Living Small

Biking to Work

Now that I have a bike, I have been trying to bike to work.  I say "trying" because, even though I have successfully made it to work on a bike twice and home from work once, I'm still not sure this bicycle commuting thing is for me.  To begin with, I've just learned that I ride entirely wrong.  Well, I guess the riding is okay, it is the starting and stopping that are wrong.  I keep the seat low enough so that I can touch my toes to the street without having to get off the seat.  Until a couple of days ago, when I started reading up on bike riding form, I just thought this was how everyone did it.  So I start by straddling the seat with my toes on the ground, and then just put my feet on the pedals and go.  Works fine for me.  But it turns out that, if you can put your feet on the ground, the seat is too low.  One is supposed to start by straddling the bar, and then lift one's rear end to the seat by pushing down on the pedal.  In other words, you are supposed to be in motion BEFORE getting on the seat.  This just blows my mind.  So today, with some coaching from David, I tried raising my seat and doing it the right way.  First I fell trying to get on the bike, and then, at the first stoplight, I fell trying to get off the bike.  Finally I just lowered the seat and did it the old way.  Is this terrible?  For David (and probably most other people) it just comes so easily.  He even said that it never occurred to him that somebody would not know how to get on a bike.  I am just so frustrated.  I think it is like trying to learn a foreign language -- you can understand the grammar and vocabulary, but unless you start speaking the language as a child, you will always have the wrong accent.  I may be able to get on a bike and ride, but I fear I will never be a fluent cyclist.

As Soon As the Snow Ends...

...the construction begins.  Road construction, that is.  Actually, what is bothering me right now is less road construction (though David and I did end up getting lost just outside Saginaw on a poorly-marked freeway detour when we went up north last weekend) than sidewalk construction.  It seems that every time I go out to run these days, I find myself having to cross streets multiple times to avoid torn-up sidewalks.  It seems like there is a lot more road and sidewalk construction here in Michigan than there was in Los Angeles.  This could actually be the case, since annual freezing and thawing of the roads might cause more damage that needs to be repaired, or it could just be that the same amount of construction needs to be done in half the time, since it can't very well be done when the roads are frozen.  In any case, those "You Know You Are A Michiganian If..." lists always include an item about how there are only two seasons here: winter and construction.  My first summer, I just thought it was a joke.  Actually, what I thought was that all the construction was being done that summer, and there would be nothing left to do in subsequent summers.  Of course, I was wrong -- every summer since then they have found something to work on, and I guess this year it is the sidewalks.  I'm starting to sound like those perpetual complainers over at AAIO!

Living in Tornadoland

One of the differences between living in Los Angeles and in the Midwest is that, while in Los Angeles we lived with the constant yet vague threat of earthquakes, here we have the pretty real threat of tornados beginning every year in May.  I say threat because Ann Arbor, being located in a river valley (it just occurs to me that this is probably a good explanation for all the hills), is largely protected.  In the time that I have been here, although there have been several tornado warnings, and I have heard the sirens many times, we have never actually been hit.  The worst that has ever happened was that I once had to spend an hour in the basement of the campus gym waiting for one to pass while it rained sheets outside and the sky turned green.  But then it veered off in another direction and we could all get back to our workouts.

But the threat is real, so every year at work at the beginning of May we have a tornado drill.  For some reason they don't use any kind of audible alarm in the building to signal a tornado (possibly because the city already has a siren and possibly because people might think it was a fire and go outside, which is NOT the thing to do in a tornado).  So for the drill, someone sends an email to all, and then monitors wearing orange armbands walk through the building, informing everyone who didn't get the email.  This annual drill happened on Thursday, when I was in an all-day meeting involving about ten guests from several different countries.  Being in a meeting, we didn't get the email, but when the orange armband lady came around, we were a bit puzzled.  Did we really have to evacuate?  After all, most of the people in that room didn't work in the building and wouldn't be there in the case of a real tornado, unless it happened this week. But we dutifully left our meeting room, and walked down three flights of stairs to the basement, with the international guests asking questions about tornados the whole way.  When we got to the basement, we learned that the drill had been a false alarm -- it was only for the OTHER building our organization uses, not ours.  So we turned around and went back up, and joked about tornados the rest of the day.  When the real dril happened, we just stayed put.

The Hills of Ann Arbor

I never noticed just how hilly Ann Arbor is until I started running outside.  Considering the fact that my main mode of transportation ever since I moved here (nearly seven years ago!) has been walking, I'm truly surprised that I never noticed the hills.  I guess that means that I was already in pretty good walking shape.  Running, though, is a whole different story.  The first few times I ran outside, I kept wondering, "where did all these hills come from?"  And also, "this is the Midwest; isn't it supposed to be flat?"  David has a three-mile (with an optional fourth) running route from our house that he used to do several times a week.  Occasionally we would walk the route together, and a couple of weeks ago we tried running it together.  I say "tried" because the hills totally did me in.  I started walking on a particularly steep one, and just kept walking the rest of the way.  After that, I mapped out my own three-mile running route that is almost completely flat.  But that route must cover just about the only flat part of town, because as soon as I tried adding mileage, I found myself on hills again!  As I do them, though, they are starting to get a bit less hard (I won't call them easy!), and last weekend David and I successfully did his route together.  When I first realized just how hilly Ann Arbor is, I cursed the town for it.  But I guess this way it will take a lot longer for me to get bored!

Duffel Bags

Around 9:30am Saturday, I was enjoying a quiet morning in my living room chair, practicing my new addiction, when I heard loud burping outside.  I peered out the window and saw a man standing on the grassy strip between the street and sidewalk of our house, with two duffel bags at his feet.  He didn't appear homeless or dangerous (though he probably was drunk, what with the burping), so I went back to my puzzle, and pretty soon the burping stopped.  A few hours later, David got up, went outside, and came back to ask me if I knew anything about the two duffel bags on our lawn.  I looked out again and, sure enough, the burping man was gone, but his bags were still there.  We figured he would be back for them before too long and went on with our day. 

By 6pm, however, the bags were still there, and we noticed that they had luggage tags on them with a name, address, and phone number, so I called the number on the tags.  I got voice mail, and left a message: "Hi, I just wanted to let you know that your duffel bags are sitting in front of <insert address here>.  You probably knew that already, but I also wanted to tell you that if they aren't gone soon, I'm going to call the police."

The guy called back right away, saying that he didn't know anything about the bags, and asked where <address> is.  I replied "Ann Arbor," (the address on his luggage tags was in Plymouth) and he seemed quite puzzled.  I described the bags to him, and described the man I had last seen with the bags, and he said that the bags must belong to his son, though he offered no explanation for why hi son would have left bags in front of my house.  He said he would call his son, and that was the end of the conversation.  David and I left shortly for a graduation party, and when we returned the bags were gone and I had a message from the guy saying he had picked them up, but with no further explanation.

At some point along the way, David asked me why strange stuff like this always happens to me.  When he said "like this," he was referring to the cars that have been abandoned in front of our house that we have had to have towed, or the time a car parked in front of our house was hemhorraging gasoline and we had to call the fire department.  As far as I can tell, these things didn't just happen to me, though maybe he thinks they wouldn't happen if I weren't here...

Small World

Yesterday, David and I went to the new Arthur Miller Theater to see the UM School of Music's production of You Never Can Tell by George Bernard Shaw.  The play was fantastic, and it was fun to check out the new theater.  This morning I was at the gym, doing my knee exercises, and saw a very familiar-looking person out of the corner of my eye.  It took me a minute to place him, but then I realized he was one of the actors from the play.  Of course, I knew that in a university production, all of the actors are students.  I think there is just something about seeing them on stage that gives them an air of celebrity, so when I then see them walking around the gym in shorts, it feels like something from the pages of Us Magazine.

Snow Record

We did indeed get that snowfall on Friday that the weather reports had been promising -- a good six inches at least, which put us over the record for snowiest winter ever.  The previous record snowy winter was only three years ago, 2004-2005.  This means two things: first, that I have been in Ann Arbor for the two snowiest winters ever (yay me!); and second, that when people say it used to snow more when they were kids, they are just wrong.  This is something I have been hearing ever since I moved here, from just about everything, and I believed it because it goes along with the grand narrative of global warming: it is warmer now, so it snows less.  But I recently started to doubt the veracity of this statement for a couple of reasons.  To begin with, I noticed that summers don't seem as hot as when I was a kid.  This probably doesn't mean that the climate is getting cooler, just that I'm less sensitive to temperature changes now than I was as a kid.  The same is probably true for people's perceptions of snow.  Second, when you are smaller, the snow naturally seems bigger.  A one-foot snowfall is 1/5 to 1/6 of the average adult's height, but when you are only three feet tall, that is 1/3 of your height!  Third, as David pointed out, time goes by a lot slower when you are a kid, so one snow day might feel like a week in kid time.  These new record snowy years still could be caused by global warming (er, "climate change"), but the climate just doesn't change in straightforward ways.

Driving Around in "The CaR-V"

While David's parents are wintering in Florida, we are babysitting their Honda CR-V, which David has affectionately nicknamed The CaR-V (pronounced "carve," with heavy emphasis on the r).  We didn't use it that much at first, especially since David seemed to have some trouble turning it on, but since it has been an exceptionally snowy winter, we have pretty much started using The CaR-V as our main vehicle because it has all-wheel drive.  The CaR-V has now taken us to all of our favorite places -- the gym, the Korean barbecue, the airport, Whole Foods, and Costco, and it is getting accustomed to our routes.  But although we have now taken full advantage of having The CaR-V, we still haven't really taken advantage of the fact that we have two cars -- our poor GTI just sits in the driveway feeling neglected!

Just When I Think It Can't Get Colder

It seems that every time I leave town, I return to even more wintery weather.   As soon as I got back from my brief trip to New Jersey, the weather turned, as David put it, "scary cold."  One morning last week he even called me to make sure I had gotten to work safely.  Over the weekend, though, it warmed up and the snow melted.  I thought the worst was over.  Then this morning I woke up at 4am to gusts of wind that felt like they might just blow our house down (we have flood insurance, but I'm not sure if we are covered for wind).  By 5am, when our local NPR station gives the first weather report of the morning, I was awake and anxious to hear it.  The forecast?  High of ten degrees with windchills down to fourteen below.  I knew I wasn't going to make it to the gym this morning, so I did what I could at home (bicep curls with two-liter soda bottles, etc.) and walked straight in to work.  When I first left my house, it didn't seem so bad, and I thought that maybe we hadn't reached today's low yet.  But by the time I got across the street, I had begun to fear I wouldn't make it at all.  I don't think I have ever been quite that cold, and I don't think the walk to work has ever felt so long.  When I got here, I just had to check, and sure enough, it was true: fourteen below.  This time, though, I hadn't returned from a trip, so I'll blame my mother-in-law, who flew home from Florida last night!

Election Day?

Today is Primary Day here in Michigan, though you might not know it if you don't live here, since the Democratic Party is pretty much boycotting it.  Only two candidates are on our ballot (neither of them is the one I would vote for and only one a viable option) and write-ins won't be counted.  Not that the vote counts for much anyway -- the DNC has refused to seat Michigan's delegates at the convention.  Things are slightly better for Republicans, as they still get half of their delegates, and the candidates are at least paying attention to us and actively courting votes in Michigan.  So I pretty much have four options today:

1. Vote for the one viable candidate on the Democratic ballot
2. Vote "uncommitted," which is basically just a vote against the abovementioned candidate
3. Vote for the best Republican candidate
4. Vote for the least electable Republican candidate

Option 4 is definitely out -- that just seems too underhanded.  I was leaning toward option 3 until I saw this candidate speak on Sunday.  I think I had been enchanted by the popular perception of him as the most liberal Republican candidate, but when I heard him speak it became clear that he is very much a Republican.  I was tempted to go with option 1 -- even though this candidate isn't my top choice, I appreciate the fact that she is on the ballot -- but I realized that in order to save my husband's soul (long story), I need to go with option 2.

David, on the other hand, is excited about casting his vote.  He even got to shake hands with Joe Lieberman yesterday, who was in Ann Arbor campaigning for David's favorite candidate.  I have never before been so unsure of how to cast my vote, and I have never before felt like my vote has counted for so little!