Another Saturday night

Tonight I came in after my bath to find that Dog One had once again managed to overturn the kitchen garbage and strewn it halfway across the house. (I knew it wasn't my dog, because he's afraid to put his head under the sink ... plus, he'd been lying on his cushion next to me on the deck the whole time I was in the tub.) I had thought I'd gotten myself relaxed, regrounded and repacified after a stressful and unpleasant afternoon, but when I saw the garbage everywhere—including five or six rotten peaches that were black and disintegrating with mold—I lost it. I yelled and smacked him on the ass, hard, with the book I happened to be holding at the time: Living Buddha, Living Christ, by Thich Nhat Hanh.

Nice choice of items to beat a helpless old dog with, eh? Maybe some people might think I'm being too hard on myself for losing my temper for five whole seconds, especially since this is the third (possibly fourth) time he's done this, this week alone. But I feel like by this time in my life I should be better at keeping my equilibrium. After all, it's at least partially my own fault for not having secured the garbage better. Also, I'm disappointed in myself—all my highfalutin talk about patience, kindness, nonviolence, etc. flies right out the window the second anything disturbs my fragile peace of mind. (It flies back in again eventually, of course.)

I guess I'm a little on edge lately. Everything feels so apocalyptic. I find myself wanting to obsess about it, wanting to rant a bit, and then feeling unable to follow through. It seems pointless to go into any kind of detail. For one thing, as I've already said, I don't think things are any worse now than they've ever been before. For another, even if they are, there's nothing new that I could do about it now that I haven't been able to do all along anyway. The best thing I can do when I start falling into doom & gloom is to gently bring my attention back to positive thoughts of things I can actually do something about. Like getting a trash can with a dog-proof lid, for example.

Moving on ...

One positive thing that's been happening lately is that I'm getting into a comfortable routine with the bike riding. I'm riding to work every day now, and riding home two or three nights a week. The other nights I meet the boyfriend for dinner or meetings or other things, and we take the bike home in the back of the truck. All this translates into about eight 20-minute workouts per week, which I realize is not huge, but is still a big change from what I was doing before (basically, nothing).

At some point I will probably get some kind of heart rate monitor or in some other way start trying to keep track of exactly how much exercise I'm really doing—maybe a bicycle computer to track miles, or something. Although I think the heart monitor would be a more accurate gauge, since the ride downtown is easier than the ride back, even though the mileage and the time are the same.

I've started taking 1000 mg of vitamin C with my other supplements, hoping to improve my iron absorption. I'm taking 648 mg of iron every day (as per my last doctor's instructions), in addition to whatever's in the multivitamin I happen to take that day—I have a few different kinds. My diet is already pretty good, I think. My biggest challenge there is the old pasteup table at my office, which has found a new life as Snack Central, the place where everyone in the building goes to drop off all things edible. Friday, for instance, there was a bag of sesame honey cashews, apple cake with caramel sauce, lemon scones, these deep fried powdered sugar things from the Portuguese restaurant, a bag with six assorted donuts, an orange bread loaf thingie, and two pizzas. Oh, and a canister of Ghirardelli chocolate drops. This table is only about ten feet from where I sit and I have been exercising enormous self control in limiting myself to one treat per day, except on days (and there have been several of them lately) when I don't have time to go to lunch, in which case I've been known to have ... let's just say, more than one.

Back to the bike for a moment: It'll be interesting to see how my routine changes when it starts getting cold and dark and rainy. I was talking to a friend last night who's a hardcore bike activist and was surprised to hear him say, "Yeah, it does kind of suck when it storms." True, he is twenty years older than me ... but he's also in a billion times better shape I am, and much more accustomed to riding in all kinds of conditions. If it's hard for him, how will I handle it?

The thought of not having to buy another car right away inspires me to at least want to try, even if it means leaving earlier in the morning so I have time to get dried off and cleaned up before I have to start working, and taking a longer (safer) route home when it's dark. I'm surprised at how much I want to Not own a car right now; until very recently I've always considered it kind of essential. No doubt I would feel differently if I didn't even have access to a car ... but I do, and it makes me realize that that is what I really want: access to transportation, not ownership of a car. I feel blessed that for me right now, those two things do not have to be synonymous. Blessed, and also kind of proud. I've deliberately designed my life to be low impact, and this is one of the benefits. In the last seven days, I've ridden in a car two times for five minutes each, and driven once for about eight minutes. Other than that, all my travels have been by bike or on foot. That feels pretty good.