Compromising

Now is the season for just sucking it up and grinding it out, pretty literally if you're a bicycle commuter, if you'll excuse the indelicacy. I've been lucky to miss the worst rain storms, although headwinds have been bad enough to put me ten minutes behind on the way to work. On the worst days I've been loading my bike on the bus going in to work. Then heading home at the end of the day, I have a tailwind that lifts me right over the hills.

I'm very stubborn, which is probably why I've lasted so long as a bike commuter, but sometimes I insist on doing things the hard way for no good reason. After wearing myself out last winter, I decided to take it a bit easier, and maybe avoid getting pneumonia this year. I did have a cold in November, but I'm over it now.

Downtown Ferndale is lit up again, even more than last year, so Main Street is a welcoming sight coming home at night.

Black Friday

Last Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, I was waiting near Sunset Square for a bus back home after completing my usual boring errands, when it suddenly struck me that car traffic was abnormally normal. Normally on Black Friday around the freeway exits, Bellis Fair, and all the shopping centers in town, traffic jams are so bad that buses are re-routed to approach the north transit center in Cordata by a back way, so we don't end up with most of the bus system jammed up along with the cars. Parking lots are usually crowded with cars with blue and white BC plates. This year it was so un-crowded it was a little scary.

Another woman waiting at the stop, on her way home from work at K-Mart, said the store had been busy the afternoon of Thanksgiving, Grey Thursday, but the crush was all over. Maybe the Canadians, and everyone else, stayed home to shop on-line instead. News reports are still saying it was the best opening-day ever.

Let's hope. Let's hope we can have a prosperous, profitable and generous holiday season, without any greedy, materialist, consumerist craziness.

Bread & Soup

Bread and soup and salad will be my menu for Thanksgiving, following an afternoon at work, at time-and-a-half pay. My dinner menu will be a little austere because I lost my wallet last week, with most of my ID, ATM and credit cards, and my EBT card. The credit and debit cards were replaced in a few days, along with a new social security card and a temporary driver's license, but the EBT card is still in the mail (this is the magic plastic that replaces the old paper food stamps, in case anyone doesn't recognize the acronym). I'm very glad that I was carrying my keys and bus pass in my pockets, so I was able to get home and indoors on a cold, rainy evening. Would have been an utterly miserable experience otherwise.

Losses like this sometimes leave me considering how slight a person's hold on their place in the world can be. I've felt this after losing jobs, and during my landlord troubles, every time I came home to find another notice posted on my door, and especially the evening I came home from work to find the lock had been changed.

And those little paper and plastic bits with the numbers and ciphers are like keys that you need to get and keep your place. I've often felt that with no job and no home, I'd be a nobody from nowhere, and without my cards and papers there would be no chance of coming back.

Sometimes I brood and worry too much and get myself into an awful state, but with the holidays coming up, I want to ask everyone who hasn't (yet) experienced any of this, to please for a little while try to imagine yourself displaced from everything you own and do, from every place you felt welcome, with no job title, no bank accounts or paychecks, no place to sleep, no car or phone or email. And then remember not to judge people who are going without these things.

Trick or Treat

Halloween evening was stormy, rainy and windy. I returned home from work late, wet and cold, but glad I had new shoe covers, so I didn't have to empty rainwater out of my shoes on the doorstep before bringing my bike inside the apartment. I had just finished removing the panniers, had shaken the rain and road grit from my bike, and taken off my baggy rain pants and jacket, when there was a knock on the door. Not a childish knock, fortunately because I was really not in the mood to face a bunch of cute little candy-beggars, but a mature, gentle yet virile knock.

I pulled the door open a few inches. There on the doorstep was my very attractive, mature yet virile new neighbor, Alonzo. We had met and talked briefly a few times before, when he admired my bicycle. He'd said he used to be a cyclist, hadn't ridden in many years, but would very much like to ride again. Now here he was, standing on my doorstep, with a jug of Chianti in one hand and a warm, covered plate balanced in the other.

"Hello," he said. "I heard you come in from the storm and thought you would enjoy some chicken penne pasta with crusty, buttery garlic bread, a fresh green salad, and a bit of wine."

"Yes, come in, please," I replied, forgetting about my stringy wet hair and red nose, almost forgetting to close the door behind him. "Of course. Excuse me while I take off the rest of my clothes . . . "

ok, maybe not really.

Kula Yoga in Ferndale

Last February's one-week snow storm wore me out so badly that I've been dreading the coming winter. Now the weather has changed so suddenly that even though I've been bargain-hunting for cold-and-rain-gear for weeks, I still feel unprepared. Sunday night cold winds coming down from the Canadian North Cascades met up with rain clouds blowing north over Bellingham Bay over Whatcom County and we had an early snow and hail storm. When I biked to work at mid-day there were still wet piles of snow in the gutters and lumps of slush along the road. Monday was cold and drier, with snow still on the hilltops around town.

Along with shopping, I resolved to prepare my body for winter. Last winter, after a very hard week of commuting in icy, snowy weather, I tried a drop-in yoga session at a place in Bellingham. During one movement that involved lying on my back with knees raised, twisting at the waist to roll the legs from side to side, I had such hard, painful muscle spasms in my inner thighs that I almost yelled out loud. Feeling it was unfair to the teacher and other students to continue when I was in such bad shape, I decided to rest and take it easy for a few months.

Later in the spring a new yoga studio opened in Ferndale, only about a mile from where I live, and last month I signed up for a four-week, twice-a-week beginner series. Now I'm attending one night a week, and have even been practicing at home, in a somewhat hit-and-miss irregular way, meaning I do some warm-up stretches and exercises while drinking my morning coffee, and a few more stretches and relaxation exercises at the end of the day. It's helping already, which is encouraging me to get up early enough in the morning for a longer, more disciplined practice.

When I first took up bicycling several years ago, at forty-five years old, I read that because of the repetitive and narrow range of movement while pedaling, bicyclists often become stiff and rigid in the shoulders and hips, weak in the feet and ankles, and develop slack muscles in the front of the body compared to the back. I knew I should be doing some sort of cross-training or stretching exercises, but being disorganized and undisciplined, I procrastinated until my laziness started to hurt.

Actually I remember trying tree pose after I'd been riding frequently for a few months, and being proud of myself because I could actually do it - I'd finally developed enough muscle in my thighs to hold my leg up without wedging my foot hard against the inner thigh of my other leg. Not anymore - I have tendinitis in my left ankle, and both my feet are too weak and wobbly to balance on one foot for long. So I've been working on my feet at home, standing on tiptoe, balancing on one foot, doing a lot of mountain poses, especially when my back starts to hurt at work. In class we work mostly on sun salute and warrior poses, after warming up with cat-cow and downward dog, loosening up my legs and back so I can move on to more challenging moves without hurting myself. Doing warrior poses usually makes my spine pop in a few places, which might be alarming to some people, but has done huge good for my back.

I'm beginning to feel calmer and more confident about facing the winter.

The Drought is Over

Friday was the first rainy day of autumn, after more than eighty days without rain. The Nooksack River is lower than I've ever seen it (not that my experience goes back very far), with sandbars appearing below the bridges in Ferndale. The woodpile I was observing at the beginning of summer was broken up and partly cleared away not long after Memorial Day weekend, but the under-water base is visible now. The pilings in the middle of the picture on the right are the remains of the old Main Street bridge, which was replaced in 1996, about a year after I moved to Bellingham.

I haven't heard any winter-weather predictions I'd trust much, but no doubt the water level will rise quickly now.

As of Monday morning, October 15, the river has risen a bit above the rock banks, and the pilings and sand bars are no longer visible. In case you're wondering what this has to do with bicycling, people in cars can't see much of the river; the view is better on foot or by bicycle. Drivers did get to see an above-the-bumpers pond that formed in the roadway below the railroad overpass, when storm drains backed up at the intersection of Hovander Road and Main Street. The sidewalks were under water and I stayed well back to avoid getting drenched.

Car-centricity

Maybe it's not my place to be judgmental, but I laughed when I first saw this place, in a small shopping center built by the Lummi tribe on Rural Avenue near the Slater Road I-5 overpass. Customers do have to get out of their cars and walk in to the store to purchase alcohol.

Besides the drive-through, there is a seafood market, cafe, and arts & crafts shop, which I guess give the place more redeeming social value.

I've been spending too much time indoors on the computer, especially considering that the weather continues sunny and breezy, in the low-to-mid-70's. This morning I took a break to walk to the grocery store and coffee shop.

This was the scene on Main Street:

Every day during my six weeks at the bike shop, I saw another bike with mechanical features I'd never touched before - a surrey, tandems, internal gears, coaster brakes, knee-height fixed-gear children's bikes and more. So even though I'm not a car-fancier, I can't help but admire the care and skill that goes in to restoring and maintaining these classic cars.

I also can't help but wonder what kind of gas mileage they get.