Glen Lewis

Today I woke up around 5, ate some of my pizza from yesterday and went back to bed. Woke up again around 9 and ate the last of the pizza before hitting the road.

Oh, I followed a passage from the Bible of Heidi, Book of Cycling 1:1: “Thou shalt have breakfast before cycling.” I also followed 1:2, “Thou shalt eat often.” I violated 1:3, though, “Thou shalt stop for lunch.”

Instead I just stopped every 45-60 minutes, ate a food bar, drank some sugar water, waited 5-10 minutes and took off again. I find that when I stop to eat I have a hard time getting started again.

I finally got out of the room around 10ish.  Jim had the room across the hall and it was already being cleaned so he clearly left before I did.  I’ve no idea how much earlier though.  I only have a bit over 250 miles left to San Fran.  There’s no rush with 6-7 days of cycling left, so I figured I’d take it easy.

I stopped every 45 to 60 minutes to eat a food bar, drink some Gatorade or whatever it was, use the bathroom, wait five or ten minutes and then get back on the road.  I didn’t want to take the time to stop for lunch and I didn’t want to have to get started again; I do best if I just keep going.

I saw Jim just an hour our two out.  He caught up with me and we laughed about it.  He thinks he left the hotel just minutes before me.  He stopped at a bike shop and I wandered through town.  With the Garmin and the ACA maps being very different so it’s funny how close we were to the same place.  He joked that he’d recognize my panniers (pronunciation stressed) anywhere.  We only rode for a short while, then I followed the Garmin route while jim followed the ACA route.
That just makes it more humorous since we linked up again about an hour later when our paths converged.  I was just finishing one of my short breaks as he was coming down the road.  It was pretty funny.  We parted ways again, still going to the same place but opting for different routes.  I didn’t see him again.

I rode into Ferndale but didn’t feel like stopping at any of the places for food, so I found a park, used the bathroom, filed up my water bottles and poured in Gatorade mix, ready to hit the road again.  I was only going to go another 10 or 20 miles but just couldn’t find any place I liked.  Leaving Ferndale an older guy training for a bike race caught up with me.  We talked for just a few minutes and then he went on ahead. I trailed him by about a hundred yards for ten miles.
He turned around and headed back to town while I continued on.

I got to a place I thought I’d stay for the night but the guy wanted $65 for a room and I just didn’t feel like paying that.   I went across the street to stock up on food in case I ended up camping, but the prices were highway robbery. They wanted $1.65 for a small candy bar. I figured I could do a lot better than that and so continued on.  Only about five miles further I found a local grocery store which was quite reasonable.  I stocked up on enough food for a couple days, had two ice cream bars and headed out.  There were several candidate camping locations but each of the ones I looked at was over priced and really crappy, so I just kept going. Since I was fueling up so frequently, and possibly because of the great night’s sleep and little climbing, I was feeling pretty good all day long.

I finally ended up at Ft Meyers, a place I figured would be much further than I needed to go, but the campground is reasonable and nice, and the shower was good.  I had two packets of Ramen noodles – not great but the best I could find at the grocery store on the way here.  I also had several small packets of cheese and some crackers, finished off a bag of peanut butter M&Ms.

I sent a couple of emails off, am charging the GPS and the phone and think I’ll read for a while on my Nook, whose battery will probably die soon.  My food is hanging up so hopefully the raccoons and everything else will leave it alone and I’ll have breakfast tomorrow. I’m expecting rain tonight so the fly is on the tent.  If the weather is bad I might just spend an extra day here…we’ll see.

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Well, it’s been a few months since I finished my bike tour. I’ve done a little bit of running, a little bit of cycling, lots of drumming and piano and the smallest amount of weight lifting (think: strength training due to osteoporosis, not "Glen wants to be a body builder").

But with my first marathon only 5 months away I think it’s time to start working out regularly again. I’ve been building up the callouses on my feet for the barefoot running thing and ride hard on the bike for an hour or so every few days so it’s not like I’ve been playing couch potato, but I’m going to have to stop the 2 am bedtime.

The parenting schedule for time with my son means early morning and alternate weekends are when I’ll get my training in. Can you say 5 am? We’ll see how long this lasts!

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Ok, I finally have the video of the barn falling over.  Enjoy!

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We had a wind storm come through a couple weekends ago and there’s still a mess to clean up.  I can’t really do much with my barn until the insurance adjuster comes and checks it out and that’s not scheduled until December 27th.  But I needed some time outside and it’s a nice day so I figured I can at least clean up some of the branches that are cluttering up the back yard.  I finally got my phone camera working again (just had to uninstall enough stuff until the offending one was gone) so I’ve taken some photos.

I still haven’t been able to trim the video of the barn collapsing yet.  I can play it back but it’s 45 minutes long and none of the video tools I have for editing recognize the file type.  It’s from an older hard-drive based video camera and although tools like VLC will play it, I haven’t been able to convert it to extract just the 15 seconds that are interesting.

But here are some photos.  I was hoping to extract the ladder that got crushed because I need to get up on the roof of the house to replace some shingles.  What do you think, should I ever try to go up on that ladder again?  Yeah, me neither.  I took a couple photos where it cracked the concrete and then looked around and noticed that it seems to be that the ladder is the only thing holding the entire barn roof up on that end.  Hmm, maybe I should vacate now.

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Several months ago I read an article about determining your exercise sweat rate to determine how much water you lose during a particular activity.  Today I decided to find out what my sweat rate was for moderate cycling.  So I weighed myself (scale goes to tenths) before getting on the bike w/ trainer, rode moderately hard for an hour and then weighed myself afterward.  I lost 2.6 lbs in that one hour.  Now, most of that will be water which is released when the fuel is burned and some of it will be for cooling me off (a neat trick we humans have).

Since water on earth (where I live) weighs about 8.3 lbs per gallon, that means I used almost a third of a gallon of water in about one hour.  Wow.  Since my bike water bottles are about 20 ounces each and a gallon has 128 fluid ounces in it, that means that to stay even with my sweat rate I need to drink a full two bottles of water every hour.  That explains why I go through so much.  It doesn’t explain why I seem to need so much more than the other riders around me.  I’ll do a 60 mile ride and go through all 6 of my water bottles *at least* once and sometimes more, and I’m not needing to urinate it out.  In fact, many times I end up feeling dehydrated after that.  But people that I will ride with will only consume one or two bottles of water for that same distance.

I don’t understand why I go through so much more.  Perhaps it’s because of my weight, because I respond to heat differently, because I am working harder than them for the same speed (heavier body and bike).  I’ll have to do this test again when I’ve lost 20-30 pounds or so and see if the sweat rate is any different.

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Are all epiphanies obvious in retrospect?  “Hindsight is 20/20″ we know, but not all hindsight invokes epiphany.

On my commute home I was allowing my mind to wander and was thinking about the events of the day.  I have so many fires that I’m usually fighting, or at least so many things that I need to deal with that I rarely have time for in-depth thought.  So that happens when I can’t be doing anything else – falling asleep, fixing meals, commuting and the like.

With my recent almost-done-divorce I’ve been directing my non-work and non-dad attention at social events.  I’ve been able to get to a few of these lately and have quite a few more planned.  (I suspect all my co-workers are happy about this; happy that I’ll turn my social brain on after work and stop bothering them about things I’ve been thinking about.)

One of the things I’ve been trying to focus on is paying attention to other people.  There are a couple in particular that I’ve been observing and a handful more that I’ve started to.  I had a tendency to evaluate myself continually and I compare what I see other’s do with how I handle myself.  And I think that with being in such small groups that I’ve isolated myself into situations where everything is predictable enough that I’m not finding massively new attributes to adopt.  Even when I’m not in small groups, I’m in groups of like-minded people and so I’m not exposed to a wide variety or diversity of thought and action.

Well, lately I have been and I’m finding a few areas that I can make dramatic improvements upon.

So I was thinking about this on the way home and it hits me like a ton of bricks – science fiction!  OK, I’ll have to tie that together for you…

I love science fiction.  I love the short stories, the novels, the collections, all of it.  I love sci-fi that’s based in the past, the future, the present.  I love sci-fi that’s heavy on advanced technology and sci-fi that’s light on technology but heavy on thought and mind-exploration.

As a kid I analyzed this and determined that the reason I loved sci-fi so much was that, as with other books, I was able to transport myself to a different world, live in the minds of different characters and that these other characters were wildly different.  It wasn’t a collection of common humans but of extraordinary beings, great technological thinkers, inventors, etc.  I felt that during a story I was actually part of it, living in the world that was laid out for the other characters there.  And after every book I considered myself to be more.  More of whatever.  More adventurous, more cautious, more empathetic to certain situations, more inventive, more persistent, etc.  I was expanding who I was by living in the minds and settings of the characters in the world of the book.

I had that thought as a young teenager and it’s never left me.  So as I’m out meeting several new people (let’s see, at least 60 people among 4 different groups, each of whom I was introduced to or heard the “who I am and why I’m here” without distraction) I”m getting this massive influx of new experience.

For example, at one of the Toastmaster meetings there were 5 different talks and every single one of them contained detailed information about the speaker.  That’s a lot of new incorporating of their experiences into my system for comparison and contrast.  There were fewer talks at the next meeting but just as many introductions and discussions.  A meetup group I attended on Monday had 30-40 people in a circle with introductions and “tell us a little about yourself” and then more than an hour of let-me-explore-who-you-are get-to-know-each-other games where a small group of 8 people I was sitting with were doing nothing except sharing details, albeit about short episodes, about their lives.  And we were supposed to be able to provide details about each person at the end of the game so that increased focused attention.  I *really* got to know a few people there.  And then there was the after-event discussion for an hour between a subset of the larger group outside of my table group.  And it goes on.

So I have this massive influx of new and incredibly diverse experience flooding at me from so many people.

It’s like eating fresh, nutritious and energy-filling food when starving.  I can’t get enough of it.

I’ve read hundreds of sci-fi books and short stories and I’ve adopted attitudes and thought patterns for different experiences from them.  But now I want to soak up the life stories of real people, those who are like me and those who are very different.

So far I’m finding that it’s making me “more”.

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I’ve started attending Toastmasters International along with some friends from work.  Today was my second visit and (along with others) was called on for a 1-2 minute impromptu talk.  Without knowing the topic ahead of time I wasn’t able to prepare.  I won’t win any awards for my talk (or be invited again soon but the topic that I was given force me to put some ideas together I hadn’t thought about before.

The topic I was given was “The Bible or the iPad”.  I had to think fast.

The idea for discussion came easily enough, I actually had it by the time I walked up to the podium.  And I’m not afraid of standing in front of groups and don’t recall any shaking.  I did notice that I spent an inordinate amount of time looking down instead of making eye contact but I’m usually pretty good at that so I think it’s because I was still formulating my thoughts or that I didn’t want to show my lack of confidence in my talk.

Here’s what I came up with.  I won’t fumble here as much as I did in front of the group; here you just get what I was thinking.  And I’ve added more here that I didn’t think about quickly enough when on my feet.

Growing up I was always taught that morality comes from religion.  I was taught that without religion people would be naturally evil.  “Religion is necessary to keep people from hurting each other”, I was told.  “Atheists are evil people, believing in nothing”, followed when the idea was pursued.

But then I fell away from religion.  Well, that’s how it’s viewed when you start there and leave.  To me, though, I escaped from the mental bonds, the traps of anti-thinking within religion.  I grew up mormon and was told very clearly (you can find this quote from the church leaders easily enough) that “when the prophet has spoken, the thinking is over”.  I was taught specifically NOT to think.

So when I finally allowed myself to think for myself I thought critically of everything I’d been indoctrinated with.  This included the teachings that atheists are so evil.  What I found surprised me.  It was the people who believe in religion that start and prolong the wars, who bilk trusting people out of their savings, who fill our prisons.  It’s religious people (not all, of course) who teach their children that they are better than everyone else and that anyone not believing like they do are evil.

And then I took some religion courses and got detailed history.  Wow.  That will change a lot; things aren’t like I was taught in Sunday school.

I’m also a crappy liar.  That factors in here.

So as I’m thinking about the topic of “Bible vs. iPad” I know I’m not going to be able to say anything nice about it.  Geez, for all I know, all but 2 of my audience members are deep religionists.  Not good.  And the iPad is a great device but I’m not so thrilled with it that I own one, so I’m not sure where to go with that.

But here’s something I’ve been thinking about and read a little on that did have some relation to both of those: that morals are not provided to society by religion, but that religion copies the morals of society.  Societal change is what drives accepted moral and ethical behavior, not religious writings or teachings.

And so by the time I got up to the podium that’s what I was going to try to express.  Except that as soon as I started forming words I realized that I was only in the “here’s some information most people won’t like” category and that I didn’t have anything positive or meaningful or predictive.  So I pushed a little bit further.  And here’s where the new thoughts came in.

If society dictates morals and fundamental religious teaching requires isolation from information and directives to deter thinking, then widespread availability and use of communication devices such as iPads, iPhones and other rich mobile devices means that isolated data fails.

If everyone was able to see everything and was willing to compare, contrast and consider what they see, then I believe there would be a fundamental shift in the moral landscape of the entire world.  I believe that an age of new enlightenment would begin.

Perhaps it already has.

—-

OK, I think I know why I blew it so badly at the Toastmasters talk.  It’s because I *still* haven’t clearly formulated this! 

I don’t have my workbooks yet but perhaps I’ll find that impromptu speaking has less to do with the mechanics of delivery and more to do with how fast one can form the structure of one’s thoughts.  I think I’m pretty good at presentation when I know what I want to say.  Perhaps mental essay formulation at speed is what I really need to work on.

Well, I do keep looking for things that are hard – found another one!

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the two co-workers I went with did quite well on their talks.

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This day was different than most. I woke to the battery backup alarms (ie. no power), found the neighborhood and the private drive my house is on covered in downed trees with other ones about to come down and Alex’s school closed for the day.

Still no power, Alex accidentally found his Christmas presents (at least the big one), shingles are missing from the roof and my barn collapsed crushing most of the stuff inside.

Oh, and there were some things at work I really needed to be there for.

Ah well, still a pretty good day!

Oh, I got video of the barn collapsing. I had been out braving the wind and surveying yard and neighborhood damage and noticed a pretty nasty lean. I knew it was going to come down so I set a video camera which could be powered by the laptop to watch it. Sure enough, a perfect shot of it getting hit by a falling tree and finally succumbing to gravity.

But I’ll have to post it later, I still don’t have power or network.

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