Sculpin

It’s happened at last: the car has died on the freeway. We may be going car-free for a few months now; unless there’s something really easy and cheap to fix, it probably isn’t worth repairing the old rustbucket.

I’m planning to try to tandem with Josh all the way to yoga class in a couple of days, with cars and everything. This is a little bit more ambitious than I really had in mind for us this week. We’ll see if I have the nerve to try to ride back after that; I retain the option of walking home. The nice thing about being a stoker is that I can safely close my eyes while I chant to myself, “We’re not going to die today, we’re not going to die today…” Or maybe it’ll be, “I’m not really here, I’m not really here…”

ETA: Or maybe it’ll be fun! I shouldn’t discount that possibility.

…I’d make socks in an argyle skull pattern. Too wonderful!

Pardon me: not argyle, but arrrrrrrrrrrgyle.

It should not be 85 F at quarter to 10 p.m. in Seattle. Gah. Josh and I have both spent a lot of time in a tub of cool water today, Josh particularly.

It’s been almost too hot to eat anything, let alone cook. Tomorrow’s another scorcher, though it’s supposed to be less brainmeltingly hot. Chilling in the fridge now are some stripey roasted beets from the farmers market. My plan is to dress them with a little cider vinegar from Minea Farm, a touch of olive oil, and maybe a little mint, then nibble away at them slowly over the course of the day tomorrow. Mint? With beets? I’ve never heard of it being done, but it sounds good to me.

I’m with Cissa on the beet issue: up to a point, big beets are best. As long as they’re still firm and smooth, they’re tastier and more convenient to peel. I know that gourmets prefer the baby beets, but I find them not worth the fussiness. And the really little ones have tasted rooty to me, too. (I also prefer thick asparagus spears for roasting; none of your wussy little pencil-thin spears for me. So shoot me, I’ve got a rebel palate.)

Roasted beet salad is a funny thing: sure, it’s great for summer, but who wants to run the oven at 400 for an hour and a half in this weather? The solar cooker’s perfect for that sort of thing. Since they’re to be chilled overnight anyway, I don’t have to worry about whether the beets will be done in time for dinner. And of course it keeps me from heating up the kitchen and making the whole house smell like beets.

It’s so hot that I’ve taken up soaking my head as a hobby.

1.73 miles, our longest ride by about a quarter-mile. We went into new territory today, with a bigger hill to coast down. I complained all the way down about my impending death and then insisted on doing it again immediately. We also practiced pausing at intersections. And for once I said, “Faster!” on our way down a hill.

Cars are freaking me out a little less, I think. I can see us going up and taking a brief crack at 20th soon, at some low-traffic time of day when visibility is good.

It’s fun to see other people on bikes when we’re out on the tandem. We seem to give them the warm fuzzies. Awww, happy scruffy geeks on a bicycle built for two.

I was thinking, “What can we do for our One Local Summer supper this week?” when I realized that we’d already had one on Sunday: a nice simple supper of local eggs and Whey Tastier sausage. I had some of the last backyard peas a little while later. (I’m one of those “eats six small meals a day” people. Not because I follow any particular health regimen that demands it, but just because I like it that way.)

Our food ways are definitely changing, if we can have a meal entirely composed of locally grown food without even noticing.

Bonus local food lunch: leftovers from Josh’s quesadilla feast, followed by lots of local cherries. It just isn’t summer until I gorge myself immoderately with cherries.

I’d planned to write up a brunch of brioche french toast with Rockridge Farm’s spiced apple syrup. However, that would have entailed not gobbling down all the Microbakery brioche before it could be frenchtoastified, and that just wasn’t going to happen! Mmmmm.

1.34 miles this morning. Nice day for a ride: cloudy and cool, with no glare off the road.

Cam: “There sure are a lot of cars today! What are all these cars doing here?!”
Josh: “There’ve been three.”
Cam: “No way!!”

I swear, there were at least five. Though it is just barely possible that it was a deceptively three-like value of five. In any case, I’m still getting used to the sound of the bike; I haven’t yet learned to trust that I’ll be able to hear cars over the bike noises (not to mention any nearby construction noises), and of course I can’t really see much of anything, so every car is still an event for me.

Intellectually I know that it’s not particularly unsafe compared to many other car-bike situations, but even so I get the heebie-jeebies when we’re passed from behind. We’ve added a mirror to the stoker handlebars, but it’s been a pain to keep it adjusted, so it hasn’t been very useful. I’d like to try one of the helmet mirrors.

Today I learned to post a little bit, or at least take some of my weight off the saddle. I also learned to let Josh take more of the load as we go uphill, at least for now. “Hey, Josh can use the exercise,” I rationalize. “It’s good for both of us.” And coasting is becoming much easier.

I had to take a few days off after my urban hiking experiment, and Josh’s back was bugging him. But after some recovery time for both of us, it’s back on the tandem again. I’m starting to get annoyed by my screwy aerobic metabolism. Josh and I can go about a mile and a half before I’m toast. That’s pretty sweet, but the tandem won’t be a useful means of transportation for us until we can go about 3 miles comfortably and reliably. I’m holding us back. I’m going to be holding us back for a while.

In the past, when I’ve worked steadily and carefully for several weeks without overdoing it, I’ve been able to nudge the boundaries of my aerobic ability a little bit wider. It might be helpful for me to gently crosstrain on the treadmill.

And I think that as we practice more, my adrenaline will drop and I’ll be able to treat coasting as a rest period. Right now, coasting is still sort of an “oh my god we’re going fast and I haven’t got any brakes and I can’t see and oh god here comes the intersection my god there might be cars aaaaaaaaaagh hypothetical cars please don’t kill me” period. This is not conducive to getting my heart rate down.

On the good side, musculoskeletally I’m doing great. Knees are great, sacrum’s great, hamstrings are great, everything’s totally good to go. And today I managed to take my hands off the handlebars briefly.

It’s such a humbler because, friends, I am a badass yoga-practicing Pilates ninja. My downward dog? Damn fine. My body awareness? Totally awesome. Under the flab, I’ve got abs of steel. I can fold myself into all sorts of funky-looking yoga positions and smile. Oh, yeah, I’ve been feeling cocky. And then I go a few times around the block on an innocent-looking little wheeled machine, and I start feeling wobbly as a water balloon. Whoo.

I want to get back on! Right now!

Update: So I did! After dinner, Josh and I took another turn around the neighborhood. This time I wore my heart monitor and managed my heart rate fairly carefully, especially on the uphills. It seems to have helped a lot. We went about another 1.5 miles, but my body feels like we went only half the distance we did last time. Soon I think I’ll try practicing some hand signals.

For One Local Summer dinner tonight: pea soup, bagels, blueberries with organic yogurt. The blueberries are from Rockport (97 miles, near Concrete), the yogurt is made in Auburn (32 miles), and the bagels were made about 1.25 miles away at Bagel Oasis. Is it perfectly local? Probably not; I haven’t found out where the yogurters and bagelists get their ingredients. But one of the excellent things about the Locavore Pledge is it’s not about a hair-shirt ideal of perfect personal purity; as Jamie’s mom says, it has “lots of options for doing something right.”

The pea soup is basically a rendition of Josh’s broccoli soup, but with peas from the back yard and without the proto-roux. (Mea culpa: I did use some non-homemade chicken stock, but I had some to use up before it spoiled, and let’s call it a condiment, eh?) I started with one white onion from Alm Hill Gardens and two small cloves of homegrown garlic, sauteed in organic butter, and added chicken stock and water sufficient to cook 20 oz of peas. I brought the liquid to a boil and added the peas, cooking them for four minutes and then blending the soup well with a stick blender. After tasting the soup, I decided to add a handful of parsley and thyme and blend it some more. The soup held for a couple of hours until Josh got home, and then I added a dollop of half-and-half. It was really good, and a beautiful color. Much more delicate than the broccoli soup; almost elegant, I’d say. (I’ll have a photo from Josh soon. I hate taking pictures.)

On the car-free side of the equation, I took advantage of a couple of free days in my schedule to push myself to do something that I’ve wanted to do since we moved here: I walked to PCC. It’s only 3.5 miles there and back, but it requires going up and over Heinous Hill. I’ve been trying to storm Heinous Hill off and on for years now; last time, several months ago, I had to stop several times on the way up and barely made it — and that was a triumph. But today I chugged right on over it. Hooray! I am feeling very buff!

It may have helped that I was animated by righteous anger — some brain-damaged Nordstrom blonde coming out of University Prep tried to turn right into the crosswalk that I was occupying. If I could choose a superpower, a very tempting choice would be the ability to instantly destroy internal combustion engines with the power of my mind.

Today Josh and I had our second day on the tandem. We rode around the neighborhood on it, going up and down hills, around curves, and once over a manhole cover. (Oof!) This was the first time I’d ever gone downhill to speak of on a bike. And I did it without being able to brake or steer or see where I’m going.

I also took some time to learn to pry my fingers away from the handlebars. Riding sure is easier when you’re not white-knuckling it.

It’s hard to say just how fast we were going. I kept thinking of the Grouchy Chris cartoon, “Grouchy Chris Goes Cycling”, in which GC collides with a bear who steals his bike. (“Here I am, biking along. I must be going very fast!”) We were fast, though! Whoo! Fastest bike on the road!

I appreciate how Josh respects my beginnerish caution even when I’m almost certainly being over-cautious. There was a point at the end of our session today when we were barrelling down a hill and I wasn’t quite comfortable with our speed and my lack of control over it. “This is a little too fast for me,” I said, and Josh gently applied the brakes. No drama, no judgment, just slowing down. Josh rules.

For a person with chronic fatigue syndrome, I am insanely super-buff. But still, aerobic exercise can be a problem for me; these days, it’s a good idea for me to keep my heart rate under 120 or so lest I crash out. Over 140, I’m definitely gonna be toast. (In contrast, if I were average for my age, my maximum heart rate would be more like 185 and I’d be aiming for a heart rate of 160 or so. This is why I do yoga and Pilates and sometimes lift weights, but do not run or play squash.) We weren’t working too hard today, but I hadn’t considered how much adrenaline would raise my heart rate. Holy cats. My vision was going all wonky by the time we got off the bike.

It’s still a lot of fun, though. I’d go right back out there now if it weren’t a dumb idea. Maybe we can take that hill a little faster next time.