18 May 2012

Today was Bike to Work day. This didn’t mean so much to Gina, who has no work to bike to, nor to me, who works from home. Nevertheless, Gina celebrated the occasion with a free lunch for cyclists provided by the local Williamsburg community center, while I embraced the concept by stopping in the kitchen for a glass of water and a banana before continuing my morning commute to the home office eight feet away.

I did eventually venture out on my bicycle at the lunch hour for some fresh air and exercise. I am beginning to wonder if America’s obesity problem might be partly due to the growing number of people working from home. There are no water coolers to stand next to, no meetings to take the stairs to, no summonings by the boss requiring you to walk down the hall with anything less than a sense of urgency (that one’s for you, Mom). Just a day steeped in sedentary, like a listless lion at the zoo. I feel my bum getting wider by the second while my world shrinks. Soon, it will be only big enough to hold my bum unless I make the time, like today, to break away and take a break that involves something other than wandering back to the kitchen to see if anything new has appeared in the fridge since the last time I looked 15 minutes ago.

It was a good bike ride as far as bike rides go. It wasn’t that the weather was all that great, although I will maintain unto my deathbed that any day in Seattle without rain is a good day, and today was a day without rain. And it wasn’t all the way across the country, like Gina is about to do, a feat that makes me so green with envy and blue with heartache that Munch would mix those colors upon his palette and paint me as the Screaming Man if he were sitting by my side right now. It was the cruise ships, of course, that made the ride a good ride. I love cruise ships. I know I’ve talked about them before and there must be at least a hundred pictures of them on the computer from when we lived at the Beach House, but one can never get enough of the cruise ships. I’ve never been on one but I’ve enough photos of them that you’d think that’s all I did, vacation by cruise ship. But whatever, they lift my spirits and the sight of them improves my mood, so for that I give them a Captain’s salute and a hearty Bon Voyage!

Rather than saying goodbye, Gina is busying herself with saying Hello: TransAmmers are arriving like flies upon a carcass. Okay, maybe not the best analogy, but after watching the Grey’s Anatomy season finale last night, I have some seriously disgusting images on my mind. What Gina’s deduced thus far about her fellow roadsters: by far, she has the most hair.

Some of these TransAmmers are also blogging. In one, Gina is dubbed “a girl from Seattle”; in another, simply “Gina”. I sense much entertaining content coming.