The bike room
July 26, 2012
Six or seven years ago, my office relocated a block and a half away. We had to do this because our landlord signed a new, higher-falutin’ tenant and they wanted the whole floor. But what the landlord had to do in return was move us to a “comparable” space. We gained a couple of things and we lost a couple of things. I’m still not sure how they balance each other out.
Yes I am. At the old space we could bring our dogs to work. My bosses had Sophie, a completely wonderful, goofy, lazy Airedale. Most of the time she laid around like a lump, but whatever she was doing or not doing, she’d make you smile and make the office a more pleasant place. We could also not only bring our bicycles into the building, but up to the space. In our current building we can do neither. But we are closer to the heart of downtown. We are closer and we are in a building that is connected to the skyway, that system of hamster trails that shelters us delicate Minnesotans from the elements during the winters that we know to expect. We can walk to lunch spots five minutes faster. I like that.
The tough adjustment for me was having to leave my bike outside on the street. There are lovely, sturdy hitching posts in front of the building but I wasn’t used to having to worry whether passing thugs would vandalize it merely because it was Tuesday. Of course nothing has happened, and in the ensuing years I’ve gotten over any misgivings I originally had. If the weather is going to be rainy, there’s a building around the corner with a bike rack under an overhang. Because my bike is a delicate flower that doesn’t like getting wet, you know.
Recently, there has been a turn of events. We still can’t bring dogs to the office, but a new tenant apparently got it written into the lease that an indoor bike parking area would be provided from which we all benefit. I still usually leave my bike outside, but it’s nice to know it’s there for unsettled days. I guess it’s part of the character and charm of our 1885 building that the room is quirky and dungeon-like.
Is that an afro or a helmet?
August 25, 2011
Every place I go within my little five-mile radius has been under construction this summer. Doesn’t matter whether I’m driving, biking or walking. Construction and detours.
There are many lane shifts and traffic pattern changes in my home neighborhood as the city’s second light rail line makes its path through. The front way, the back way, it’s all disrupted. Going in the opposite direction, a mystery project on Interstate 94 creates other problems. The way to my favorite beer store is detoured.
And now the off-road bike path on the home end of my work commute is detoured because that’s where the new rail line comes in to join the existing one. I haven’t been able to find information about whether that will be a permanent situation. In order for the bike path to reopen, there would have to be little bridge over the train tracks and I’m guessing that’s not part of the plan.
The mile and three-quarters between home and work has been a constant obstacle course. It would seem that every street downtown is being shaved down and resurfaced this summer. My bike route to work is one of those streets, so I now enjoy nice, smooth blacktop where it had been cement, seamed, cracked, and pitted. And most excitingly, a bike lane is now marked where previously it had just been an extra-wide driving lane.
In addition to the stripes there is, of course, a pictogram biking dude (or dudette). The first few times I rode over them I thought, wow, the fresh, white paint really contrasts with the fresh black asphalt. Then I realized why I was really paying extra attention. Safety has come to the bike lane pictogram. The dude (or dudette) either has a flattop afro, or that’s a bike helmet. A bike helmet on the pictogram! It has been weeks since I comprehended it and I still get a giant kick out of it.
Being the over-documentarian that I am, I began to notice and photograph other bike lane pictograms that I encounter. On a street near the riverfront that has recently been tarred and chipped, I kept seeing these blocky shapes (left). I thought, oh that’s cute, somebody graffitied abstract skyscraper shapes on the road. After seeing three or four of them, duh, it’s in preparation for a biking dude (or dudette). The bike lanes to and from the grocery store already had theirs (right).
The bike trail between my home light rail station and the grocery store (I continued on to the store on my way home after work) had some faded, older, stenciled ones (left) in which the biking dude (or dudette) was riding a bike with zeroes for tires and wearing cargo pants. On some newer pavement, though, the biking dude (or dudette) was very modern indeed, sporting a rounded helmet and riding what appears to be a “comfort” bike.
The bike lane on the street was helpfully marked with a sign letting me know that should I wish to bike after a snowfall, it would be a good route to take.
Creepy GPS tracking (the day in bike ride, part 2)
June 9, 2011
Maybe it’s a little unfair to call it “creepy GPS tracking” since I’m the one who installed the app on my iPhone and turned it on for the express purpose of tracking my bike ride. If you were a reader already last summer and saw my bike ride reports, know this: the maps that I included were all hand generated by me.
A couple of months ago, my friend Jack who was already out biking in, of all places, Scotland, turned me on to Cyclemeter.app, one of the three flavors of app that Abvio Inc makes to track your activity at three different paces (walking, running, biking). I haven’t delved into why different apps are necessary for different speeds. Someone else can figure that out if they’re curious.
(Not because it was Scotland per se, but because it would have been Scotland in March, and that seems a little early to be galavanting around on one’s bicycle that far north.)
Anyway, I embraced Cyclemeter as an easy way to get a map of where I’ve gone. I had tested it on a couple of previous short rides that didn’t involve stops. Saturday was the first time I’ve used it on a longer ride. As I said in last night’s entry (to which you can refer for details about the highlights on tonight’s map, other than the toilet which is mentioned below), I didn’t plan on all the stops and wandering around that I ended up doing. I left the app running the whole time.
When I got home, I had Cyclemeter send the map data to Google Maps. I looked at it and at first glance I thought, great, that’s where I went. Then I zoomed in and things got the aforementioned creepy.
It followed me around the Midtown Farmers Market, and it followed me following the deer. And it captured all of my movements in Minnehaha Park where I ended up spending an hour or so between the Falls and the band I listened to for a while. I didn’t think too much of it. I was mostly pleased that even though it’s the bicycle version of the three apps, it kept working while I was walking, too.
The creepiness crept in when I noticed that in addition to tracking my general walking around, it also managed to capture my every move inside the bathroom, which was my original reason for getting off the bike path and going a little ways into the park. The GPS shows you that I used one of the northern stalls and then had to walk a few feet to the center to use the sink. I exited and started walking around.
Had I thought about it beforehand, I wouldn’t have had any reason to believe that the tracking would pause while I was in the bathroom. A satellite doesn’t know that I had to pee like a racehorse. Next time, though, I will try to engage the pause feature. I don’t mind a little privacy for certain things.
Map and satellite image © Google Maps and affiliates
Learning to fly
June 6, 2011
I had occasion today to recall being brave enough to make my first bike ride without the training wheels. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but I can tell you exactly where I was.
This might take a while and I might ramble.
When I was still a squirt (say, ages three through six), we’d spend the summers in Bloomington, Indiana, because my dad was working on his doctorate degree in music theory at Indiana University. It took a while because he only did summers. During the school year, he was a professor of music at Ohio Northern University. That’s a whole other topic, ONU.
There were a few kid milestones that happened during those summers at IU. I won’t claim to remember if they’re in chronological order. But they did happen. Oh blargh, now I’m calling my mom to check. Hang on …
Okay, it was during my ages three through seven that I went. My dad went one additional year without my mom and me.
The main milestone I want to focus on is learning to ride a bike, or more precisely, the day I ditched the training wheels. Because I do remember it. What I didn’t confirm with my mom just now was how old I was, but I feel like it was the summer when I turned six. (I was one of those fortunate kids whose birthday is in the middle of summer and no fuss was ever made in class during the year.)
I had a hand-me-down bike, an old Schwinn from a neighbor. I thought it was copper, my mom said it was maroon. On that momentous day, I was riding up the diagonal sidewalk between the two apartment buildings—the one where we lived, and the other one where my little best friend Angie M lived (Angie was a year older than I). Somebody, probably my mom, I guess, because my dad would have been in class, noticed that I wasn’t putting any balance on the training wheels and said, okay, let’s take them off. And we did. And that was it.
The other thing I remember about that day (and I’m sure it’s entirely possible that I’m blurring events together because, let’s face it, that was forty years ago) is that along that sidewalk, just about where it met the other diagonal sidewalk with which it made an X, I came upon a squirrel that wasn’t too frightened by people and seemed willing to let me walk up to it with outstretched hand. One of the other adults present sternly warned me not to interact with the skwerl because it might be rabid and if it bit me, I’d die. There was some other thing about stray dogs peeing in the sandbox where we kids liked to play. Yay, adults and their scaremongering.
Other things I remember about those years, definitely not in chronological order:
My mom and I would play Poohsticks on one particular little bridge over the Jordan River which ran right through the middle of campus. As you’ve learned, in addition to rabbits, I have a history of Pooh.
We did spend one entire year there, so I attended kindergarten. I got along well with my teacher. She’d walk me home sometimes. In class, I learned the classic “My Napsack on My Back” song (val-da-ree …) On the walks home, she taught me another song that had slightly naughty words, that her husband disapproved of her teaching one so young as I. Maybe she wasn’t my teacher. Maybe she was just a friend of my parents’.
I remember vaulting off a stone wall that I’m going to estimate was at least six feet tall. There were four or five of us kids doing it. We had no fear of mortality.
Angie and I came to be in possession of a shopping cart for a couple of days. We pushed each other around in it, and we turned it over and made a fort out of it.
Angie and I also set up a lemonade stand on the other side of the apartment complex on a busier street. We made a little bit. Angie figured it all out and I remember feeling like I didn’t walk away with as much as should have been my fair share, you know, probably $2.25 instead of $2.75.
IU might also have been where my interest in science kindled. For whatever reason, my dad the music professor had a class in a lecture hall in the geology building. In the lobby was what to me seemed a moon-sized globe, as well as a two-storey pendulum. I found them both to be fascinating. I attended class with my dad one day, and it was on that day that a rare earthquake occurred, the only one I’ve ever been witness to, thankfully. It wasn’t much, just enough to be felt and to cause everyone in the hall to look at each other in “did you feel that?” wonderment.
I think what this boils down to is that I really fondly remember my time at Indiana University. You know, and my childhood.
Post script:
My dad’s doctorate thesis was not approved. He did not get his PhD. Years later when I myself was in college, I took an editing class. We had to come up with a long manuscript to edit and I convinced my dad to let me use his thesis.
Top photo: me, by my mom.
Bottom photo: a youngster who freed herself of training wheels today and was the inspiration for this post but who shall remain nameless, by her dad Tyler, an acquaintance of mine. If I had one of myself peddling around at that age, I would have used it instead.
Me, right now
September 18, 2010
Take a photo of yourself right now! Even though I looked pretty rough, I regret that I censored (and deleted) my very first “right now” this morning. But I was embarrassed by the result of too much beer and too little sleep last night.
Instead you get my second, third, and fourth right nows. I came back to the camera after I had had my shower this morning and was feeling clean, if not a little fresher than half an hour earlier. I tried to get my cat CJ to join me but she was too busy buttering me up for her breakfast to pose nicely.
During the day, some people posted followup photos to their first ones, and in the seventh inning of the Minnesota Twins baseball game at Target Field tonight, I decided that would be the perfect scene for another shot. You can see that I and 40,000 of my closest friends are enjoying ourselves, despite the Twins’ subsequent loss to the Oakland A’s.
The weather was iffy today, and if there’s a chance it will rain, I park my bike at a nearby building under its overhang for shelter. (My office and Target Field are within a few blocks of each other so I just leave my bike where it is when I go to a game.) I guess because it’s a utility company they have good security, including a camera that monitors the front where the bike rack is. And something in its software motion detects and draws a red box around the mover. That’s me! I find it a little creepy that it can do that, but at the same time, sometimes I dance around a little just to see how the square changes size. I had snapped this picture to share my thoughts about it elsewhere, then couldn’t resist also sharing it with the other right nowers.
And now to bed so that I won’t have to be embarrassed two mornings in a row.
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