New Years

I'm not a big fan of the New Years holiday. I think it's ridiculous. What do people do for New Years? They stay up so they can "celebrate" that split second when we can get a new calender. What else was significant about Monday night this week? Nothing. If you want something to celebrate, see my post on the winter solstice, that has some significance.

I know, New Years isn't only about staying up until midnight and celebrating the new calender, it's about starting anew, with a new year ahead of you. I'm going to let you in on a little secret. You can "celebrate" March 12 and make the appropriate changes and see how you perform until March 11 of the next year. The same is true for any day of the year. It's really not any different, except if you make the changes in your life that you feel that you need to make throughout the year, you are far more apt to develop into the person that you want to be. Oh and it's easier to remember January 1 than it is to remember March 12, but that is really of little significance since most New Years resolutions don't make it past March 12.

So I am not a fan of New Years... maybe I would like it better if I drank. I guess I'll never know.

Some people may say it's the new year that spurred the idea, and maybe it was, but I've been thinking about my blog. This upcoming semester I will have more free time than I did last semester, so I would like to write more regularly. I think I want to write daily on week days. That sounds great, but what in the world will I write about? Here's the thing; I would be willing to bet that most people really don't care what I did today. My goal with this blog is not to keep a journal, my goal is to keep up on my informal writing skills. I spend lots of time writing really boring scientific manuscripts and I think it is important to maintain the ability to communicate with real people that have better things to do with their time than read boring scientific papers.

OK, so I want to write informally, but I also don't want to write about nothing. Still nobody cares about what I did today, so what should I write about. When I started this blog, I named it "Sans Auto" partly because I just sold my car and was depending far more on other forms of transportation, and partly because Fatty had a great blog on bikes and I wanted to be like him. I ran into a couple of problems... 1) He's a far better writer than I am. 2) Riding my bike everyday has become the norm and I don't have much more to write about without copying verbatim from Fatty's site. I would also like to add that it's not bad. I really don't feel that I'm missing out on anything and not having a car actually brings much more to my life than it detracts from it.

That's where I'm trying to go with the blog. My family is trying to live without many things (car, television, TP, etc), but really I don't want to write about doing without, I want to write about what it brings to my life and how it helps my family. As we do without, we are far from deprived. I would call it liberated and free. --Oh, and I"m going to try and post more pictures.

So there's my plan. Now I'm going to spend the weekend trying to come up with something to write about on Monday.

New Years

147,090, that was the mileage on the van on January 1, 2007. Today, the mileage on the van was 152,544. Yes, I'll do the math for you, blogs are not designed to make the reader think, so I'll do that part. 5,454 miles, including a ~1500 mile trip to Arizona to visit my mom and go hiking. I was shooting for less than 100 miles a week because I wanted to ride more miles commuting than we put on the van. We were over the 100 miles per week, but I would estimate that I ride between 5500-6000 miles a year for my commute. That takes into account the fact that there are many weeks where I don't ride to school. Like this week that I have off, and last week. It also takes into account days that I take the bus because of icy roads.

I started the New Year off right, I went on my second annual New Years day Squaw Peak Hill Climb. Squaw Peak is the local "make out point" (I've never been there for that purpose, in fact, I've never been up there in a car) and the road is closed in the winter. Snowmobiles still go up there, and they keep the snow packed down a little, but otherwise it's not well traveled in the winter. On New Years Day Fatty organizes a ride up there and I like to attend. I must admit that last year was much better for me. This year I just couldn't get going on the snow, so I ended up walking about half the time. In fact I didn't even make it to the top, I turned around when everyone else started heading down (I was probably .5-1 mile from the top). On a certain level I felt that I should have been embarrassed about my performance, I really did not ride well. Actually I didn't "ride" much at all, I pushed my bike up a lot of the hill.

Even worse than walking my bike up most of the climb, was walking my bike most of the way down the hill as well. I have two major weaknesses in cycling. First, I am tentative. I am not a daredevil and I get nervous when I get going faster than I feel comfortable, and that's not very fast. This is especially a problem off road because I don't spend a lot of time off road. Second, I don't have great bike handling skills. Sure, I can track stand forever, but when it comes to picking a line on a descent, I am not good at it. The combination of these two major weaknesses is that I am REALLY slow coming down hills, especially off road (or on a road covered with a couple feet of snow). So by the time I got back to the bottom, most of the others had already left.

I think I just made it sound like a bad experience. It wasn't. In fact, I don't think I would change a thing. I was able to enjoy the solitude of the outdoors. On several occasions while I was climbing the hill, I stopped and enjoyed the absolute silence. What is it about snow that makes the silence so much more intense? I also got to a few overlooks where I could see the city below and the Utah Lake which looked to be frozen all the way across. It was really pretty up there. And my feet were warm. That was a highlight, there's nothing like being out in the snow and having warm feet.

Happy New Years