Hills are Fun! (the 5 stages of bicycling)

11.09 am

Denial: No way am I getting back on that bike.

Anger: %@#! this bike!

Bargaining: Just let me make it up this hill.

Depression: I ride so poorly, what's the poing?

Acceptance: Hills are fun! I wonder if this is like runner's high...


11.24 am

I went for a ride yesterday, after sitting at the desk copy editing for eight hours. The plan was to take a spin around town and start to learn where everything is, so that I don't end up so hopelessly lost every time I leave the house. Instead, I ended up biking along Seven Hill Road and then to Lake Chabot. I discovered that hills are kinda fun, especially if there's a bunch of them in a row. Getting up the first one took work, but after that I could coast downhill and use that speed to get almost all the way to the top of the next hill. It reminded me of that golf-ball room in the Children's Museum in Boston - the one where you climb up the stairs, start your ball on the top of the wooden track, and try to drop it so that it makes it over all the hills into the milk crate at the bottom of the run.

6.05 pm.

I woke up this morning to an explosion of cilantro. We had started seeds in one of those little greenhouses, then transplanted the basil, thyme, and watercress to a window box and the tomato to a pot of its own. Then we put down more seeds (especially watercress and coriander, since those hadn't done well at all in the greenhouse). The watercress has been shyly poking its head up for the past two days, but the coriander/cilantro was nowhere to be seen until this morning. Overnight, six or seven shoots came up, and more have come up today, growing so fast I could almost hear them. I wasn't sure any were going to survive, as I had placed the window box on the front porch, where a squirrel found it and happily dug up all the seeds.

It has been an interesting summer. I use interesting in the same sense I would use it if you told me you were going to open a "muffin bottom" shop and wanted to know what I thought. Interesting. We leave the Berkeley house on Thursday. I have mixed feelings about that. One the one hand, I'll miss being so close to school, and the house is gorgeous. On the other, I won't miss waking up at 5am every morning to feed the dogs.

Work is going wonderfully, although since I'm not sure exactly what parts of it I can talk about, I won't talk about any of it at all. Suffice it to say that I am working on a wonderfully challenging memo interspersed with more academic types of things like syllabus writing and article editing. I also got a chance to go to a conference in Dallas, where I met a young lawyer from Argentina who knows several languages and runs a small printing press, a few grads from Boalt who lead eerily parallel lives, and a professor who decided to get into teaching because she realized halfway through a litigation that the case, although intellectually fascinating, was going to lead to the bankruptcy of a developing country. Which proves that not all lawyers are sellouts for the big money (something I was beginning to wonder about).