Biking to work

April 26, 2013April 26, 2013 meisajDaily Life

Last year I biked to work several times.

Of course by this time last year the weather had changed to consistently warm and sunny, where as this year it’s been warm and sunny one day, and snowing the next. I’m not kidding. This has been a year of bizarre weather in Cleveland. Last Thursday we set a record for the high temperature. 83 degrees Fahrenheit. Saturday morning it was snowing when I drove into work. That’s messed up. Weekends in particular have been either wet, or really cold limiting the distance riding I could do.

So its been hard to get bike rides in consistently. I had done at least one 50 mile bike ride at this point last year. My longest ride has been 18 miles this year. And I’ve only been biking for three or so weeks. Which is probably about the same time frame as last year. But I’m not sure I’m in the same biking shape I was last year. Although I weigh less than last year and I have a new bike which is driving my enthusiasm. I just need the weather to catch up with my enthusiasm.

Monday I think is the day. Sunday night/Monday morning its not supposed to dip below 54 degrees Fahrenheit. Sunrise is 6:26am – so it’ll be light quickly after I leave. Only a 10% chance of rain and very slight wind. In the afternoon it’ll be low 60’s. Perfect biking day. So this morning when the 5:30am alarm went off and I couldn’t fall back asleep (I’m certain its vengeance from my brain for trying to sleep more yesterday… see my last post), I was thinking about what it would have to be for me to start biking to work temperature and weather wise, and when I would have to leave. It is a 24 mile ride to work. Not that far. It should really take me 90 minutes or so bike it, and that’s being pretty fair. That’s 16 miles an hour riding. Not a crazy pace by any means. but I would give myself a little less than two hours. Get up at 5:30am (packed the night before) and hit the road at 5:45am and I should be good. That gives me 1 hour and 45 minutes to leisurely bike to work. No problem.

Last year I jump started my biking with a 50 mile ride. To kind of prove to myself I could. I don’t need that this year. But I need to do something that guarantees a longer ride for me. I think biking to work is it. And I’m excited about it. I like that. Makes me smile.

Snooze

April 25, 2013April 25, 2013 meisajDaily Life

I am not normally a fan of the snooze button.

That’s not exactly true. I set two alarms instead of using a snooze button. One for 5:30am and one for 5:50am. Nothing in between. If I don’t get up at 5:30 then I sleep until 5:50. And I never get up at 5:30. But that’s a sneaky 20 minutes. I use it to trick my brain into thinking every weekday I’m going to be up at 5:30, and those 20 minutes are special and it only gets them on occasion.

This morning I tried to add another ten minutes into the situation. When the second alarm went off at 5:50am I set an alarm for 6:00 so I could sleep a little longer. My brain apparently didn’t appreciate this attempt at more sleep. I ended up laying awake for 7 minutes until I decided to just get out of bed.

I think my brain is in on the trick of setting two alarms.

Elephant Dreams

April 24, 2013April 25, 2013 meisajDaily Life

What does it mean when your dream consists on trying to get a baby elephant onto a train to go to work with you?

In the dream it seemed like I spent an hour or two trying to keep the elephant hidden and get it on a train. It was a cantankerous elephant, and every time I tried to get it to move it went the other direction. I think it charged at me at one point.

Weird and Bizarre.

Story Time #4

April 22, 2013April 22, 2013 meisajDaily Life

Thought I’d start a random story since I haven’t written anything in a while. This is straight from Rory’s Story Cubes, although I wasn’t able to get a picture of that this time.

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01102011AJC Once upon a time there was man named Jim. He was a happy sort of fellow. A little carefree, or at least that’s how people viewed him. He smiled a lot, unfortunately for Jim his smile had that weird slightly skeptical look to it, making people question whether he was smiling or confused often.

But Jim didn’t know this, nor would he have cared either. He was rather proud of his “It doesn’t matter what others think” mindset. He liked to take adventures and chances and didn’t have a lot of stability in his life. He had his friends of course, they stayed put, and put down roots, but Jim liked adventure. Even if it was dull adventure. He moved several times in his adult life. Enough to learn the truth about himself. Wherever he moved too ended up extremely similar to every other place. He went out several times a week, whether just for coffee or for a drink, had a few places he loved to eat, and had one or two hobbies that got him outside often.

That was his life, that was his routine, and he was ok with it. It wasn’t the big adventures in stories he had read. He loved to think someday he’d have one of them, but he knew better. He was the guy who everyone referred to as a wanderer (although he lived in each city for a year or more), and he was the guy who had “crazy adventures” but those were all details. Day to day, year to year, his life was pretty predictable, and he was ok with it.

Jim lived in Arizona right now. He didn’t have close friends or family here, but he had a large plot of land he rented, a small house (more of a shack) on it, and a lot of time. He worked at the home improvement store in town a few miles away. It paid well enough that he could live comfortably, but he was exactly ‘making bank.’

Jim passed his time away reading and hiking. He liked that sort of thing. He listened to horrible late night radio talk shows (Coast2Coast AM was his favorite) and spent a lot of time just staring at the stars next to a small camp fire in his backyard. This fall’s experiment for Jim was a sweat tent. He wanted to call it a lodge, but Jim wasn’t that great at building this sort of thing, and his enthusiasm exceeded his reach often. It was more of a canvas TeePee with a hole in the top and a small wood stove with stones on top to produce steamed heat. One of his neighbors called it a crappy sauna, and Jim didn’t really think he was wrong.

Tonight Jim was relaxing in his “sweat tent” with George Noorey in the background talking about some sort of alien appearing somewhere. Jim just like the openness of the show. Anyone could talk about anything. Aliens and conspiracies were his favorite shows. He laid in his tent thinking how where he was living was where that stuff should happen, alien invasions and the such, but he knew it was all made up crap.

“Still fun… fun to think about” Jim thought. Just then an arrow came shooting through his tent.

Confused, as anyone would be in this situation, Jim left his sweat tent to see what the hell was going on. He had been in there for several hours so when he took his first step he immediately fell flat on his face. He called this wobbly feet. It happened often. Others usually said their feet were “asleep,” but Jim was certain his feet never slept. He had whole cartoons and stories about how his feet went off and had adventures without the rest of his body. Hence wobbly feet. And wobbly feet left Jim half in half out of the tent.

Thankfully his face was the half out of the tent, and when he finally was able to look up he saw a little gray man staring him. An Alien. An Alien with a Bow and Arrow. That had shot at him.

It would have been hilariously funny if not for the fact that wobbly feet left Jim face down in the dirt and he swore that as he was looking through the dust he saw the alien laughing at him.

As Jim started to get to his feet he saw the alien slowly ascend through the air. Before Jim could reach him he was as high as Jim’s house and when the alien was at tree level it looked down and waved at Jim.

Jim scratched his chin in absolute confusion, and watched as the alien disappeared from sight.

“Messed up,” Jim said to himself. “Guess it is time to stop using the sweat tent.”

Every Morning Starts the Same Way

April 16, 2013 meisajDaily Life

I wake up every morning to Angelo. He sleeps on the bed, he follows me around, and most every morning when I sit down to drink some coffee and read the news, he’s right there next to me purring and pawing at my legs. It’s more dog behavior than cat, but I guess he’s pretty loyal for a cat.

Special Pillow

April 14, 2013 meisajDaily Life

I’ve had one particular pillow for at least a decade. Probably much Longer than that. I sleep with two or three pillows on any given night. Usually two pillows is the right height for me to sleep in my side without cramping my neck (or collar bone). This pillow was different.

I called it Special Pillow, just for the fact that it has been around for long time, and that I slept with it covering the top of my head and eyes every night. It was a down pillow that had little to no mass left however it blocked out the light completely and helped me sleep at night. It was useless for anything but being put over my head.

For the last couple months it has been put aside, waiting to be patched and sewn up – it was old enough to have had it’s casing just disintegrate. The plan was to sew it up in a pillowcase and put an extra pillowcase around it. Unfortunately it had to be tossed as feathers started getting spread all over the apartment.

I thought I’d do a little memorial post for this pillow that I’ve had longer than just about anything else in my apartment. Essentially I’ve rebuilt my whole life in the time I’ve had this pillow. Sooo….

A long time ago (2005) I took a series of pictures of the pillow imagining what it did while I was at work.

A day for Special Pillow contained all of the following. Pillow sleeps in long after I’ve left. He likes to plays video games, all the sports games that I don’t play it does. Daytime TV is Pillow’s favorite. Especially trashy talk shows. It is smart for a pillow, long ago figuring out how to use computers. Despite not being able to reach the pedals, Pillow still likes to bike. Looking at bills is depressing for everyone, especially pillows. He tries to give off the image of intelligence by reading books way above his comprehension level. Foosball is his favorite sport, if you can call it a sport. He is actually a really good cook.