Sculpin

Josh has a roundup of photos and other coverage from yesterday’s Ride for Fremont.

I was a doofus: I was so concerned about my wonky joints, but it was the chronic fatigue syndrome that did me in. I conk out hard if my heart rate goes above about 135-140 for more than a few seconds. (”Post-exertional malaise” they call it. I’m still a bit muzzy.) But I wasn’t wearing a heart monitor; it’s been many months since it’s been a real problem, and I plain forgot. Then I pushed it harder than I should have up the hill — there were those twenty-somethings pulling away from us, the tandem’s slow and heavy… and, in truth, the lone counterprotester with his rather snazzy “Bikes are Bullies!” sign made me feel like a million bucks. (Grr! Scary me! Hee, right.) This post-exertional stuff is a pain in the neck, because there’s a delay before it kicks in, so I generally only know I’ve overdone it after it’s done. Anyway, Josh and I rode up, around, and down before the conk-out kicked me in the head. Then we sat around watching the bikes go by. And by, and by, and by…

Conk-out and all, I had a lot of fun. I even met up with an old friend I hadn’t seen in years. (Hi, Jennie!)

Next time, I wear the heart monitor. And no heroics. Like Grouchy Chris said in a similar situation, “You know, Cam, sometimes you can be really dumb.” No more the dumb!

Next up: a round of email. I wrote this morning to Feet First, the pedestrian advocacy group. I’m a member, as it happens. (If you ever leave the house under your own power, consider joining up! It’s cheap.) I asked them if they’d taken a position on the Stone Way road diet and expressed my hope that they’re working with the bike community for a safer Stone Way. I think it’d make a lot of sense for Feet First to be out front and active on that issue. There’s a Pedestrian Master Plan in the works right now; we want the city to be sticking to its alternative-transportation promises.

I also wrote to Joe Szwaja to thank him for showing up. (If there were any other political candidates out there, I sure didn’t see them.) It didn’t escape me that Joe took our concerns seriously.

I’m planning to write a note of thanks to the folks at the Episcopal Bookstore. It warmed my heart to see the the staff out there clapping for us. My needs for Episcopalian supplies are very low indeed, but I could probably buy some gifts for my aunt there, and I have been meaning to read more Thomas Merton.

Josh and I are going to ride around Fremont with the SeattleLikesBikes.org crew tonight. We meet at 4:30 at Gasworks, then ride to Fremont. We’ll ride our bikes through Fremont where the city says we ought to ride them, following all laws. If you’re on a bike, come join us! Josh and I will have an early dinner in Fremont somewhere afterwards.

One or two of you are probably asking, “But Cam, your hip and foot are all messed up. How are you going to do this?” The plan, in a word, is aspirin. Plus I see my LMT tomorrow. Besides, it’ll be good for the cabin fever. I’ll probably only do a lap or two anyway. It’s going to hurt, but I’m okay with that, because this issue makes me really mad.

I’ve written my share of letters about the Stone Way bike lane debacle. But with mega-wealthy landowner Suzie Burke throwing her weight around, a little polite letter-writing doesn’t seem like enough to me. I want to help show City Hall that bicyclists will come out and act in support of the Bike Master Plan. Riding a bike where the city is claiming I should ride it? That sounds to me like some very mellow direct action indeed. And it sounds like fun, too.

I’m also curious: certainly this spineless reversal by the city looks like it’ll have a terrible effect in those blocks. But though I’ve been through Fremont by tandem a fair number of times, we don’t usually go up Stone Way, so I’m not sure exactly how terrible it is. (Who would want to grind up Stone Way without bike lanes? Not me.) This evening, I’ll find out for myself first-hand.

What I and many other cyclists want is a connected network of adequate bicycle street facilities. Does the Burke-Gilman connection north have to be on Stone Way, and not a nearby street? Eh, I could be persuaded, though it’s my belief that the Bike Master Plan as written has been thoroughly scrutinized by people who know what they’re talking about. The bottom line, though, is this: it’s got to have that connection. Six blocks of gap? No good. Won’t do.

In vaguely related news, oil prices are at an all-time high. Quoth the BBC, “Oil prices have climbed to a record high of $78.71 a barrel amid worries about whether oil supplies can meet global demand… The Department of Energy said that oil inventories had fallen by a higher-than-expected 6.5 million barrels in the week ending 27 July. Analysts had been forecasting a far more modest fall of about 700,000 barrels.” Just a wee bit off there.

Today Josh and I went to Wallingford to hear his aunt read from her new book, Red Studio, after which we had some dinner and picked up some cupcakes at Trophy.

Lured by cupcakes (mmm), I’d been wanting to try to get up to Wallingford for a while, but we’d never found a route that looked comfortable. I think we’ve come pretty close today to finding our way up that hill.

No way would I have managed that even four months ago. I was feeling all hardcore when we got back, right up until chatting with our neighbor who’d just come back from riding around around Mercer Island. Yeah, well.

If my notes are correct, tomorrow will be our 6-month anniversary of being car-free. Hooray!

I knew that January would be the test of my resolve, and this January was one fine test. But I’m still happy with our decision not to keep a car around.

There was one day, one icy slippery-sidewalk day, when I thought twice about it as I flailed my way to the bus stop. (And then kept on thinking twice as I flailed my way back from the bus stop, having forgotten about holiday schedule changes. That day stunk.) But one grouchy day in six months is not worth having a car for. I thought the rain and cold might do me in, but in fact, I kind of like short bike rides in the rain, and I have yet to meet a cold day that my balaclava can’t handle just fine.

By and large, life’s been more fun without a car.

I’ve been busy with physical therapy lately. It’s about what you’d expect from me: weak VMO, internally rotated femurs, sub-optimal hip muscles… if I’d realized how much of the body’s well-being comes down to the muscles of the butt, I would have been a lot more careful after being tossed through the air by a van and smacking my derriere on the pavement a few years ago. (”You’ll be fine in eight weeks,” indeed.) Fortunately, I don’t seem to have done myself a whole lot of real damage — no torn ACL or anything.

It’s been sort of fun working on the VMO part of all this — I get to run a small electric current through the VMO while flexing it. It feels like I’m ripping Scotch tape off the skin there. Dan the PT also has got me doing little tiny interval training: I boost my heart rate to about 135 for thirty seconds or so, then cool back down to below 110 for a minute, and repeat.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with oddball resist-dyeing methods. So far, my experiments have not been particularly successful.

Yesterday, Josh and I dropped by the open house at Two Cranes Aikido, which has moved to my neck of the woods. We’re thinking about giving it a try, starting probably in April.

A minor rite of passage: I had my first bike wipeout on January 13. Out on the tandem a block and a half from home, we hit a patch of ice and went down. My thought on the way down: “Oh, man, I really don’t want to have to tell the physical therapist about this.” Because, really, being out on that road that day was plain crazy. But I’m glad to have the first wipeout over with. I’d been fairly afraid of falling on the bike, especially since it’s a tandem—I’d imagined the combined force of bike, pavement, and captain all working together to snap my femur. But no, I just jarred a few joints.

I placed a super order at Raintree Nursery a few weeks ago during their winter sale. Arriving in the mail at some point are two kinds of strawberries, three kinds of lingonberries, two kinds of thornless blackberries, two kinds of blackcurrants, and a Stevens cranberry. (Oh boy oh boy oh boy….) I’ve gone plant-mad. I want to rip up the parking strip and plant it with raspberries. I want to train apple trees on wires into a living fence in the front yard. I want a greenhouse. Yeah, it’s January, all right.

This is what I need on a day like today. No doubt it is perfectly safe. No doubt. Now, if only it had pontoons, it’d be perfect for today’s weather. The rain’s coming down in buckets out there, and the lights keep flickering.

Yesterday in Pilates I did something very dumb. I was kneeling on my left knee on the reformer, with the right leg straight and resting on the floor. And as I got out of that position, I put too much weight on the left knee while moving. There was a sickening creak as the patella seemed to slide toward the outside of the knee, in a way that patellas ought not to do. That leg is much stronger than it was last year, but it’s still pretty atrophied and probably has some minor nerve damage; so I’ve got this weak, sluggish VMO on that side, and… well, I should have been paying more attention, because I know better than to do that. (I will be calling my PT soon, because all this bicycling requires good knees.)

And then Part II of The Dumb: hey, it didn’t seem too bad, and maybe I was making a big deal out of nothing, and I sure had a lot I had to do that day. So I said to myself, “Quit being a whiner!” and walked around on it a lot. Then it seemed too bad. It puffed up a little and got very stiff and a bit hot, so I did the usual things one does for inflammation. “Do not,” I said to Josh, “let me ride a bicycle tomorrow.”

“Got it.”

Later, predictably: “You know, I’m feeling a lot better. I bet I could totally ride that bicycle.”

“Nope. I have my orders! No riding the bicycle!” And thus was The Dumb Part III averted.

Anyway, this seemed like a pretty good time to try out Josh’s ability to haul me to and from the U District on the Xtracycle — we’d never gone more than about 2.5 miles round trip before, and that was almost entirely on the flat. I grabbed my bus pass just in case, and we headed out to the Farmers Market. Our haul: three kinds of cheese, cider, apples, cardamom bread, potatoes, beef jerky, soup bones, kale, collard greens, onion rolls, garlic, and two tiny pies. And the trip home is gently but insistently uphill. But Josh hauled all that, plus me, and did just fine.

I try to get a massage once or twice a month from Mark Pearlscott in the U District. They’re effective as hell, these massages, but they leave me extraordinarily woozy, and I often crash hard within 30-60 minutes of receiving one. (And not because they’re soothing, friends. Myofascial work is not soothing.) Josh has been picking up a Flexcar to get me home on those days, but I think we’ll be able to use the Xtracycle instead. I reckon I can hang on to the back that long.

I’m proud and happy for Josh when I think of how much fitness he’s gained since he started riding his bike to work. It could be that crashing his car will turn out to be one of the best things he’s done for his health.

Josh and I went down and got our Xmas tree today. I’d seen an announcement in some email from Seattle Tilth: it turns out that the UW Forest Club grows noble firs organically in power line right-of-ways. They were taking orders until Friday, cut them yesterday, and sold them today. My eco-hippie sense went all a-tingle.

I would have mentioned this before, but in addition to being a lazy blogger, I kind of figured that they’d probably tend to be a little, let us say, natural-looking. You know, rustic. What with UW students not being experienced, professional Christmas tree farmers and all. We biked out at a very cold 8:15 a.m. to pick up the Flexcar and zip down to the Center for Urban Horticulture in time to be one of the first in line and get the pick of the bunch. But damn if they weren’t the best-looking trees I’d ever seen; every one looked great. I waded in, grabbed one, gave it a good look, said, “Good enough,” and we strapped that sucker to the top of the Flexcar.

It was a nice scene down there, too. Friendly folks in line, with sort of a Mountaineers Club vibe. It was nothing at all like the manic, sharp-elbowed crowd that I remember from the old days buying cheap trees at Chubby and Tubby.

Maybe next year we’ll be able to get our tree home on a bicycle trailer for the Quadruple Hippie Score. This year, no. It’s all uphill from the CUH, and I had my fill of hills yesterday. We took a trial ride up to the View Ridge PCC on the tandem, and got a pretty good idea of where our reasonable limits are when it comes to hills. Severely short of that, is where they are. But we’re getting obviously stronger; in a few months we’ll give it another try.

Today was the first time I’d ridden a bike in the rain. We really need to get some fenders on that thing. And I’ve got to get myself some rain pants. On the bright side, everybody seems to enjoy watching a couple of soggy, grinning people on a tandem. A bunch of folks waved to us as we rode by. Riding the tandem’s always fun, even in the rain.

Being married to an amiable driver made me go soft, I have to say. I used to go out for walks in the pouring rain and not think much of it. But after being ferried around in a car for a few years, I got so reluctant to go out in the rain, you’d think I’d melt. I’ve wondered if I’d regret going car-free once the fall rains set in. So far, the answer is no. I’m rediscovering that it’s not that bad, even with imperfect rain gear. Sometimes it’s even kind of nice. (Though we’ll see how nice I think it is when the rain is less Pineapple Express than Hyperborean Drench.)

At the market today, we picked up enough sausage to hold us for a couple of weeks, some fabulous Microbakery cheese-and-onion rolls, and about twenty bucks’ worth of potatoes. And yes, that’s a lot of potatoes.

There’s a new potato you can get from Olsen Farms, called “Purple Majesty”, that’s stunningly purple. (If you go to the U District market or some of the others in Seattle, you’ll probably remember the Olsen Farms guy; he’s really nice and has a big bushy beard.) It’s a lot more vivid than the old All-Blue, which was no slouch itself. It’s likely the anthocyanidins are good for us, but it’s the sheer gorgeousness that really draws us in. And it makes great mashed potatoes. Josh is the mashed potato czar at his family-of-origin’s Thanksgiving (weighty responsibility!) and this year he’s going for the dramatic flourish.

Next week I’ll try to remember to bring a really large plastic bag and a couple of straps so we can buy a ton of greens. It’s just about time for us to have another round of making and freezing gumbo base. We’ve been using a recipe out of Crescent Dragonwagon’s Soup and Bread cookbook. It takes a couple of days to do it at a relaxed pace, and we wind up filling every big pot we own with chopped vegetables. But in the end, we get around a gallon and a half of pure gumbo-base bliss, which makes about three gallons of gumbo not counting the rice. This is the recipe that taught me that collard greens are food. I’d happily live on this stuff all winter.

Josh and I had a bike adventure to celebrate our third anniversary. We went up to Log Boom Park in Kenmore, stopping off to see the permaculture beds near the Meadowbrook community center. The beds are kind of overgrown, but still awesome. You can pick fruit there, and they have the most marvelous grapes. Coasting down the gentle slope of Ravenna to Hale is a fun ride; the tandem was really picking up some speed.

Log Boom Park was closed. Boo! So we headed back down the Burke-Gilman trail and had a picnic at Matthew’s Beach. I hadn’t been there since I was about eight years old. Then back down the trail to the UW and then to home. Total mileage today: 23.75 miles. Fastest speed: about 25.5 mph.

Man, are we ever sore. That’s very significantly longer than I’ve ever ridden before. It was pretty tempting to leave the bike at Josh’s office and take the bus back, but we persevered. I cranked down my heart monitor’s limits to be extra-cautious, and it seems to have worked: I’m groggy, but not totally zonked out. Poor Josh forgot to wear padded bike shorts; he was pretty thrashed in the rear by the time we got to Matthew’s Beach. Heck, we both were — I sprawled out on top of a picnic table there, prone, enjoying my sit-bones’ lack of compression.

As we were heading out of the Meadowbrook community center’s parking lot, a little kid shouted after us, “That is so cool!” Yay for tandems.