10K Monday

Did the round trip to work and back today, although not necessarily on purpose... missed the bus, which I was planning on taking there.  But it wasn't too bad; I even went up the incline on Knoxville north of Lake, which I had thought that I'd have to walk. It didn't kill me or even wipe me out as much as the mile or so that I rode back from the repair shop, just last week. I'm getting my bike legs back, I think.

I'm enjoying what I missed about cycling, which is that I'm going slow enough to really see things, but fast enough not to get tired of the experience. Cycling gives me more of a chance to interact with my environment. I rode past some public school lunch ladies who were picketing in protest of proposed outsourcing of the school lunch program. If I hadn't been riding, I probably wouldn't have ever seen them.

Let them eat johnnycake

Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio has been taking part in an experiment, of sorts, to see what it's like to eat for a week on what food stamp recipients have to live on--$21. He was doing OK until the Transportation Security Administration confiscated his peanut butter and jelly (he has to travel, so he was carrying it in his suitcase) on the grounds that it was a liquid or a gel or some not-entirely-solid stuff.

Some of the suggestions that people come up with in the blog comments are great, particularly when they point out all the things that he could do with the food that he's got left for the last two days: a sack of cornmeal. I was thinking that, if he could find a piece of broken glass, he could chip it into a little knife, whittle a couple of sticks into an atlatl, and get a rabbit or two to go with that johnnycake...

P.S. On reflection, I came off as a little flippant there. I've been on food stamps, for two short periods in my early twenties just after graduating from college, and it wasn't fun, both because of the bureaucratic hassle involved and because of the shame that I felt. I haven't been down to the sack of cornmeal, but I have been down to the loaf of stale bread and the block of government cheese.