Here comes the cold again

Here in Western Massachusetts it's gotten cold lately. We got hit hard with a crazy storm the night before Halloween and many people in the area are still without power. Seeing a foot of snow on the ground in October has made me miss nice warm bike weather even more (especially since today on my ride to the Dam Cafe I had to wear gloves and the wind left my eyes watering) so I'm going to reminisce a bit to this summer.

See this beach set-up?

Two chairs, two towels, two lunches, reading materials (I think I was reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake at the time), there paddle-ball in there somewhere, and sunblock and other beach necessities. Well this is how it got to the beach:

Chair backpacks and bike racks! So incredibly useful.

My aunt has a house about 5 miles from the beach. Free parking when you're on a bike! (Otherwise it's $10 - and that's if you can find a spot!) By the time we got there we were dying to get in the water and cool off from that hot ride.

So, what am I reading now? Well, unfortunately I'm so busy with grad school and two jobs that I'm not reading very much, but I'm slowly working my way through E.M. Forsters's A Room With a View. I've read A Passage to India, but that was as part of a course during my undergrad and I had guidance. I don't really know how to approach this text. There's something about the way people have conversations in it that leaves me utterly confused about what is happening. Is it the way people talked during that time period or is it Forster's writing style that's throwing me off? I'm about 60 pages from the end, so I'll be sure to put up a review on my Shelfari page when I finish.

Four Around the Fourth

The president of my running club has a race timing business, and every so often I'll work a race with him - getting runners into the database and entering bib numbers in to match up with places. Northampton has a race near the 4th of July called "Four Around the Fourth." It's a 4-mile race through downtown Northampton, where you're much more likely to see people on bikes than in my town, even though it's only about 8 miles away. Saw this woman with a pile of leafy greens in her panniers and on her back rack:

Go runners! Finish strong!

Spotted this woman with her adorable daughter and her adorable dog in the basket! I had to snap a picture.

Turns out she was there to cheer on her husband, who was running the four-miler! They chatted with other runners at the finish (where there was also a delicious pancake breakfast.) I was so thrilled to see such a happy bikey family. Plus look at all the cargo on the husband's bike - possibly an Xtracycle? But it also had a second set of handlebars behind the seat, I'm assuming for a kid to hang on?

And I forced myself to get up at 5:30 am to give myself enough time to bike the 9.5 miles from my house to the race. The weather for it was perfect.

See you next time!

Bike Fight

I think often people in the biking community seem to be on one side or the other - you're a road biker, a bike commuter, a BMX biker, a mountain biker - and there's no crossing of lines. This is especially true of the spandex biker vs. slower biker commuting or running errands. But who says you can only be one kind of biker?

In addition to biking, I'm also a runner, and at the end of May I ran as part of a team in a 200-mile relay race. My shins were killing me in the weeks afterwards, so where did I look to get my exercise and give my legs a little rest? My bike, of course!

Every Thursday I run either a 5K or 8K at this reservoir in town. So while I was out of commission for running, I figured I'd take my bike down there and ride around it instead.

I may not be a speedy spandex-clad road biker, but I do like to use my bike as more than just transportation. And I've even done downhill mountain biking before. So when some people in the "slow bicycle" movement complain about aggressive road bikers, I say we're really all on the same team. I'm sure we all want safer roads, more bicycle infrastructure, drivers who are more bicycle-aware. So let's all join forces!

The halfway mark in the 5K - it comes a lot faster when you're on a bike!

And then when I got home I changed out of my sweaty workout clothes and into a breezy sundress to go grocery shopping!

Happy trails (or roads, as the case may be) bicycle friends!

Long Time Yes Bike

I have been biking, just have not been blogging.

I rode to school on my second-to-last day of classes because the weather was glorious. The dam looked very impressive as I biked over the bridge on my way home - had to stop and take a photo:

I had a presentation in my second class so I work a classy dress. The downside was that it is not a flowy dress so it ended up being VERY short as I was biking (to allow for enough movement to pedal) and I flashed a LOT of thigh as I passed by people.

I finished The Toss of a Lemon and I really enjoyed it. Family saga, along the lines of Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, maybe, only I liked this better. The book challenged me - I felt sympathy for the main character even as I disagreed with her beliefs. It was interesting to read a book that tripped me up like that.

But since then I've been unmotivated to read. So I'm reading Terry Pratchett's Going Postal since I've heard a lot about it and it was at my local library. I'll blog again soon I promise! I actually rode to Wistariahurst today, and I did a bike-a-thon (50 miles) a few weeks ago, but I forgot my camera! If I can scrounge up some photos I'll post them.

Days Off

• What with Patriot's Day and Easter this week, I had last Monday and Friday off, and I have this coming Monday off as well. Final projects for school are keeping me busy so I spent my time off doing work in my "mobile office" as Miss Sarah of Girls and Bicycles calls it.

AKA I went to the Dam Cafe. It's basically the only cafe in my whole town. I miss having the options of Rao's or Amherst Coffee or Cushman when I was doing my undergrad, but I like the atmosphere and they have really good lunch food if I don't feel like going home for lunch.

Monday looked like this:
Baseball game going on in the park.
Loving riding in the bike lane.
Obligatory panda shot.

And then here's Friday:
A stack of library books, a latte, my notebook and my favorite pen. I was incredibly productive. I'm also thrilled by the fact that not only can I get books from any public library in Western Massachusetts through interlibrary loan (I just requested Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Dream Country to join in the I Will If You Will book club at Monkey See), BUT I can also take out any book from Mt. Holyoke library since I'm a Simmons GSLIS West student, and from Amherst College and UMass libraries because I'm a resident of one of the counties adjacent to them. It's great! So I currently have 4 library cards and I have books checked out from 3 different libraries.

It was a little chilly on Friday, so here were my shoes of choice:

If you're wondering what I've been reading lately (aside from textbooks and articles about library research) the answer is The Mysteries of Udolpho, a gothic novel with suspense and the supernatural and castles and romance, which I liked but didn't love; The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar which I absolutely adored, go read it; My Best Friend is a Wookie, a memoir about being a diehard Star Wars fan which I couldn't get into because I am not a huge fan of Star Wars; and now I've just started The Toss of a Lemon by Padma Viswanathan which is about a Brahmin woman who is widowed in the early 1900s and challenges the rules about widowhood that existed at that time.

In college I took a course on South Asian women writers, which I loved, and I still really enjoy reading books about India and Pakistan and the like, so I'm sort of on a "fiction about Indian women" kick. I'll let you know how Toss of a Lemon turns out.

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Some people have class.

I'm currently taking grad school courses on Saturdays. One is online half the time, so I usually do that class from home in the morning and then drive in to school after lunch. Last week, though, was one of our few face-to-face classes for my morning class, and it was a beautiful day, so I decided to try biking to school for the first time.

But here's the thing: to get to my school, I have to cross a river, and there are only 2 bridges I can take unless I want to ride like 12 miles out of the way, which is not happening. One bridge is in a bad part of town (although during the day it's usually fine), and the other leads to a busy rotary/roundabout that doesn't feel safe.

I decided to take the rotary, since I know my way around in that part of town better, only to be confronted with this:

I know it's a little hard to see, but that sign is showing "no pedestrians, no bikes, no horses" basically. Oops. I took that way anyway and made it to school fine, but I knew I couldn't go back that way, so I rode home through the bad part of town known as "the flats". And of course I got lost. Thank goodness for brothers, though - I called my brother and he looked up a the route I needed to take to get home. I didn't encounter any trouble in the flats.

Funnily enough, it was when I was almost home that a guy yelled out his car window at me "It's called a sidewalk, a**hole!" On a road that has a designated bike lane. Sigh. Some people just don't have class.

New Basket

Sorry for my long absence, blog, it's been winter! But now the weather is warming up and I've biked to the grocery store twice and to my classes once.

I finally attached my new basket to Marin! It was a little harder than I imagined it would be since the metal parts meant to attach to my rack were a little small and I had to bend them out of shape to get them to work. But eventually, success!

The main basket covers up the side one a little, so I have to take it off to put full bags into the side and then put it back on, but it works. My mom and Brian have asked if I felt off-balance having a basket only on one side now, but I actually feel much more balanced than when I used to carry heavy things just on my 1 rear basket! I think because this is lower to the ground it gives me a lower center of gravity?

Anyway, with the warmer weather I can wear shoes like this:

and my feet weren't even cold! This Sunday when I went grocery shopping I regretted taking a coat.
The side basket folds up. It's nice that when I'm not using it I don't have to have it in the way. Here's what I can carry now with my additional cargo space. This is what went into the rear basket:

• 3 fresh beets
• gallon of milk
• full-size orange juice
• family-size Kashi Go Lean Crunch cereal
• large container of arugula
• carton of vegetable stock

And here's what went into my side basket:

• 5 small yogurts
• 1 jar of pickles
• small bunch bananas
• 5 cans of cat food
• 1 can corn
• bottle of white wine vinegar
• 1 orange
• 1 onion
• 1 red bell pepper
• 2 pears
• 2 pickling cucumbers

So if the weather is nice where you are - get out there and bike or walk or do something outdoors. I can't wait for sundresses!

Snow Day

What with the Snowpocalypse going on all over the US I took some time to read last week. Living with my sister and her fiance is sort of like having my own mini library. They both read a lot and their taste in books, while similar to mine, is different enough that they own things I wouldn't normally buy. Thanks to that I'm currently reading The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. Liking it so far. Anyway, here are just a few of the bookshelves in our house:

But even with the snow I did get some activity in. We shoveled. A lot.
And then Joni and I decided to go for a snowshoe about town. It was my first time snowshoeing and it's not easy - I thought I would be more prevented from sinking into the snow than I was - but it was certainly a good workout! And a good was to get around without a car in weather my bike can't handle.
As you can see the snow was quite deep. And we just keep getting hit! It snowed a lot again this Tuesday and Friday, and I heard we're getting more this coming week. I want it to melt so I can bike again.
Now, I certainly am capable of biking now, the streets are cleaned up and not that wet, but because of the sheer volume of snow we've gotten, the snowbanks are sticking out into the road more than usual, which forces me to bike more in the road since the shoulder has all but disappeared, and I feel less safe in traffic now.
But we had a great time nonetheless and I will try to enjoy the snow while it lasts instead of lamenting it.

Madame Bovary and Winter

It's winter, which means I ride my bike significantly less than I would like to. I miss the fall when I could dress like this:

and truly be warm enough. Now I need a heavier coat, some tights under my jeans, a scarf, thicker mittens, and a big ol' hat. I do still bike to Wistariahurst every week since it's so close, and they say "I can't believe you rode your bike! It's freezing out!" But then I think about people in Canada and Denmark biking in snowstorms and much colder weather than here so I feel guilty if I don't brave the cold at least sometimes. I will admit that it's way too cold to ride the 18 miles to work. Plus, with the short days the sun is right in drivers' faces when I leave work so I wouldn't want to risk getting hit by a car. Even a bike-aware driver can't see you if the sun is in his face.
But I will long for days like the one above. I saw this girl locking up outside the Dam Cafe while I was working inside. Fabulous red fall coat and I was happy to see a fellow biker. Here's what my table looked like:

For Christmas I got a new basket for my bike as well as a new light, so I'll have to set those up on a warmer day. I'll post pictures soon. I'm very excited to be able to haul slightly more groceries now!

You would think that with winter here and me holed up inside more often, I would be reading a TON. Nope, I have instead been spending a significant portion of my time playing Scribblenauts and the Professor Layton games on my Nintendo DS. However, last night I finally finished reading Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. I wasn't sure I would like it at first since I didn't like Madame Bovary herself (and the last time I didn't like the main characters - in Lady Chatterly's Lover - I hated the book and it took a lot of work to get through it) but I ended up enjoying it.

It's actually a wonderful comment on "the grass is greener" viewpoints and the influence that novels can have on us. Emma Bovary is so miserable in her life because she thinks that all love must be like the love in novels and that fine things will make her happy. She is just so deluded that when she is confronted with reality it completely unravels her. This is the kind of book I wish I had read in college so I could discuss it with other book-lovers with the guidance and insight of a professor.

And I think even now people can be influenced like that by novels. If I expected love to be like novels I would probably be disappointed with what I have with Dave because it's not a constant torrent of passion and heightened emotion. Most of the time we are simply content together, but I'm a realist and I like it that way.