2000 Miles!

It will be of great interest to no-one that I hit 2000 miles on the bike odometer this morning. That’s right, just like the Pretenders song. Or the Proclaimers song about walking 500 miles back and forth to your chick’s house, but if you played it twice. I’m not sure how big Scotland is, but I think that to do 500 miles you’d pretty much be limited to  walking around the edge of Scotland. All the way from Thurso to Dumfries is only 341 miles. Where does this chick live, anyway?

Anyway, I am glad to know that I could pedal from Portland back to my native land of Dallas in one hour a day, and that it would only take me seven months.

As long as we’re talking about my bike,  a vintage Trek 720, let me make some etiquette suggestions. If you wish to drive past a cyclist and scream something unintelligible that ends in “bitch”, you might want to check that you aren’t running into a traffic jam that will cause her to catch up with you in 15 seconds and spit gum in your passenger’s lap and ride off laughing.  Not that I would ever do that.

After a cyclist recently got clocked by a bus rider in our fair city of Roses, not only am I mostly not spitting gum at people, but I have put a bumper sticker on my bag that reads “Don’t Hit Me! I love you!”

Xmas family fun

I have survived hosting Christmas- it was my two sisters, their British boyfriends who are also brothers, their boyfriends’ parents, and my mother and my brother in my tiny house

The Trip There

It was. An. Adventure. Their dad wandered onto the tarmac while waiting for their flight out from Austin, and was detained for being a terrorist.  He claims that no-one told him he couldn’t go walking on the airstrip.  He also liked to kneel on the floor and splash himself with bath water instead of taking a shower, which has the overall effect of soaking the whole bathroom.  He is obsessed with Boddington’s pub ale and hot chocolate, but refuses to pay more than $1.50 for anything.

The Party

  We had a little party, and this was the first family party I have ever been to that went on past 3 AM. I went to bed at two to the sound of my future father-in-law swishing soy milk around in his Egg Nog (really Advocaat) bottle to get the last dregs of whiskey and milk out, and my sister Laura singing to the detuned piano on the back porch, and my spouse singing as Tom Waits in the front room.

Laura Ryan: Oh, I was playing that piano last night, it is sounding so creepy and awesome.
Me: Yes, I heard you.
Laura: You could hear that?
Me: It’s right outside my bedroom. There’s not, you know, any kind of soundproofing out on the patio. You’re just a drunk person singing outside.

I love family time.

(A month after they left, we discovered that the in-laws had opened a window in the guest room that then stayed open, just wafting heated air out into the yard)

Postscript

Postscript: the marriage ended in divorce, the father in law ended in death, but I still shiver thinking about this Christmas.