Rosebud Rides Again

The Nooksack River from Riverwalk Park, December 31, 2012
The lighting came out kind of grim, really it's much prettier.

This morning at eleven when I was getting ready for work it started snowing pretty seriously, so I pumped up the knobby tires on my old K2 hybrid bike and added an extra layer to my clothing. The snow had stopped by the time I headed home from work at eight this evening, and it might have been cold, but I was so bundled up I felt toasty warm all the way home. I only noticed a bit of cold wind on my face.

The ride on my old bike felt so smooth and easy compared to my Surly. Maybe an occasional change of riding position is good for the spine. Or maybe it's because I haven't given the newer bike a thorough cleaning in a few weeks and the chain and shifting mechanisms are kind of gritty. It's amazing how much sand my bike picks up on rainy days, considering that there hasn't yet been enough snow to require putting sand down on the roads. Usually it isn't this bad until after the snow is gone.

New Year's eve and all day I've been hanging on the edge of my own personal financial cliff. Last summer while I was working two jobs I stopped filing unemployment comp. claims, but after my bike shop job ended I found I couldn't cover my rent at the end of the month without some extra income, so I opened a new claim. My new weekly benefit amount turned out to be pitiful, something like $117, but luckily the Employment Security Department said I was required to continue claiming Extended Benefits until they ran out. Extended Benefits paid a higher weekly amount, enough to cover my rent when my earnings don't.

But the Extended Benefits program is due to end December 29, unless Congress passes a budget deal. All day at work I was checking cable TV news reports (only with no sound, just video and captions), and I keep checking online news now that I'm at home. It's getting so I have to check what time zone a news report is coming from to figure out how timely it is, and which way the pendulum is swinging. Probably best to just turn off the media, stop worrying, and see how things look in the morning.

Happy New Year!

Christmas Eve 2012

I'll refrain from being profound tonight.

Here's a scene from my ride home from work:

The first snowfall in Ferndale, around noon on December 18.

Turn on your headlights, and don't drink and drive!

A few weeks ago the batteries in my bike computer died suddenly, just as my odometer was about to turn 5600 miles. Now it's back to 116 miles, quite a come down, but at least I can brag here.

Don't Worry, Be Happy

In keeping with my annual November through January holiday custom of re-thinking and trying to remember what I've been doing for the previous ten or twelve months, I've been remembering this quote:

Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

I'd been thinking this was Mark Twain again, but I did a little google-searching and found it was really Abraham Lincoln. Interesting that many historians believe that Lincoln was at times clinically depressed, and he surely must have been deeply troubled and worried, yet he must also have been deeply satisfied with his life and the great changes he brought about.

Pretty much all my life I've been living in a holding pattern, waiting to move on to something better, or different, at least. From the time I moved away from my family's home at eighteen, through going to college, dropping out then going back, every time I changed my major, through every job change and new place of residence since then, I've been working and just getting by while saving up money, trying to prepare for my next phase. Which was supposed to be the right one, the true path that I want my life to follow.

Over and over again my plans were derailed by job loss, or legal or family or health troubles, or economic slumps or crashes of some kind. Now it appears that the present Great Period of Economic Adjustment will be a long, slow and halting one, and many people will probably never be as well off as before the crash, though we may be content and prosperous again. In fact, as skimpy as my "lifestyle" is now, every day I see many people around me who are worse off, and more mired in hopelessness. So it seems to me now the best course is to make up my mind to find ways to be happier with what I have and where I am, in the here and now.

My google search also turned up this essay by Marc Sokol from Huffington Post,
http://www.marcandangel.com/2011/08/30/12-things-happy-people-do-differently/, which prescribes in twelve bullet points some ways to change your mind and be happier despite hard circumstances.

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.