Bike Commute Sensations

I’ve been thinking recently about my bike ride to work, mostly after listening to this awesome podcast a friend made about commuter biking. My sister-in-law is interviewed in it, and talks about how biking made her feel more integrated with her community, because of how she commonly experienced it with all of her senses. I was thinking about this on my own ride to work this morning, and pondering what my favorite sensations are during my commute. So here they are!

Sound

There are several groups of naturalized parrots that live along Brighton where I ride, and each morning they’re always flying overhead, cawing and squawking. It feels like riding through some kind of jungle. I also love hearing crows cawing and trilling, mostly because they sound so different from the crows back in Kentucky. At night on the ride home, I love listening to the chirping crickets, though it occasionally makes me homesick for the summer katydids back home.

Scents

The world smells wonderful right now because all the flowers are blooming, so that’s a bonus. However, I must admit that my favorite bike commute scents are on the way home from work, when I pass by the homes of families cooking dinner. I feel like I’m riding through invisible wafts of mid-preparation meal scents, and I always try and guess what’s for dinner tonight at this house or that. There’s one place in particular, and I haven’t pinpointed it, that seems to frequently cook over a wood fire. The downside is that I’m usually ravenous by the time I get home.

Touch

Burbank is a great place for a bike commute. You get that mild SoCal temperature most days and it’s blissfully flat. One day recently, though, I got caught in a mild rain on my ride home. I was surprised at how peaceful the experience was, and how gentle the rain was as it fell on my skin. I think that when in a car, even light rains can seem much more noisy and foreboding than they actually are when you are outside in them.

Sights

Most of my ride takes place on Brighton, which is a quiet neighborhood street one block over from Buena Vista. I love seeing all the different styles of houses and how they keep their gardens. My favorites are the ones with proper desert yards filled with pebbles and yucca and cacti. I’m also still delighted by the common sight of citrus trees in front yards, limbs heavy and drooping with ripe fruit. I really do live in a beautiful place.

So, has my bike commute made me feel more connected to my community? Maybe! It certainly has made me appreciate the beauty I get to experience every day, and what a lovely place Burbank can be.

Walk musings

When Mr. Davis and I go on our walks, we sometimes spend most of it standing idly next to parked vehicles while Davis sniffs them. He has a fascination for license plates and bumpers, and will drain away the minutes sniffing and sniffing with deep intensity. Then we’ll move on to the next car and he’ll repeat the process. I thought this might have been a quirk particular to Davis, but when leaving work tonight I noticed one of the local feral cats strolling through the parking lot doing the same thing. The kitty was so intently sniffing a license plate that it didn’t even notice my approach, which is unusual for the ferals since they tend to be wary and keep away from people.

What is it that they are smelling? What is so compelling a scent that gets stuck to car bumpers? Squished bugs, perhaps? Do dogs do this? Mysterious.

Meanwhile, I’ve started using the time on our walks to practice standing with good posture. It is…difficult. I’ve found that when I stand upright without slouching and hold the position for any length of time that it becomes painful to breath. Maybe this will get better with time and when my back muscles strengthen, depending on if I can keep this up.

Ants and Aphids

There’s a short wall behind my apartment complex where Mr. Davis likes to perch, and there’s often a line of ants coming and going up and over it that I like to watch.  Today, as I watched the ant line disappear under some ivy, something caught my eye.  It was several ants tending diligently to a flock of aphids!

Now, I’d known before about the relationship between ants and aphids, and seen it before on nature shows, but somehow stumbling upon it in my back yard made the phenomenon 100% more awesome.  I watched with wonder as the ants harvested honeydew from their aphid herd in wee little droplets.  Nearby, a large group of baby aphids was clustered on an ivy stem under the shelter of a leaf.  At the base of the stem, two ants were just hanging out, which was weird to see as one tends to encounter ants on the go.  Guard duty, I suppose.

Meanwhile, during my observation, Mr. Davis had hopped down and found where the line of ants picked up through the grass.  He was lapping them up by the tongueful.

Church trap

Every morning on my way to work, I pass a little church on Buena Vista which, like many little churches, has a sign out front with a new message every week. This place, however, has the most bizarre, quippy, and humorous messages I've ever seen on a church sign. It's to the point where I eagerly look forward to passing it, to see what weird or witty message is up.

Some favorites:

"I love the smell of chaos in the morning"

"It's not about the shoes"

"Avoid churches" (which was followed by a bible verse, Matthew, I think, I cant recall it)

I'm intrigued to the point that I might stop in one Sunday and see if the sermons are as snarky as the board sign.

Brainz!

I noticed a weird thing that my brain did the other day...

I was at the animal shelter, and went into one of the cat colony rooms to work on cat socialization (read: petting and snuggling). The cat colony rooms are setup to be like a living room of sorts: a couch, coffee table, some tables, and an abundance of cat trees and toys and hidey holes. This is where they keep cats who enjoy being around other cats.

Anyway, as I sat down to join one of the cats lounging on the couch, I noticed my brain processing information in a particular way, and I found it rather interesting.

When I looked at the cat, I realized "that cat has three legs." But, I noticed that it took me until I sat down beside him for several moments before I'd registered *which* of the three legs he was missing.

I find this kind of bizarre. It wasn't as though I thought "there is something different about that cat" and then after a bit of observation noticed he was missing a leg. No, my brain processed the fact of his three-leggedness all in one go, but it took extra time to notice the specific of which leg was missing. I recall that I even spent several moments looking at his hind legs to find the missing leg before seeing that it was one of his forelegs.

Is this not a strange ability? Maybe it is similar to reading - how I tend to process text in big chunks at a time before actually seeing their individual components.

Or maybe I just think too much.

As an aside, the three-legged cat was very friendly and snuggly and seemed perfectly at home with only having three legs.

Results of the Sleepathon

So, my internship at Schell Games has started in full swing and is awesome thus far! However, I thought I'd post about what I learned, or concluded...or just theorized from my 2 week sleep study.

1) I think I caught up on an amazing deficit. The first few days I was sleeping upwards of 14 hours a day, and eventually this tapered off somewhat to around 9 or 10 hours a night. I felt it was good, rejuvenating sleep, though. Kind of like the subconscious version of a 2 week cleanse.

2) I am, at heart, a night creature. I've denied this for ages, because for some reason I had some deep resolution that my being a night person was "bad." The world, after all, does not cater to us very well. But screw that. I harbor tons of nocturnal energy, and this can't be corrected by a rigid sleep schedule, which I think causes more harm than good. I've started working out at midnight, doing my grocery shopping at 1, going to bed around 2 or 3 and that's okay, because that's how I roll.

3) I've identified my napping needs more closely. I tend to need a small nap in the early afternoon, even if it's just 45 minutes, to kick me back into gear. Around 3:00pm seems a good time. This is often followed by a longer, evening nap. I used to get so stressed about taking naps at 8:00 at night, worrying that it would "mess up my sleep schedule," but now that I've embraced point number 2, I'm much less worried about it (and being less worried means I get to bed more easily when I do sleep at 2 or 3).

Overall during the test, my sleeping periods tended to be vastly erratic. At first I was concerned about this, but I think what I learned is that spaced out, shorter blocks of sleep just work better for me in general. This is roughly what my most comfortable sleep schedule has ended up being...

2:30am - 8:30am (6 hours, my "main" night time sleep)
3:00pm - 4:00pm (1 hourish, my afternoon nap)
8:00pm - 11:00pm (3 hours, my evening nap)

With this, I still get the 9-10 hours of sleep that I seem to need a day, and I'm not tired during the day or stressed out about the fact that I'm staying up late. I imagine that on the weekends I will let myself sleep more freely, to catch up on any deficit, and I will stop beating myself up over it.

One thing that has helped me IMMENSELY during this experiment was this little device, the Sleeptracker Pro: http://www.sleeptracker.com/

Jesse lent it to me. Basically, it is a watch with an accelerometer in it that you wear at night. It detects "near-awake" periods based on your movement. When you set your alarm to wake up, you give it a window of time instead of an exact time, and the alarm won't go off until it detects a "near-awake" moment in your sleep cycle during that window. Thus, you're more likely to get woken up when you are in the light stage of sleep, versus being yanked out of REM or stage 4 sleep, and all groggily.

I'm normally not one for gadgets, but I'm in love with this thing, and am going to get my own as soon as I am able (Jesse kindly is lending me his for the duration of my co-op, and I really think it will help).

So! There are my sleepy conclusions, and it's midnight now...time to go to the gym! :D

The Sleepiest Chimera

As a present, Jesse gave me the little chimera figurine that comes with the fancy-pants edition of Resistance 2. It does not look fierce, but rather as though it is yawning. Perhaps it was put on some uneventful patrol and is bored out of its mind. Poor guy.

Speaking of sleep, I've been conducting a sort of sleep experiment of my own for the past week. Basically the idea is that I've taken 2 weeks of my life in which I will sleep as much as I please, with no obligations to guilt me awake. I just want to see what my sleep patterns are when left to my own devices.

So far, the patterns have been incredibly erratic, but I have been getting about 11-12 hours of sleep a day total. I have been otherwise keeping active and making sure I have access to sunlight, but it seems to make no difference.

Jesse is loaning me some sleep-robot thing that detects your near-awake periods at night, and figures your sleep pattern based on those. It seems to only work with long stretches of sleep, but I'll give it a try tonight and see how it works. It's a nifty little device, at any rate.

I have no idea what I'll do with this data after the end of the 2 weeks, but I feel like it's good to have, and I'm just generally curious. Plus, after this semester I'll be a working woman. No more luxurious breaks, so I'd better work one in now!

Bugs

A leaf bug has decided to board with us for the winter. I noticed him at first before leaving for break, hanging out on our dish drying rack. Today, I found him again in the shower.

First, yes, I know that it is extremely likely that these are two entirely different leaf bugs. But what harm is there in pretending that it's just the one?

Anyway, I presume his lingering on dishes and in the shower is for the available water source. Today, though, he appeared to have been caught in there while someone else was in the shower, and was quite waterlogged. I brushed him with a toilet paper square to soak up some of the excess water (enough so that he could pull his antennae apart, at least. They were stuck together) and he scuttled along the rim of the bath.

Part of me was concerned that I should move him out of the bathroom, for fear that one of my roommates may not be so keen on having a bug in the house for the winter. But, I decided that he probably knew what he was doing, and didn't want to disrupt his access to a water source.

Winter is always tough for me, because my typical method for finding bugs in the house is to catch them and put them outside. But during the cold cold winter, I of course can't do this! What am I supposed to do with these bugs? Usually I just let them be, but I don't want my roommates to stomp them, so where can I hide them for the winter months?

Maybe I should start a bug terrarium in the basement.

I can seeeeee!

I got new glasses today!

I'd been long overdue for a prescription update, so I was looking forward to it. The world is like a crystal!

Getting new glasses is always a little weird for me at first. My perception of reality has been suddenly improved! It's as if the world is less real.

Things are so startlingly clear that I feel like I am going to trip and fall into the world, as one fears they may trip and fall into the world on the TV screen, only in three dimensions so it's trippier.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

Motto

Lately, all around I've been seeing bumper stickers, magnets, and signs reading "United we Stand," which is the first part of Kentucky's state motto, based on a song, based on some Aesop quote or something, it's a pretty popular saying. However, I've never seen the complete quote, and they're leaving out the second and just-as-important part, you know, "Divided we Fall?" That's kind of an important piece of the puzzle to just toss away.

Thanksgiving Thoughts

If anyone remembers the christmas cactus I rescued from the gloom of props storage last year, I'd like to announce that it is blooming like crazy. It's ready to be re-potted, too.

 A more general thought: every now and then, I am forced into some situation (being stuck in an airport lobby, for instance) in which McDonalds is the only feasible means of nourishment. I usually buy something, eat it, gag in disgust, and make a dramatic proclamation that I will never, NEVER, eat McDonalds again EVER.

However, deep in my heart, I know the next time I stop at a rest station on a long trip and that's the only food for miles, I'll shrug off my promise to myself and eat again....only to be disgusted again....only to swear I'll never eat it again. What is it about us humans that we constantly and even knowingly make the same mistakes in life, over and over and over again? Happy Thanksgiving!

Mizunch

Why are packaged foods so much less appetizing when they're smashed? I mean, there's really nothing wrong with them, they're still in their sanitary little plastic wrapping, and at most suffer from some mild pre-mastication. But when I pulled the squished oatmeal pie out of the bottom of my backpack I instinctively grimaced with an "Ewww, yuck."

Of course, after some reflection, I went ahead and ate it, and it was still as tasty as it would have been without my calculus book sitting on top of it for most of the day. And yet, I've also been known to eat potato chips that had fallen on the floor of the glass studio, or chase a kiwi down a flight or two of stairs before I caught up with it to eat it.

It could just be me.

Meanwhile, plasma grenades suck.
http://storage.wertle.com/albums/lj/halo3-02.gif

Special thanks to Brendan for being a walking, talking onomatopoeia thesaurus

Hmmmm...

The other day they cut down a tree on campus, because it was sick or something, and as I was walking by the broken up pieces, I noticed them covered in flies. Like some rotting animal carcass. How pecuuuliar...