Biking Season 2013

My new-ish bicycle, parked outside work for the first morning this year.  No trailer yet.  Didn't seem necessary.  I'll get it hooked up this weekend in case I need it.  It was cold enough out that I could wear work clothes and not worry about sweating through everything, even with fleece pants and a ski jacket on.  It did create a potential problem for lunch because we were all going out with Sean for his second-to-last day as a contractor, and bicycling to lunch is slow, but Sean gave me a ride in his classic (e.g. cheaper) Jaguar.  Nice lunch - we did the all you can eat sushi in Eagan.

The only big issue on the way to work was the ice on the trails.  Over by Glacier Hills, on the hill, there was enough ice that I just started louge-ing at one point.  Scary if you're on a bike with a laptop on your back.  The bike is great.  I'm not exactly shooting along at top speeds, but it was a replacement for my mountain bike and carries me along at a comfortable 10 mph, just like the mountain bike did.

Amusingly, or disturbingly, once I got to work and swapped from my leather boots (thank you internet for recommending them as appropriate footwear) to my brown dress shoes, this fell out of my dress shoe.  50 weeks later, and I'm still finding safety glass from the Mustang.  I didn't keep this piece.  I have my bag full of glass and a picture is sufficient.

Glass

This is a picture of the office wall closest to my head at work.  That's a bag full of the Mustang glass from the accident, including the piece I picked out from between my teeth (despite assurances from everyone it wasn't there) after being in a coma.  Any time I'm feeling a bit ornery at work, these pieces of glass do a great job of getting me back to a state of calm.  There's not much anyone can do that's worse than the accident.

I'm not generally the type to need mementos (an organized serial killer type).  Most days I'm fairly well grounded in the larger scheme of things.  But I find these surprisingly useful.  They remind me of the hospital and how miserable I felt, both physically and mentally, worrying about my family and whether I'd be bicycling and/or walking and trying not to hurt.  Puts everything else in perspective: everything else in a space relative to the accident.  On a continuum, that pushes everything else to the far end of the spectrum, or makes the spectrum so large that they appear to be stuffed up against the end for meaningless minutia.