Further Bicycle Commuting Thoughts

So, on Thursday of this week I got to have my first, "Thank God I'm on a bike" moment.  I don't expect them to be frequent.

I was on Alpha Road approaching Preston and traffic got ridiculous.  I had not spent enough time noting the location of sidewalks, and as of right now, I'm not going to be the guy riding in between lanes begging for someone to open their door to make my day suck.  If I had, I might have just taken the sidewalk, and spent even less time in traffic.  As it was, there must have been some accident south of Alpha Road on Preston, because traffic was backed up, moving even slower than what I was in.  Each light cycle, a few cars would pile into the intersection, and get stuck there, which would end up preventing any cars from being able to proceed along Alpha Road.  With perverse pleasure, and a brief flashback to some scene in Premium Rush, I weaved through stationary cars, emerging on the other side feeling pretty awesome.  The people behind me had caught up to me by the next light or so, but the moment was fun.

Prescott Brewing's Ponderosa IPA

Prescott Brewing has apparently been at this for over 20 years, and from this one I can see why they've stayed in business. This beer is fantastic, and certainly plays to all of my favorites. This beer has great balance between malt and hop, and has grapefruit flavor, piney notes, and finshes clean, mostly without aftertaste, except for something refreshing that reminds me of spring water.

I drank this one while watching Tattoo Nightmares, hearing my son in the next room taking a "nap" singing at the top of his lungs because he's totally not tired. I'm certainly in a good place to enjoy this beer, the tattoo cover-ups are awesome, my boy is cute, even in his refusal to sleep, and it's overcast and cool in the mountains of Arizona. I loved this beer, and I'll admit, I'm too positive about IPA's, but I really think this is a fantastic example. If I could get this back home, I'd certainly get it again, and I'd put it on par with Dogfish head, though very different.

SanTan Brewing Epicenter Amber

I'm back in Arizona, after being gone many years, and I'm not particularly familiar with the local brews, so I picked up a mixed six pack including 4 local beers I'd never heard of before.

SanTan Brewing, based out of Chandler, AZ, looks like it's been in business about 6 years now.  They've got a pretty decent selection of regular brews, and they have a really awesome sounding motivation for their existence here: http://www.santanbrewing.com/about-santan/

This particular beer is pretty decent, which might sounds negative, but I'm not usually a big fan of amber ales unless they're also hoppy, or have more going on with their yeast.  This one has great caramel and toasty notes, finishes dry, and has nothing negative to detract, so it's very solid and respectable, and would make a great introduction to craft beer to someone used to light beers.  I usually perceive the dry finish to be watery, so my first sip wasn't impressive, but I've come to enjoy it about 1/3 through.

There's nothing otherwise distinctive about this, I'd accept more if drinking by the pool, but wouldn't seek it out.

Biking to work, Day 2

Friday morning I took another stab at commuting by bike and train, with the advantage that I was able to leave earlier than I will most days (~5:45a.m.).  As much as it feels it should be shorter, it seems to be about 10 minutes between leaving my house and sitting down on the train, which is only about a mile from my house.  The train ride is then about 20 minutes, like clockwork, and my 5.5 mile bike ride takes a little less than 30 minutes, leaving my total commute at just under an hour.

This morning I got to try out a few weight lifting exercises at the gym, and use the showers, which was a welcome change to trying to make do with paper towels and a regular restroom.  I'm thinking I may try to switch to using just a hand towel to dry off, to keep the bulk in my back-pack down, as a full bath towel really isn't necessary.  The lockers appear to be the best place to hang up my biking clothes and towel for airing out/drying during the day, again, a big improvement from hanging them under my desk.

Some of my biggest concerns are traffic on the portions of my route that are off the bike trail.  They are hilly, two lane roads in poor repair, in an area of town known for heavy traffic during rush hour(s).  This being the week of July 4th means exceptionally light traffic for now, but we'll see how that works out in the long run.  It's also a much different proposition to get Brooke to come get me when I'm 15 miles away, through heavy traffic, than 2.5 miles on a usually not too busy road, so if something happens to my bike, or the weather gets bad, I haven't figured out exactly what the plan is.  From what I hear, there is a bus I can get on right next to the office that will lead to the train, so that may be my backup.

How to teach your kids what you believe, when you're not sure

So I have a rather difficult situation developing.  I have a 4 year old son asking increasingly complex and probing questions about everything.  This spans many things I'm comfortable with, such as why does the rocket shoot so high in the air when I stomp on the balloon looking thing, or what does CSS mean?  (He only knows because he asks everyday what I'm going to work on, and I tell him the same thing I tell my team during stand-up, slightly shortened.)

He then asks things I have a harder time with, such as why did God make it so we can get sick?  Why did God make bugs that bite us?  I have complicated ways of explaining these things to myself.  I'm comfortable, mostly, with my understanding of these things.  That means I can give him increasingly larger portions of my understanding as I feel he's ready.

But then he asks things like, what do Tyrannosaurus' do to people?  Simple question right?  I could just queue up Jurassic Park and answer that question for good.  But the truth is, I'm still not at perfect peace about what I believe.  I was raised literal 6 day Creationist.  I have severe difficulties reconciling what I now know, and what I once thought.  I want to believe in a simple interpretation of Genesis, because most of the time, I like simple, and I like to think I can understand the basics of a thing, especially one so important as the origins of life.

But I don't want to cling to an interpretation of the Bible that I'm not confident it instructs us to hold.  I have enough faith to believe what the Bible says, because it describes reality as I understand it.  I have wrestled, and still do, with how we could have a sense of humor, a sense of the infinite, a desire for eternity beyond progeny, a physical body that couldn't survive a cage match with any number of supposedly near or distant animal relatives, for the trade-off of a brain that only in the past couple thousand years has given us the tools to really tip that balance.

So when the shows he so desperately wants to watch tell him Tyrannosaurs died out millions of years ago, I confirm it.  I tell him dinosaurs lived a long time ago.  He's 4, so 2 years ago was a long time ago, and he tells me as much all the time.  Dada was a little boy a REALLY long time ago, so I'm sure to his understanding, I won't be wrong, regardless of what he ends up believing, for at least another year or two.

 I still feel like there's a lot we don't understand, but I hate to see that as the only justification for saying that we'll one day reconcile physical evidence with a 6,000 year old universe and 6 x 24 hour day Creation.  Is it possible for me to hold on to that possibility while believing it's probably not so?  Is my belief in God's gift of eternal life dependent on my understanding of the speed of light, when it comes to understanding what we see coming from billions of light years away?  I don't think so, but it doesn't make it easy to know what to say to Jacob.

First day of my longer commute

Today I took my first shot at commuting to the new office using only public transportation and my bike. I ride a neon yellow(ishgreenish) fixed gear bike that I got when I started commuting by bicycle last year, riding the only 2.5 miles or so to ClickMotive's location. Now that we've been acquired by Dealertrack and moved to the Galleria, the commute is a bit more complicated. I ride about a mile down to the D.A.R.T. light rail station, take it about 10 miles south to Forest Lane where I get out and take a combination of bike trails and roads for about 6 miles to the office.

This morning, I exited one exit too early, took a wrong turn, managed to bike down to the station I should have exited, then took another wrong turn, which took me up to Spring Valley, which is probably a better road than Alpha Road, the one I had planned on. My commute in took about 1 hour 20 minutes. My badge didn't yet have access to the showers I had counted on, which was a major negative, one I'm hoping to never repeat. I'm also hoping I didn't greatly offend my co-workers, as all I could do was paper towel off and re-apply deodorant, as well as change clothes. This was my normal routine at the old office, but 2.5 miles is a lot different than 6.

My route home was using the crummier road, with even more potholes and fewer nice houses, but took the better of the two bike trails, and I was able to get to the station near my house about 1 hour after I left, with still a couple wrong turns, though nothing as time consuming as this morning. I'm thinking I can keep total commute time to about 1 hour, which was feeling like my undetermined maximum allowable time to contemplate doing this regularly.

The exercise is great, having the showers means I can leave the moment I finish letting Dexter out in the morning, and if I commit and get a monthly or yearly pass, which I can use pre-tax dollars to buy, I'll be saving noticeable amounts of money, plus wear and tear on the vehicle. However, being even farther from home, making it even harder to get my lovely wife to come pick me up in emergencies, is a significant challenge, as is the fact that I'd be averaging 2 hours daily commute time, which is 4 times what I was used to.

I drove in on Monday, and it was a total of 1 hour, roughly 30 minutes each way. Since this is the lowest traffic week of the year, I may need to gauge how much traffic affects those two times. My assumption is that my commute time by train and bike will not vary much, as I am the slowest vehicle on the street currently, and cannot fathom that traffic will slow me down even more, not to mention the bike trails won't have that kind of traffic, and the train isn't affected by it either.