Dining With Strangers

We went walking Sunday. It was windy but quite nice. It’s fun being in a part this time of year seeing the people struggle with how to dress - sweaters, jackets, 83 degrees and sunny.



Saturday The Wife declared she’d really like to drag The Boy 6 around the MUP in the daylight since last time it was a bit on the dark side. So the four of us did; those 20 miles put me at 169.9 miles for the week. Can I take the miles in excess of 150, apply it to last week and declare I made my goal last week?

This week I put 25 miles on my car when The Boy 11 and I visited the orthodontist. Ahh…my orthodontist experience. One of the reasons it’s amazing my parents survived me. I was this close (picture me holding my thumb and index finger closely together) to getting The Boy 11 out of school early enough to ride the tandem but couldn’t quite justify a lesson in transportation over a lesson in math.

We saw signs of fall.



I like to play with the idea of time travel – but not in the traditional sense. I like to imagine that time travel is already here in the form of our current motorized transportation. I can never get my thoughts together enough to make a complete post but check this quote out that I saw on the It’s Just A Ride Blog – When You Treat People Like Idiots, They’ll Behave Like Idiots:

“Monderman was interested in this notion that the car changed time and space…The implications are clear to any modern driver. Commute times are precisely that—times—with distance obliterated, as if we were driving across the face of a clock. Cities have essentially expanded in size to the extent that new transportation means have arisen to keep commuting times more or less stable. Pedestrians, on the other hand, who possess a more intimate knowledge of the geography they are traversing (and must provide the actual power to do so), tend to think in terms of distance.”

We also saw signs of the fall. I’m guessing this is some of the damage from Friday night’s storm. Didn’t know it stormed? I think it was a Category 3 Adolescent.



I understand there’s a certain segment of the population that believes the planet’s not worth saving because it’s going to burn up in the end anyway. I understand that a certain segment of that population believes this because they read in a book once that

“But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar: the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.”

The MinusCar Project hit the road this week when I had lunch with a guy that could name the exact place in that book of this verse. He mentioned that he’s been starting to entertain the idea that instead of the fire destroying the planet the fire cleanses it.

Seems to me that sort of thinking might cause millions of people to believe the planet has unsurpassable worth. Wouldn’t that be uhh…dare I say – cool?

I think it's also safe to say he'd never before had lunch in a nice resturant with a sweaty guy wearing a helmet.