Transpo

[darkemeralds]

I've never been able to stick to an "exercise program," (bleh) so changing my transportation mode from passive to active was perhaps the greatest stroke of genius I've ever had.¹

For the last four and half years, my daily eight-mile bike commute to and from work has been what gets me off my ass--the only thing. I was a little worried that retirement, in removing my biggest transportation need, would find me slowly melding with my armchair, never to budge again.

Instead, I've discovered that I'm riding my bike more than ever.

First of all, I have time to bike to destinations that, when I was working full time, would have taken too long. I have time to figure out a safe route to a new place, to get a little lost², to go in daylight, to choose my weather.

And second of all, I don't have to get everything done in one go on Sunday. I can make multiple trips, any day of the week. Whoops, forgot toilet paper? Four miles round trip to Fred Meyer. Return a book? Branch library across town. That fabric store that's out in the semi-urbs? Worth a shot.

Today I rode clear out past the ring of freeways to an acupuncture appointment that has always previously been a train trip. From there, since I was in the neighborhood, I stopped by my sister's--the one I don't see as much of because she lives "out there"--and pedaled home again in the gathering dark, for a 19-mile day.

View Bike to Lynne's in a larger map

¹ Selling my car was an important part of everything. Side note: my driver's license has expired and I should probably do something about that. I could ride my bike to the DMV. :D

² Sometime since I first starting biking, Google has added voice navigation to the bike layer of its maps, and it's awesome! Now I just need an app that has Paul Bettany's voice saying, "In six hundred feet, turn left onto the I-205 Bike Path. No, left, madam. The other left. That's it..."

Comments

[executrix]

My ballet teacher (who was a Rockette during WWII!) would frequently counsel "Your left foot...no, your OTHER left foot." She didn't sound a bit like Paul Bettany though.

[darkemeralds]

Hah! No, but I can sort of imagine how she must have sounded. :D

I found an app with a British male voice. Might have to give it a try.

Sorta Like Gandhi. Well, if he was really pissed off.

[executrix]

The Trustee's GPS sounds kind of like Emma Thompson. In a bad mood.

Re: Sorta Like Gandhi. Well, if he was really pissed off.

[darkemeralds]

Ooh, I'd have Emma-in-a-bad-mood for fun too!

[hunningham]

Commuting does make a difference, doesn't it. I used to walk to work (ten minutes there, ten minutes back) and when I started working from home this made a big difference. And I cannot do a regular exercise thingat all.

[darkemeralds]

It really does! I would imagine that your twenty minutes' daily walk didn't seem like much at all till you stopped doing it. I've found that it's the regularity of exercise, rather than the intensity, that's important. No one day's effort is much of a thing, but cumulatively it makes a huge difference.

[hunningham]

I put weight on. Slowly, but over a year it made a difference. And I was surprised.

[darkemeralds]

There's a lot of discussion (and some science) about the imperfect correlation between calorie consumption, calorie burn, and body weight, but I've found for my own body that the correlation is very clear and precise. Your experience sounds similar. It's amazing, isn't it, that if you add or subtract one small factor from habits that are otherwise quite steady, it makes a measurable difference.

For me, the problem is that I will always naturally tend to "eat up" my exercise (I bicycled daily for two years without losing a pound), so I have to apply controls at both ends of the process by tracking both burn and consumption.

Time to get back on that...

[ravurian]

If I did not already know where you live, I would now know precisely where you live thanks to this map. And where your sister lives. And her name. May want to lock this post?

I am in awe of your get up and go, though. Yay you!

[darkemeralds]

I've spent more than a little time today considering what kind of story might result from my having heedlessly posted a map showing my exact address. Here's what I came up with:

National Public Radio has been snooping around the Supernatural fandom lately, with particular reference to fanfic. In a followup story, someone has scanned the AO3 (which was linked in the first story) for various SPN fic stats. As it happens, the longest work in the SPN/RPF category (which they really want to do a salacious and embarrassing story on) is one that I wrote.

They point it out in their next blog post on the subject. Now, being NPR, the "they" in this part of the horror story don't really do anything further, but of course the link results in an unwanted kind of interest in that long AO3 story. Another, less reputable outlet picks it up and decides to do the Johnlock thing, asking the actors themselves if they're aware of RPF, if they've heard of this historical AU, etc. They have, they don't answer questions about it, they've been in this business a long time and they've learned never to google themselves, etc.

So far, I'm still just DarkEm. I start hearing about it from my online community. It's nerve-wracking, but not, after all, the end of the world. A cursory look at my Twitter account would show me as living in the city where I do, in fact, live, but you'd have to be pretty motivated to go digging around the very-obscure Dreamwidth community to find me, then read all my posts to discover that map.

Of course, this less-reputable-than-NPR "journalist" does just that. Bonanza! He or she learns that DarkEmeralds lives at [street address redacted].

And then!

And then...

Um...the worst thing I can think of is that I'm still in my bathrobe at 1:30 p.m. on a weekday, hanging laundry on the clothesline on my front porch when this enterprising "journalist" (who for some reason actually comes here, or already lives here) cruises by, paparazzi style.

HOMELESS-LOOKING OLD LADY WRITES SALACIOUS FANFICTION would be the headline.

That would be horrible.

[amaliedageek]

I was terribly excited about this until I learned it was only for iOS devices. Boo!

[darkemeralds]

Oooh! That looks interesting. Limited, though: it doesn't seem to support voice navigation, which would be my primary use for it.

Still, this kind of thing is certainly the way of the (near) future, and if it comes out for iOS, an Android version probably isn't far behind.