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Getting Better & the Ballad of a New Bike
May. 20th, 2014 09:52 amThings have been feeling a bit lighter the last few days. I even came to work Monday morning and smiled, instead of sequestering myself away in the corner and hissing every time someone dared walk too loudly. I'm still a bit bristly around one particular person, but at least I'm not incoherently annoyed with everyone.
I think it's a combination of exercising more, breathing more, avoiding chocolate (;.;), and finally putting our past two TTC negatives behind. I'm still putting the pieces of what my life should be back together, starting with a wee bit of meditation and a whole lot of breathing room.
Also reprioritizing writing, since I am SO FAR BEHIND. I have 10k left to edit and I'm pushing through to get that done this week. My new deadline is June, but I am being clever and allowing myself to move that back if I feel the current draft needs more tweaks.
It's amazing how often I run up against the same walls in life. I get depressed and stop writing, then I get depressed because I'm not writing. When I start writing again, suddenly I feel much better. When I'm consistent with it, I'm so much happier. When I'm inconsistent, the demons settle in. I know I can't be inconsistent - and yet I still slip up. I know it's a long, slow process, but then I get frustrated when it takes more than a month, two months.
Every. Single. Time.
Maybe one of these days I'll learn. Or one of these days I'll simply be kinder to myself.
In other news, TTC is stopped until next cycle. We figured taking this one off would be wise, considering how weird everything has been. This is also assuming the next one isn't going to be weird, which could happen. So far everything feels normal again... but my feelings have been off before.
To distract myself from tracking symptoms, I've been instead focusing on minimalism in our home and lives, trying to pare things done before baby and/or moving. I like to think I'm pretty good at avoiding stuff, yet it still feels like we have a lot of it. In a way, this is also to help us save money by both rediscovering things we could use, repurposing other things, and selling some of the rest.
In that light, I determined that finally having a functioning bicycle was, in fact, a minimalist endeavor. Keyword: functioning. I've had a defunct bike for the past three years now, taking up space in my office and continually reminding me that I made mistakes. My parents shipped it out to me from their place waaay back when we moved here and I somehow switched the pedals up when I put it together. This resulted in the stripping away of the interior of one crank arm while I biked back and forth to my new job as a (wait-for-it) bike builder. The pedal fell off one time when I got to work and refused to go back on. Well, no wonder.
Since then I've replaced the crank arm and the pedal myself and paid a bike shop to repair it. No dice. Each time the bike worked for a ride or two, then the pedal would start wonking and threatening to fall off. The bike shop which fixed it closed within a month of the repair, otherwise I would have brought it back. Faced with those failures, I couldn't convince myself to try again, so the bike just sat unused, taking up space and mocking me. I really wanted a working bike, but all I had was a defunct one. I couldn't get a new one when I still had one I'd put all that time and effort into. Maybe I'd fix it one day.
Right?
Finally I realized that it just wasn't going to happen and that I was laboring under the sunk costs fallacy. I might have sunk too much money into that bike's repairs, money I didn't want going to waste, but at the same time that bike was continuing to suck money from me just sitting there, unused. If I had a functioning bike, I thought, we could cut down on gas. We could bike to the grocery store, to our garden, to the chickens. Now that a majority of our friends all live within a block of each other, we could bike to them. We live in a really good, bikeable area and we weren't taking advantage of it because of my stupid, nonfunctional bike.
That needed to change.
It would cost money initially, but I figured we would easily save that much in gas over the coming year. I thought about it for a while, did some calculations, then began researching online for what I should look for and what I should expect, costs-wise. And wow - bikes are a shit ton more expensive than they were growing up. Holy cow.
I narrowed down the local shops to three I wanted to try and we went to the first one Saturday morning after weightlifting. The shop had good reviews and right away we spotted a few bikes outside that were on sale and pretty close to our price range. Within a few more minutes the owner had shown us two more and I fell in love with the second. I walked out of that first shop with an unexpected bike.
It's a beautiful aluminum hybrid with 21 gears and an upright stance. She looks a bit like this, but with a brown seat and grips. She was also quite a bit less than that listing. O.o
So far, I love my new bike. I still feel a spike of panic when I think too hard about the money spent, but in the end it will be worth it. And granted, I've been feeling a spike of panic when we buy groceries lately, so I think I'm just super sensitive about money right now. We've biked to the garden and we've bike to Doug's and I keep asking Lady if she just wants to go for a bike ride in the morning. So far: no. But we'll see. :)
I think it's a combination of exercising more, breathing more, avoiding chocolate (;.;), and finally putting our past two TTC negatives behind. I'm still putting the pieces of what my life should be back together, starting with a wee bit of meditation and a whole lot of breathing room.
Also reprioritizing writing, since I am SO FAR BEHIND. I have 10k left to edit and I'm pushing through to get that done this week. My new deadline is June, but I am being clever and allowing myself to move that back if I feel the current draft needs more tweaks.
It's amazing how often I run up against the same walls in life. I get depressed and stop writing, then I get depressed because I'm not writing. When I start writing again, suddenly I feel much better. When I'm consistent with it, I'm so much happier. When I'm inconsistent, the demons settle in. I know I can't be inconsistent - and yet I still slip up. I know it's a long, slow process, but then I get frustrated when it takes more than a month, two months.
Every. Single. Time.
Maybe one of these days I'll learn. Or one of these days I'll simply be kinder to myself.
In other news, TTC is stopped until next cycle. We figured taking this one off would be wise, considering how weird everything has been. This is also assuming the next one isn't going to be weird, which could happen. So far everything feels normal again... but my feelings have been off before.
To distract myself from tracking symptoms, I've been instead focusing on minimalism in our home and lives, trying to pare things done before baby and/or moving. I like to think I'm pretty good at avoiding stuff, yet it still feels like we have a lot of it. In a way, this is also to help us save money by both rediscovering things we could use, repurposing other things, and selling some of the rest.
In that light, I determined that finally having a functioning bicycle was, in fact, a minimalist endeavor. Keyword: functioning. I've had a defunct bike for the past three years now, taking up space in my office and continually reminding me that I made mistakes. My parents shipped it out to me from their place waaay back when we moved here and I somehow switched the pedals up when I put it together. This resulted in the stripping away of the interior of one crank arm while I biked back and forth to my new job as a (wait-for-it) bike builder. The pedal fell off one time when I got to work and refused to go back on. Well, no wonder.
Since then I've replaced the crank arm and the pedal myself and paid a bike shop to repair it. No dice. Each time the bike worked for a ride or two, then the pedal would start wonking and threatening to fall off. The bike shop which fixed it closed within a month of the repair, otherwise I would have brought it back. Faced with those failures, I couldn't convince myself to try again, so the bike just sat unused, taking up space and mocking me. I really wanted a working bike, but all I had was a defunct one. I couldn't get a new one when I still had one I'd put all that time and effort into. Maybe I'd fix it one day.
Right?
Finally I realized that it just wasn't going to happen and that I was laboring under the sunk costs fallacy. I might have sunk too much money into that bike's repairs, money I didn't want going to waste, but at the same time that bike was continuing to suck money from me just sitting there, unused. If I had a functioning bike, I thought, we could cut down on gas. We could bike to the grocery store, to our garden, to the chickens. Now that a majority of our friends all live within a block of each other, we could bike to them. We live in a really good, bikeable area and we weren't taking advantage of it because of my stupid, nonfunctional bike.
That needed to change.
It would cost money initially, but I figured we would easily save that much in gas over the coming year. I thought about it for a while, did some calculations, then began researching online for what I should look for and what I should expect, costs-wise. And wow - bikes are a shit ton more expensive than they were growing up. Holy cow.
I narrowed down the local shops to three I wanted to try and we went to the first one Saturday morning after weightlifting. The shop had good reviews and right away we spotted a few bikes outside that were on sale and pretty close to our price range. Within a few more minutes the owner had shown us two more and I fell in love with the second. I walked out of that first shop with an unexpected bike.
It's a beautiful aluminum hybrid with 21 gears and an upright stance. She looks a bit like this, but with a brown seat and grips. She was also quite a bit less than that listing. O.o
So far, I love my new bike. I still feel a spike of panic when I think too hard about the money spent, but in the end it will be worth it. And granted, I've been feeling a spike of panic when we buy groceries lately, so I think I'm just super sensitive about money right now. We've biked to the garden and we've bike to Doug's and I keep asking Lady if she just wants to go for a bike ride in the morning. So far: no. But we'll see. :)
