Why fly?

Posted on 2007-05-10 by frank

Flying used to be fun. In the mid to late 1990’s and the early 2000’s, airlines were doing very well and seemed always to try to do better. For the most part whatever they could do to gain your repeat business, they did. Upgrades, increasingly decent meals on slightly longer flights, friendly staff, more room between seats in coach class, and more.

These days, it’s nearly impossible to travel by air without hassles from the time you enter the departure airport until the time you’ve left your arrival airport. As a recreational endurance athlete, I drink a lot of water, but now I can’t carry water through security. It’s annoying to pay four or five times the market rate to buy water once I’m through security. I used to rarely check my luggage, preferring either to carry it on or to gate check it. Now it’s tougher to do that, unless I purchase special tiny containers of toothpaste, shampoo, and shaving cream, and plan to buy a razor upon arrival.

We’re planning a summer visit to the in-laws in Maryland, and Andrea is already driving up a couple of weeks early with the girls and Finley, so I looked in to my flight options. The best I could find was connecting through Charlotte, with total door to door time of 8 to 10 hours if the flight is on time, and it’s only an 11 hour drive!

There are only two reasons for me to fly on this trip, and they’re related: Andrea’s already taking one car up and it seems silly to drive both our cars that car; and it’s cheaper to fly than it is to rent a car one way.

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The Perfect Mess

Posted on 2007-05-09 by frank

I’m not the neatest person alive, but I’m far from the messiest.

Elizabeth on the other hand is a one-girl Perfect Storm of clutter. She’s so messy, when she walks in to a clean room, the room will clutter itself up out of fear, or maybe it’s admiration; who can tell?

I’ve learned a few things from her about clutter. My favorite because it works in almost any room in the house is, whenever you need to get something out of a storage container, say a drawer or a basket, dump the contents on the floor, sort through it by heaving the items you don’t want in every direction, leaving them where they fall. If you’ve chosen the correct container, you’ll pick up the item you want by the time you reach the bottom of the pile. If not, you can always move on to the next container in line, because this technique is easily repeatable as well as endlessly entertaining.

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Walking in “downtown” Evans

Posted on 2007-05-07 by frank

After a month of listings, phone calls, and meeting up with prospective buyers in various parking lots around town, I’ve traded the car Andrea and I bought when we returned from London in April 2001 for a counter check in to our bank account.

The guy who bought the car really likes it, which is good, because I really like it, too, and to be honest am a little bit sad to see it go. I hardly have any pictures of it at all! So, bye bye car, we enjoyed it, but that’s not the point of this. The guy, a graduate student at Georgia Southern who had been saving up for a nice used car, asked me once the transaction was complete if I needed a ride anywhere.

“No thanks. I appreciate it, but I’m going to stop by the library since I’m already over here, and then I’ll just walk back to work.” He looked at me like I’d told him that yes, my ears DO grow cornstalks at this time every day.

“Really, it’s no big deal, it’s only a mile or two.” Here I had a perfect opportunity, even an excuse, for some self-powered transportation, and I wasn’t about to squander it for a two mile car ride on such a beautifully cool sunny morning.

It took me around half an hour. Evans has just enough sidewalks to make you notice it has sidewalks when you’re driving around, but not enough of them to actually walk anywhere. Starting at the library, you’re on sidewalk until you hit Washington Road, but cross it and you’re on county-maintained shoulder for a block or two. After that it’s lawns in front of strip malls for a few more blocks, then cut through a neighborhood with no sidewalks but also no traffic. After the neighborhood, cross over Hereford Farm Road and you’re in a brand new office park with the first buildings nearing completion; some sections of this have sidewalk, but the sidewalk starts and ends in strange places, so half the time you’re walking in the road or in the grass.

I wonder if sidewalks or pedestrians to demand them have to come first? Maybe I should start going to the county planning meetings.

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No really, how much impact was that again?

Posted on 2007-05-05 by frank

Been thinking some more about No Impact Man (NIM). Almost as hard as actually changing your habits is going to be measuring the impact. How can you be zero net impact if you don’t track both the “impact” and the cost of all the aspects of your life? It’s a daunting task they’ve undertaken, and I would like some more details. With the breaker in the apartment thrown, what is the temperature inside the apartment, graphed against the temperature outside the apartment? How does this vary with the seasons?

A good study — what additional burden, if any, does their lack of heating and cooling give to the neighbors in their apartment building? How would the average temperature inside the apartment be affected if all the residents in their building followed the same policy of no power?

There’s plenty of room for liberalism in the world, but I wish they’d be a little more rigorous, or, dare I say it, scientific, in explaining and accounting for their choices. It’s interesting and perhaps even inspiring to read about worms in their apartment, but if they don’t cite references for their claims and provide a basis for comparison for their statistics, their stories are merely narrative. For example,

We produce less than half a small bag of trash in a week.

That’s much less trash than my family produces, but how much did you produce before you began all these measures? Which ones were the most effective in terms of effort versus results? How do you handle diapers for your toddler, and how did you handle them before?

This is interesting stuff, but I want more details!

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How to get back out of shape in two short weeks

Posted on 2007-05-05 by frank

There are plenty of ways to avoid getting in shape, but this routine has worked really well for me over the past few weeks. Give it a try!

First you have sign up for a couple of events that are within reach for your current level of fitness, but are very likely to leave you pretty tired afterwards. In my case an endurance mountain bike ride on one day and a 60 mile road ride the next day did the trick. By the time I finished the road ride, my legs were shot. Take it easy the next couple of days to help yourself recover from the big effort. You should probably even avoid the easy 15 mile round trip to work because it might help you to get in some more base miles and saddle time.

Late in the week, try a group ride and surprise yourself by hammering to keep up with a faster group than you’re used to, and notice it doesn’t even hurt. Two days after that, go on a road ride in the morning, do yard work all day, then a mountain bike ride in the afternoon. You’re feeling really good now, nearly there! Drink a few beers at the baseball game that night to get good and dehydrated for the crucial steps in your shape-avoidance plan.

The next day, spend the whole day with the family, then on the way home from church in the afternoon, stop at Lowes for some top soil for the flower beds. When the soil you want is way back under a shelf and you have to stoop over while lifting the 40 pound bags out to your bazillion pound cart, manfully ignore your wife’s suggestion to get a Lowes employee to pull the palette out for you. When you get home, don’t bother getting down the wheelbarrow to haul around those bags of soil. You can carry them one by one as long as you’re careful with your lower back!

Two days later, wonder where the pain in your neck and shoulders came from. Hey, at least it’s not your lower back, so you can walk and sit, it’s just lifting your arms, turning your head, and, strangely, yawning that cause you to flinch every time in pain.

Spend the rest of the week babying your neck and shoulders. Don’t even take the dog on a walk — if the back yard is good enough for the squirrels it’s good enough for him, right?

By now you’ve squandered all the hard work and long rides, it’s time to get serious again. Wake up early Saturday and ride. But wait, it’s nothing but rain rain rain all weekend, so the best you can stomach is half an hour on the trainer in the garage. Mission accomplished!

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