Obstacles, Internal and External

This week: drove to work Monday-Friday, plus several other trips. Saturday ran a few errands by bike, Sunday bought produce and yarn at the HOPE Farmer's Market - in this case the singular possessive is actually correct since there was only one farm represented. Some other cool artsy stuff, but they should really just call it the HOPE Market.

I also cruised around to more artists' studios and was blown away by Fisterra; between the art (left, byJennifer Chenoweth), the lovely garden, the lovingly restored old house, and the chicken posole, I all but wept. Bussed the uphill part back home, and later used the car to get the cat food I'd forgotten. Bottom line: forty-eight hours carless, seven days bikeless. Yeesh.

So, the commute. It's only twelve miles, twenty minutes by car, an hour by bike (according to Google Maps). BUT: no bus service, narrow, shoulderless country roads, 7 a.m. arrival time (so biking in pitch black). I had my choice of start times and took the one that got me home earliest; the others would have also had biking drawbacks, either more traffic or the same dark trip reversed and at the end of the day. Maybe I'll ride the route on the Thanksgiving holiday just to say I did. (The temp assignment ends Friday but may be extended or made permanent.)

As for the after-work errands, mostly they were trips to the store on the way home and could have been done by bike, if I'd been on one in the first place. I did have one evening of extreme running-around that would have been difficult-to-impossible without a car.

Besides the daunting externals, there are the wearying internals. After last Saturday's long mosey, I was very tired Sunday, the kind of tired that leads to injuries if unheeded. Definitely need to work on endurance and just daily saddle time (if they can do it in Minneapolis, surely I can in Austin.)

And the mental struggle? Being at a new job consumed most of my psychic energy this week, as it should. The best cure for that is a long-term stable employment. At least this job has a very regular schedule; it just starts too dang early.