This afternoon

This morning was more than grey and rainy. This morning was downright surly. The rain sheeted down and gusts slapped at our legs. It wasn’t pretty. This afternoon, the day was all, “I’m so, so sorry! I just – I don’t know what got into me. Honest, I didn’t mean it – here, I made this bright sparkly for you.” And just like that, we forgave it, like it won’t do the same thing again tomorrow. We’re such suckers sometimes.

My bike had a new first today – check it out!

As I rolled away from school, a dad called out, “Hey, is it legal to have a volcano on your bike?”

1. Family Ride to Tiburon

Over Thanksgiving weekend, we finally took a great ride that we’d been planning forever with our friends Rik and Sherri and their two awesome kids. We went from Mill Valley to Tiburon on a clear and windy Saturday afternoon. The ride was amazing; only one challenging hill and mostly beautiful bike path, tons of people out enjoying the day, stunning views of the bay and the city to the south. Everything went smoothly and the kids all had a fantastic time. We stopped at Waypoint pizza and got the back room all to ourselves – the food was made even more tasty by our ride beforehand. After we ate, we admired the view for a bit before heading back home.

Tom has this great app called Runkeeper on his iPhone which tracks all the stats on your adventures – distance, time, pace and even elevation – using the phone’s gps. Here’s the screen for our return ride from Tiburon:

How awesome is that?! The kids loved checking out the route and looking at the elevation chart – speed certainly is variable when your riders range from six to, well, you know, more than six. I love the information design on these screens – they’re easy to read and beautiful to look at. So satisfying. All in all, it was an incredible day.

2. Walk and Wheel Wednesdays

As I’ve mentioned here before, I put in a small amount of time for the Safe Routes to School committee at our kids’ elementary school. One of the ways we’re trying to build participation in the program is to encourage a weekly walk/wheel/carpool to school day. We try to drum up enthusiasm for the whole idea by putting up posters and a table at the school entrance on the first Wednesday of each month. Whole Foods was good enough to give us some bags of granola to hand out to the students, and we’ve been stamping hands to show they participated. However, we’ve been struggling to come up with other ways to get the message out without printing up hundreds of flyers that will just be tossed when the kids go home after school.

Last week, I started thinking about edible advertising. So I bought a couple bags of cuties and some food markers and put the message right on the clementines.

They had faces on one side, and “Walk & Wheel Wednesdays” on the other. It was fun watching the kids trying to decide which face to choose, and I think they worked pretty well. Anyone out there have other ideas? I’d love to hear them.

3. Xtra Clean

I’ve carried lots of fun things with my xtracycle.

I love having a bike that can carry my vacuum cleaner.

Here’s a shot from the path to school. That lady on my xtracycle? Not me. It’s one of our fantastic PE teachers. I rode to school early this morning with my bike completely loaded up with a box of granola samples kindly donated by our local Whole Foods, a huge tupperware of orange slices, serving trays, you name it. The minute I arrived, I saw our PE teacher, who commandeered my bike to chase down the principal, who was heading up the bike path to meet the crowd of walkers heading in from the community center. I didn’t get to see the path when things were going full tilt, but I heard it was mayhem. Woohoo!

Look who’s got new wheels! He finally has hand brakes and gears, thanks to a lucky garage sale find. He’s beyond happy.

Here are some riders filling in one section of our bike racks. It’s tricky to take shots without any faces in them – thanks for this one, Tom!

The bike racks filled up pretty quickly…

Check out that sweet minty green bike! The black one behind it doesn’t look that fancy in this shot, but it’s got a very cool industrial rear rack. Having good equipment sure makes the decision to ride an easier one.

In the end, we handed out 270 badges to students who walked, rolled and carpooled to school this morning. Not a bad turnout!

After a week of strep throat, the death of our neighbor and a suite of home, school and office issues too annoying to even go into, I’m glad it’s Friday. Really, really glad. I’ve decided I can’t let this week end on a sad note – so here are some good things that have happened lately:

Dogs

I called the animal shelter on Wednesday and found out that the dogs we took in briefly last week were claimed by their owners that afternoon. That’s one point for good news!

Quiche

There’s really nothing wrong with quiche. Hot Wheels did a little dance when he saw this one.

Help in the Kitchen

The very best kind.

Soccer Practice

Some of you might recall that Honey has a Friday afternoon soccer practice that runs till 5pm – last year we parents decided that it was a perfect setting to kick off the weekend, so we started bringing drinks and snacks to practice. Nothing too fancy. This year I bought a sweet new soft cooler for my xtracycle, ready for Friday afternoons. It’s been wonderful – each week we have more and more parents joining us, and it’s a terrific group of families. Look at this afternoon! Not too shabby.

Candy Corn

It’s October, everybody, and that means I get to buy candy corn. I know that to some people, candy corn isn’t even an A list candy. To those people I say, it’s ok! Just send me your candy corn and I will dispose of it responsibly.

Cloche Hats

I recently bought the most spectacular hat. It was so spectacular that I actually paid full price for it. Inconceivable. I thought I’d just take a shot of myself wearing this new hat of mine so you could see it.

Easier said than done, it turns out. I stood on the back deck, held out the camera and took a shot. Holy smokes that didn’t look so good. I took another. Yikes! I tried again. And again. And again. It got painful. I think my mirror must have vaseline on it because I’m sure I don’t remember all those lines and droopy bits and freckles. It was a horror show. So after about 654 shots, I quit. Here’s the damn hat.

When I bought it, the woman ringing me up asked me, “And did anyone help you with your purchase today?”

Why, yes – my grandmother and my great aunt Alice, as a matter of fact.

There were coordinators from every public school in our town, as well as two private schools. We also had representatives from the district office and the CHP. (I know! CHiPs!!) Before this meeting, I hadn’t realized exactly how many organizations were working together to secure funding, educate the public and implement road & traffic improvements for safe routes in our county. They’re planning programs to encourage “green routes” to school, they’re building an online matching service for families to line up carpools and bike/walk groups so more kids can participate without having to travel alone, they’re making changes to sidewalks and crossings to raise driver awareness. It’s fantastic. Here’s a photo of some of the new bike racks our school has, thanks to one smart parent and a grant:

The big push right now is for International Walk to School Day, coming up on October 7. We’ve also been asked to implement a weekly table at school to acknowledge students who use green routes – bike, scooter, walk, carpool, camel, whatever. Like a “Walking Wednesdays” program. I’m trying to think of non-material incentives to get kids excited about participating. One of the local schools reported that their students just liked having their hands stamped when they got to school – I thought that was a great idea. If anyone out there has ideas, let me know!! We’re just trying to avoid sending the kids home with tchotchkes this year…

On a completely different note – literally – I recently saw this link on reddit to an old Washington Post article about an experiment they ran where they asked Joshua Bell to play in a DC metro station. If you didn’t get to see it, it’s worth a read – the article, Pearls Before Breakfast, has stuck with me for three days now. I just found it fascinating – what they thought would happen, what actually happened, the descriptions of the pieces Bell chose and even the history of the violin he plays. Amazing to picture a thousand commuters streaming past a world class violinist sawing away on a three and a half million dollar violin and not really noticing. The video isn’t that great, but the discussion about art and appreciation is compelling. See what you think.

Riding with the kids later on, we heard the unmistakable chiming song of an ice cream truck idling on one of the streets we cross. Our kids are pretty careful on their bikes, but I swear they were like sailers to sirens and completely lost all sense of direction and purpose. I wasn’t very lyre-like, though, as I hollered them through the intersection – “Cross now! Don’t stop riding! People are waiting for you! Watch out for the stroller!” They didn’t lose the glaze in their eyes till we were about a block from home. It really is a wonder that they didn’t crash or get run over.

Then Thursday morning, Tom had an early meeting so the kids and I rode out to school after he left. I pulled out my bike and loaded it up with the bags. I went back into the garage to take the kids’ bikes out for them and I heard the door close behind me. We have a regular door on the side of our garage – the roll up door had been replaced with windows before we bought the house. Our garage door is like the cellar door at Mum and Dad’s house that just naturally swings shut, and I seem to have a thing about not propping it open. It probably stems from being a kid and daring myself to make it to the bottom of the cellar stairs before the door closed behind me – those kinds of tests can die hard. Now it’s morphed into an awkward garage dance where I try to get a bike wheel into the closing gap in the door each morning. Too lazy or stubborn to prop the dang thing open. Well yesterday, it closed, the nerve of it, and when I grabbed the doorknob, it popped right off. A second later, I heard the knob on the other side hit the cement.

There I was, staring at the closed door with no knob – kids in the house, phone in my bike in the driveway. I had visions of my neighbors discovering me waving pitifully at them with my face pressed against the garage windows. Fortunately I discovered that the doorknob spindle was inside with me, and after working on it for a few minutes, I was able to work the tab back and get the door open. When I relayed the story to Tom later, he laughed so hard he had to pause to catch his breath. I muttered something ungraceful about being happy to have provided his entertainment for the day, and he said, “The day? I’m going to be entertained by this for weeks!”

Or how about this? In the middle of the night on Wednesday, Honey got up, went to the bathroom and washed her hands, then came into our room to tell me something. No problem there – except for one thing. She was operating in stealth mode and I didn’t hear any of this. I was woken up from the black of a deep sleep by a small, cold, wet hand on my knee. Did I have an appropriate reaction to this psycho horror movie situation? Thankfully, no and oddly, yes. Thankfully no in that I didn’t wind anyone up in the emergency room. What I did do was shoot straight up in bed and shout, “Jeepers Creepers!!!” Oddly yes in that it turns out that there’s a series of horror movies called – you guessed it, Jeepers Creepers. But I was unaware of that until about 3 minutes ago, which begs the question – which decade am I from, anyway? Who says Jeepers Creepers anymore? When I told my friend Lori, she laughed,”That’s a real ‘whoopsie daisies’ moment!”

This run of situations (and I’m not even going into the one about very nearly walking into a meeting with a major piece of spinach in my teeth) did flash a scene in my mind of a guardian angel dispatch office, looking like the set from the old show Taxi, with the dispatcher barking, “Murphy! You’re gettin’ ‘er this week and I don’t wanna hear another *%# word outa ya!”

Last weekend I decided it was time for a little bike spa. Hot Wheels and I ride down to my dance class together twice a week, and in the mornings around the full moon the path is often completely flooded in places. It’s usually quite an adventure with some off-roading through the scrub grasses to catch the path again. That part is fun, but it leaves our bikes pretty muddy and gunky. So after some sloppy rides over the last couple weeks, it was time for a chain cleaning and general demudification. 

These pictures would be a lot more impressive if I’d had the presence of mind to take the ‘before’ shots. Anyway – we had some fun cleaning them up and fixing the lights and attaching the new basket to Hot Wheels’ bike. He was super excited about the whole project. Now I’m debating whether I should get the fenders for his bike or wait till he grows into a 20″ bike. Poor thing – it really shouldn’t be a question. I finally figured out his basic weekly (Monday – Friday) mileage, and it’s 18 miles. That’s just the school and dance class riding, so I suppose the guy has earned himself some fenders! 

You might think that all this cleaning would leave my bike chain feeling light and content. I certainly did. Perhaps it just made it hungry, though, because yesterday on my way to work, it took a bite out of my pant leg. Check it out:

How’s that for gratitude? Hmpf. And it was the left cuff – I’d pinned the right one, since that’s closest to the chain, but it still managed to get a chomp in there. My nice Anthropologie pants, too. Good thing they were on sale, because otherwise my bike would be in the doghouse.

 

Someone in my house is now eight.

Eight.

It might be a good moment to note that the day after this certain person was born, she received a letter from my dear brother, in which he promised that when she was eight, she could indeed have a pony. Thanks for that, Joe! 

Her birthday morning was wonderful and filled with amazing treats from all around the globe. Such a lucky girl. Josephina was a lucky girl today too – look what she got!

 

Oh yeah. Hampton in the house. Mum found this while we were all on vacation this summer, and I’d completely forgotten about it. It was a HUGE hit.

I made Josephina a little dress out of some scraps from the fabric bin. (Fabric going out instead of in! It’s a miracle!)

 

 

Here’s a look at the hem, which took me too long because I didn’t gather the ribbon at all and the hem flipped up so I had to tack it down all the way around on the inside. 

 

Today is also International Walk To School Day, which is a little more like walkbikescooterandskateboard day when you get right down to it. Whatever you call it, it’s great. We loved seeing all the riders on the bike path this morning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What a morning!

 

At their practice field, there’s a beautiful arrangement of trees off to one side – the ideal spot to park the bikes and spread the blanket.

 

It’s yet another moment when I’m happy to have my xtracycle – it carries all the backpacks, the soccer snacks for the kids, the soccer snacks for the grownups (the end of the day on Friday should always be celebrated) and the soccer bag. I love you, xtracycle.

 

Yes I know. I’m just too funny for words. I’m sorry. I just can’t help it.

Ok, tacky titles aside – Hot Wheels and I had the best, best, best bike ride home from ballet this morning. It’s bird heaven here these days. I just simply had to take a few mediocre photos.

The bike path was quieter than usual. We could spot about a dozen different birds, and the long, still egrets were nicely juxtaposed by fast packs of small birds flying in close formation. We could hear fish darting up against the surface of the bay, and we sat out on rocks for what seemed like a week and a half trying to get a good look at them. No luck, but it was divine. 

(Check these guys out. The one on the left was saying, “I’m not talking to you,” and the one on the right was like, “Fine. I’m not talking to you either.”)

 

 

I have to confess a bit of confusion regarding the egret, heron and crane families. They’re like keeping track of second cousins and first cousins once removed. It gets a bit blurry. But they’re beautiful!

We did see one gigantic blue heron, but not until it was too tricky to get a shot. (Of it, not at it – this ain’t Palin country, people.) When I was in Peru, Tom and the kids actually saw a blue heron dart down, grab a gopher and eat it in one gulp. Tom is now a blue heron devotee.

I’m still mad at that heron for completely disappearing from the bike path for the duration of my parents’ visit last winter. My parents were all, “Oh you have a humungous blue heron that hangs out along the path to school? What’s his name? Harvey??” I ought to give that heron a piece of my mind. He sure made me look bad. Although eating a gopher is a nice way to make up for it.