works a bit better when the reader doesn’t have the context, since it lays out more details of each task as well as giving the overarching task.

Both of these styles of lists assume a competency in doing laundry, reserving a Zipcar, or choosing and buying produce. The checklist I’m creating for the volunteer program has to assume zero competency to start with, and I have to try to envision and explicitly describe each task and sub-task. This is, frankly, impossible: I have an idea of what needs to happen overall, but the nitty-gritty remains nebulous. Because this program hasn’t yet become real and people haven’t started doing the steps, I’m not sure what each individual task will actually entail when it’s acted out in reality.

I do believe that a checklist can ease the transition as we move into a new way of interacting with volunteers. Atul Gawande’s interesting article “The Checklist” and this related NPR spot reinforce the value of using checklists. I’ve put a hold on his book The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, but 108 other people have put holds on it ahead of me. In the meantime, I get the privilege of trying to write one checklist that makes sense to seven different brains.

Here goes. Good thing I have an inspirational Indiana Jones soundtrack to keep me going!

I was planning on riding my bike to the AmeriCorps meeting I have in Port Townsend today. It should have been a lovely 35-mile ride along the Olympic Peninsula coastline, through Port Ludlow and Port Gamble along quieter country roads. I have been looking forward to this ride for quite a while, imagining myself riding along with a couple other AmeriCorps guys, enjoying the sunshine and sea air.

I’m sure it would’ve been nice… if the torrential rain had held off another day. As it was, the pouring, drenching, unremitting rain came right on schedule and made me think more than twice about the ride. At first I resolved to do it, but I checked the weather and the radar showed heavy rain over my entire route. The weather man predicts a 90% chance of rain all day. I don’t mind riding in the rain, but arriving soaking wet, cold, and miserable in Port Townsend to then spend the day doing AmeriCorps activities and finish up by camping overnight… brrr. I would have spent the entire day damp and miserable.

Besides all that, Ian and I got possession of our house yesterday evening and today, despite the rain, is moving day. We have to get our stuff out of the storage unit before Monday or pay for another month. The free storage unit truck was available today, so today it is. I’d like to be here, if not today (it’ll be hard to get back from Port Townsend at a reasonable hour), at least tomorrow morning.

Last night Ian and I did a quick walk-through of our new home (!!) and found that, in addition to everything we expected to get with the house, we also inherited:

• 7 front door keys

• 2 back door keys
• 2 garage door openers (that have 3 buttons each — why would you need 3 buttons?! It’s either open or closed, right?)
• A bunch of hot tub chemicals
• A large stack of instructions on how to use and maintain the hot tub and various other appliances
• 3 large round light bulbs for the bathroom lighting fixtures (which I intend to replace ASAP)
• A bunch of solar-powered LED garden lights
• A dirty but usable hand truck
• 2 hoses
• 2 moldy tennis balls (I brought them back to my parents’ house for the dog and she loved them. Stinky, rotten, easy to shred, all-round vile? Perfect!)
• A thermometer
• A net for the hot tub
• Lots of touch-up paint in well-labeled cans

In all, I’d really like to just be available to help with the house this weekend, and riding to Port Townsend, camping there overnight, etc. just doesn’t fit into the plan that well. I don’t like my AmeriCorps buddies enough to give up helping to move into my new home for them.

I was going to write a blog about how my internship is going, but I think I’ll share an insight that I had recently instead.

At Charles River, although I always worked hard and gave my tasks my best effort, I never really believed in my work. In fact, I always felt ambivalent about making money from Big Pharma on animal testing — two hugely controversial topics. When I met new people, I told them, “I write lab reports,” and de-emphasized the part where the results come from animal testing. Only very, very rarely did I arrive home upset or bothered by my work. When I rode out the gates, I left all Charles River-related problems and frustrations behind.

As a result, I separated my sense of satisfaction and enjoyment in life completely from my work. Work was work; I did it to make a living, but I never expected to feel gratified or validated by it. Instead, I found my joy in other places: In my faith, friends, family, and hobbies. Although I won’t pretend that I spent every minute blissfully happy, I did enjoy a calm peace that carried through my workdays.

Now I work at the Bicycle Alliance of Washington, a bicycle advocacy group that I really do buy into. I believe in their mission and goals, and everything they work for closely touches one of my deep passions: Bicycling. In essence, without even realizing it, I’ve expanded my passion for bicycling into passion for my work at the Bicycle Alliance. I want to achieve something great for them, to finish my internship with a beautiful, smooth-running volunteer program that will dramatically broaden the Bicycle Alliance’s reach and potential for achievement. Lots of organizations use volunteers in highly responsible roles, and I have a dream of something that grand and meaningful for the Bicycle Alliance.

Unfortunately, the linking of a hobby with a job means that the many setbacks, disappointments, and frustrations that plague me here follow me into my private life. I found that I began basing my joy in life from my work, rather than on those healthy things I’d done before. I started feeling very low and unhappy, when objectively I knew life has hardly ever looked better for us: We own a home, my bike is fixed, Ian has an interesting, challenging job that he likes, we’re healthy, we found a wonderful church and are making friends there, we love living in Washington near our families… The list goes on and on.

It took me a long time to realize that I had once again shifted my sense of value and joy on how much I felt I had achieved at work. That’s a terrible way to live; joy shouldn’t be externally driven, but an interior cup filled by God and always overflowing. Now that I’m aware of it, I have started reminding myself of all these many blessings. “Consider it pure joy, my brothers,” James 1:2 – 4 says, “whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” And really, who wouldn’t want to be “mature and complete, not lacking anything”?

This morning as I rode up the hill on 112th NE, I noticed a distinct squishiness in my ride. I ride on 120 psi tires, and when fully inflated — as they were when I left this morning — they feel about as soft as rocks. I would never describe my tires, when functioning correctly, as “squishy.”

A quick stop confirmed my fear: My rear tire was slowly going flat on me on the first rainy day in a week. The good news is that I only had to ride a couple miles to the Bellevue Transit Center and my favorite bike shop. The next 10 minutes turned into a race against the air leaking out of my tire. I won, but just barely.

When I say “won,” of course, I mean I won the opportunity to change my flat in a dry space with a floor pump readily available. I didn’t actually pay Dean to change the flat, but he loaned me his floor pump and helped me seat the wheel right when I finished (I always have a hard time with that, thanks to disc brake finickiness). I found the location of the puncture without any problems, since the water on the tires bubbled as air escaped from the hole. Whatever had slit the tire did the deed and then escaped before I could wreak my retribution on it.

With the flat fixed, I rode on, arriving at work just before 10:00 to find my coworkers in a bit of a tizzy. I’d informed Every of my intention to arrive late, but Every threw her back out and didn’t come to work today. The remaining employees had become anxious for me when I didn’t get to work anywhere near the usual time. For bicycle commuters, extreme lateness can mean something really bad happened, and they worried that I’d crashed again. It’s very nice to work at a place where people care for you and wonder why you’re not doing the usual thing.

Speaking of “not the usual thing,” my other flat falls firmly into that category: The exercise ball that I’ve used as a chair for the last 5 months exploded this morning exploded while I sat on it. I fell smack onto my rear while the ball emitted a loud BANG!

The sound of the explosion spurred the bike shop guys to call, “Are you OK?” When one of them ventured back to see what had happened, he stood for a minute looking at me sprawled in the scattered wreckage of my chair and then started laughing. I had to join him — after all, I bet I looked really ridiculous falling as the ball exploded around me.

I’ve switched to a kind of bizarre chair that has a “cushion” made out of rows of very sturdy black bungee cords. Let’s just hope they’re up to the job… and that I don’t have any more flats today.