Just over one week ago, August 6th 2009, we packed the family into our van and made the four hour drive to Washington D.C.

Gareth repeatedly asked to see the White House, elephants, and pandas. How could we deny him the excitement of seeing all three? In order to streamline our trip, we decided we would pay for the vacation with our American Express card, which had no credit limit. All our expenses would go on it so that we could easily track everything we had done and could pay our expenses all in one place.

Imagine my surprise, then, when our card was denied on the second day of our visit to Washington. I called American Express customer service to find out what was going on and found that they had reduced my credit limit to below the balance on our card just two days before we left for our trip. They did this with no advance notice whatsoever! In fact, the day after we returned home, we received a letter from American Express telling us of the change they were making, effective “immediately”.

Knowing better than to place all my eggs in one basket, I brought along a second card and used it for the remainder of our stay in Washington. Gare saw the elephants and pandas at the National Zoological Park, and he made us visit the White House three times during a four day trip. But what I really remember is that a credit card issuer very nearly ruined that trip for us.

I am glad that the credit card bill of rights was successfully signed into law, but there is still room for improvement. If I had been notified 30 days in advance that a change was going to be made to my credit line, I would have known what to expect. As it was, I was caught by surprise at the worst possible time. If we were experiencing a health emergency (not unlikely) or were simply broken down on the side of the road and had to pay for repairs, we would have been stranded by the practices of, in this case, American Express.

Here’s hoping that the credit card bill of rights does not represent the final word on consumer protections from credit issuers.

“The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” Chicken Little’s famous phrase of impending catastrophe sums up rather well the current upswing in citizen unrest mostly among our conservative population. But that isn’t the phrase that is being bandied about. No, instead, “socialist”, “Big Brother”, “Russia”, “death panel”, “rationing”, “deficit”, “choice”, and “control” are all mentioned right before somebody inevitably states or shouts “We want our country back!”

Can anyone explain to me what that even means? Who is the “we” in this case and in what state would they like the country returned to them? There are, of course, a few takes on that. One take says that the “we” are conservatives who want the country returned to them from the liberal power that has taken hold. Another is that the “we” are people uncomfortable with the changing racial topography of this country and that power needs to be returned to supposedly trustworthy caucasians. But I don’t really buy either of those. I am of the opinion that “we” represents a population that feels it no longer has any power over its own governance and that returning the country to them means that they all get to do things the way they best see fit.

Since within every “we” there are a lot of “I”, that basically boils down to anarchy since we all see the world differently. Now is a time when conservatives feel particularly powerless due to the heavily shifted balance of power in Washington, the rapid and overbearing reawakening of liberal media, and the heavy reality that their lives are not in their own control when it comes to national issues like the economic downturn. People are scared and feel helpless, and they are choosing to blame people other than themselves for all of these problems (and are right to do so in some cases). But the bottom line is that a portion of this nation is feeling victimized in a way that was once reserved only for gays, blacks, and women.

Conservative caucasians are not used to feeling victimized. They are typically full of righteous vigor and go through life pretending that absolutes abound, that black and white are the only choices while shades of gray be damned. While I would rather not start down a tangent, I will offer forth the idea that a majority of that population fervently holds to the ideal that there is no middle ground between good and evil. You are either one or the other. This is a convenient carryover from Judeo-Christian dogmata.

On top of that, we as a nation have steadily increased our sense of personal entitlement over time. We fear immigrants because they will take “our” jobs. We erupt into violence on the roads because somebody was slowing us down or in our way. We do away with reasoned debate because our opponent does not share our opinion or have our interests at heart. We will not stand for anything that impacts our convenience, our freedom, our choice, our family, and our belief that we are the most important person in our life. Oddly, we refer to the 1980’s as the “me” generation. It was so only because of the money people showered upon themselves. What we have now is worse. We have a “me” society that permeates every facet of our lives. We have a “me” country that believes it knows best in all circumstances and closes itself to the education that is an open mind and the willingness to learn from others in this world that have a longer history and greater experience.

As the saying goes, “We are number one!”

It is important to understand all of this when talking about the current climate of antagonism over health care reform. The town hall eruptions have almost nothing to do with health care, insurance, and services. They have a lot to do with a population choosing to assert power for the mere purpose of asserting power.

Why do I say this? I say it because the arguments against nationalized/socialized/tax subsidized health care make little sense. And I also say it because if these very same people were given the free market they so loudly demand, they would quickly see the role government plays in working to protect the welfare of its people.

“Choice” is a common argument. Choice of doctor, choice of treatment, choice of death. Well, okay, not that last one, because conservatives have always rallied against allowing people the choice to die (aka assisted suicide). What they fear now is that government will not give them the choice to live by denying them services at crucial times. Where would they get such an idea? From Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, actually, who pretty flat out stated that when deciding between health care for an infant, a young adult, and the elderly, the young adult should get priority since they are guaranteed to contribute to the ongoing health of the commonwealth. I have to concede that’s a very valid concern given Emanuel’s advisory position in the Obama administration. However, the guy isn’t all bad.

Choice of doctor seems like less of a concern. Every program in which I’ve participated has dictated which doctors I can and can’t see. They’ve done this by ratcheting the coverage depending on whether or not a doctor was a participant in their system and was willing to accept lower compensation in exchange for increased access to the patient base for that insurer. If every doctor accepts nationalized insurance, it would seem to me that choice would be expanded. I’ve not yet seen any indicators that the plan is to dictate which doctors you can see, nor have I seen mention regarding by which criteria such restrictions would be determined.

Choice of treatment boils down to what the reform bills contain regarding the system for approving treatments. Unfortunately, everybody has been shouting so much that we’ve not actually gotten any information about these types of details. That’s what the town hall meetings were for, but as usually happens, people who go in angry stay angry and come out angry.

The choice to participate is paramount. It is important that any national plan does not come by way of abolishing private insurance. We must always maintain the choice to get our coverage elsewhere, but we can do so without denying others the benefit of a national pool of contributors.

“Socialist” has been a favorite word since the start of the Obama campaign and has built enough steam to solve our oil dependency. Here is one of those places where we run into the problem of absolutes mentioned earlier.

There are many forms of socialism, but when we as a nation say “socialist”, we’re basically saying “communist”, which is why it is often followed by mentioning Russia. We have a good 60 years of anti-communist fervor in us, so when we hear of anything run by the state as being a “social” program, it gets bounced back as being socialist. To be fair, the proposed national health care system is a socialist form of insurance. It takes money from the production of the entire populace via taxes and then distributes that money to benefit the entire citizenry. Here are some other similarly “socialist” programs: welfare; unemployment; social security; Medicare. Suppose we throw those socialist babies out with the bathwater and eliminate those programs. Is that what people want when they say they want their country back? When I see the photos and footage of the town hall meetings, filled with a frothing older generation, I have to wonder - how many of them are benefiting right now from Medicare and are willing to admit to the hypocrisy?

I challenge everybody who is repeating the anti-socialist mantra to turn away their government checks and benefits. You obviously believe that everybody should fend for themselves, so get to it. I also challenge them all to learn about modern social democracy and how it differs from the all-out socialism they keep picturing in their heads.

Fear of the collapse of capitalism lies behind the rage against any form of social policy, which I find infuriating. A purely capitalist free market has been proven to work against the interest of consumers. There’s a reason why we have the FDA - it is to, as much as possible, protect the health of consumers against the practices of producers looking to increase profit at the risk of safety. The FDA didn’t just decide one day to exist. It was a response to real issues regarding illness and death. In an unrestrained market, lead paint gets used in kids’ toys, seat belts would never exist, you’d never be sure what meat you’d be getting in a McDonald’s hamburger, and we would have all had to just sit back and watch the nation collapse economically while the financial market continued digging its hole. Regulations of markets are a socialist construct, so please be more specific when ranting about impending socialism as we’ve had forms of it for 100 years.

“But what”, people might say, “about innovation? What motivation does anybody have to excel in a socialist system?” There they go again with absolutes. Modern socialist democracy doesn’t look to replace capitalism. It looks to complement it. In the current proposals, government is not looking to convert every hospital into a state run entity. It just wants to pay your expenses. Those hospitals are still to be independently run. Pharma companies will still benefit by improving drugs. Equipment companies will still be able to sell their gadgetry. Would one say that Blue Cross has dampened innovation just because it doled out the cash? Yes, actually. Procedures not covered by an insurer tend to not be performed, and if that procedure required a new process or product, the marketability of that product is reduced. Yet, innovation continues on.

“Big Brother” is a favorite talking point of mine because I have a long history of being staunchly against government intrusion in all facets of my life. It was my turn to be frothy when the USA PATRIOT Act was being put into place, when it became legal for the government to listen in on my calls without proper judicial review or to make me take off my shoes before boarding a plane. I was one of those guys who went on about how giving up privacy for the mirage of security was unconstitutional and an affront to my rugged individualism. Then, on December 3rd, 2001, that all went to hell. That was the day my son was born, had to be resuscitated, flown to another hospital, and treated for five weeks in a neonatal intensive care unit. That was the month that I had to make the decision between letting my son die or putting him through tracheostomy and gastrostomy surgery so that he could live into an unknown future. It was the event that showed me what asses and what saviors the state can be.  And the price of admission for this grand adventure was all of my privacy.

Mind you, not all of that privacy was violated by the state. When your child incurs over one million dollars in expenses in the first month of his life, everybody paying a piece wants your information. Add to the purely financial violation the fact that my son required massive support from doctors, therapists, home nurses, and equipment companies, all of whom must also violate your privacy in one way or another. The only place I still have privacy is in my own head, which I sometimes choose to violate by writing items like this.

To date, nearly eight years after that all began, I have yet to experience a privacy violation that was not directly related to the treatment of my son. The state has not revealed our info to anyone it shouldn’t have (to my knowledge). In fact, the worst violators of privacy have been the private nursing organizations who placed people in our home that were quite happy to regularly disregard HIPAA regulations and discuss their other cases with us or discuss our matters with their friends and family. The state, by contrast, was often refreshingly impersonal when dealing with us, which is how we liked it. Big Brother cared only about two things - making sure private health insurance was tried first before deferring to state and making sure that my son required all the things we requested. For the latter, they deferred to our personal doctors. My son constitutes an immense and ongoing expense. He incurs more cost than you or I could ever hope to achieve, and yet he continues to receive coverage. In the end, I traded privacy for his security.

What is interesting to me is that all of these topics are boiling to the surface in the fight against universal health care. There is no use pretending that that isn’t the end game here. The liberal goal is that every citizen of the United States have access to health care paid for by the populace at large. But why is this a bad thing? Why are people fighting with one another over doing good for their neighbor?

Health care is not the real concern. Control and power are what is at stake here. Health care hits at the heart of the “me” by having a direct impact on every person who is part of the program, and this is an effort that has failed for liberals in the past, making it a prime toppling target now that it has risen again. I wish people had been this fervent about the liberties they lost during the Bush administration, but throughout those eight years, none of them recognized their personal stake and responded with “I’ve done nothing wrong. I have nothing to hide.” Now, they all want to hide their medical records in order to deny help to those who need it. Ask any of these people individually, and they will all espouse their compassion but will maintain that compulsory compassion is no compassion at all.

However, none of them will say that health coverage is a bad thing, because it isn’t. What they won’t admit is the health care debate is a convenient topic for asserting a will they are afraid is diminishing. They didn’t fight the bailouts like this because they feared for their bank accounts. They didn’t fight the stimulus like this because some of those jobs might go to them. But they’re fighting health care like this because they already have coverage and don’t need that lousy government help. Rejecting government only when it doesn’t benefit you ignores the fact that it might benefit others or that you simply don’t recognize the benefit.

Let the debate on this topic continue, but please, let it be debate. Let us come to it informed and with our eyes open to what drives support and opposition to it. The moment we begin to shout, we have conceded reason and are driving from guttural emotion. As it is now, the debate can be distilled thusly:

Pro: “We want to take some money from everybody and provide for the literal health of the nation.”

Con: “Screw you, you can’t have my money or my privacy, I don’t care who suffers because of it.”

Contrast that with this quote. Some of you have probably heard it before:

I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.

As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.

No, that wasn’t said by Chicken Little.

Back when I thought I’d spend the rest of my life paddling around in a kayak, my biggest frustration was that there was nothing locally geared towards bringing like-minded paddlers together to keep each other company and teach one another.

As is usual, I toyed with the idea of starting a web site to foster such a community. It was one of the few times when I decided not to take on a new web endeavor.

Now, well over a year later, somebody else has thankfully gone and done the thing I had wanted to do. The Canoe Club of Centre County held its first meeting last month and has as its mission to bring together paddlers of all skill and interest levels.

Had this been in place back then, I might not have migrated to bikes quite so quickly. While I do like being alone on my trips, I don’t want to be alone all the time. It was difficult to get out for a paddle with Brandy - in fact, I think we did that only once and that was only because my mother was along to watch Gareth while we took a quick spin around the Kettle Creek reservoir.

This is not to say there weren’t any groups. The Penn Kayak group was in full swing at that time, but most of the trips ended up being more distant than I desired or on higher classes of creek and river than I was ready for.

I sincerely hope the CCCC does well. I might even have to stop in for a meeting and see what the group is like. No, I’m not planning to buy another boat.

Yet.

I did, after all, keep my PFD, shoes, bilge pump, and watertight containers.

I’ve been tasked with translating some letters from a father to his son. Written in 1944. In Germany. It’s interesting to go through the translation and then match things up with history. I figured somebody else might be interested, so here is the first letter I’ve completed.

November 14, 1944

My dear Manfred:

We have still not received a letter from you and are therefore very worried, as you can imagine. I am consoling myself with the thought that you’ve left Westwall and that there is no post to reach us.

For two days, we listened day and night to the booms of the cannons in the west; there must, therefore, be hard artillery battles under way. If only we knew where you were currently located. Maybe we have been too quiet? Or not, who knows!?

Wolfgang left quickly yesterday evening. He had to get back to his unit. He has written down your address so he can write. I hope you will send him heartfelt greetings in the meantime, Manfred.

Mother has once again been driven to sleep just after Degerloch. Walter is with me still. That’s our life, it’s actually not fun anymore.

Last Sunday, I was sworn in for the Volkssturm. It was an impressive crowd in Spitalhof. I belong to a company lead by Mr. Muller (Bookbinder). My conductor is Mayor Neunhoffer and I drove the group this time. Tomorrow evening, we have our training and I can easily say that these evenings are always very interesting.

Hado was here this afternoon as well, he is currently on leave. He brought mother an extra four eggs, so she can bake you something for your Christmas package. That is really lovely of him.

I have already written you that your certificate of maturity came yesterday. You can see, Manfred, what you have yet to accomplish. So, you have at least a degree. You will see it again one day. The most important thing now is that you come back, and for that we wish wholeheartedly. Everything else is incidental.

Dearest Manfred! I wish you all the best from the heart, and quite a bit of luck. Don’t make us worry, dear boy.

Sending you heartfelt greetings,

Your Father

Mother and Walter also leave you heartfelt greetings. Walter is already in bed. He still oversleeps.

RBR is taking me to Interbike this year. Flying me out, putting me up, and letting me geek out at the nation’s biggest bike industry show.

Of course, I’ll be working while in Vegas. We’re planning to do daily show reports, photos, and possibly video interviews with various company reps. It should be a ton of fun.

So what can I do to fill my time between now and then? How about figure out which vendors I want to hit, document them here, and then forget to take the list come September? Okay, let’s do it!

Booth 4621 - Arkel Inc - Creator of the most rugged, expensive, expandable panniers I’ve ever seen.

4459 - Atoc Inc - Manufacturer of overly complex but insanely useful rack systems like the Draftmaster (which I have for Gare’s bike and for my trike).

L22 - Bikes Belong Coalition - These folks hand out money to non-profits. Want to stop here on BikeAble business.

1051 - Bionx - Electric assist for bikes. Interesting to see if they have anything new coming up.

1459 - Day 6 Bicycles - Crank forward comfort bikes with lumbar support. Basically, recumbents.

4613 - Do Wrap/SweatVac - I love my SweatVac, so visiting these guys is an attempt to get freebies.

4008 - Hase Bikes - Because I want to feel bad that we bought a Pino before they made the collapsible frame.

374 - HP Velotechnik Recumbents - Because Hase and HPV are my favorite recumbent manufacturers. My HPV Speedmachine and Street Machine Gte will attest to that. I’d have a tough time choosing between a Hase Kettwiesel and an HPV Grasshopper if the occasion arose.

1742 & 1735 - J & B Importers Inc - These are the guys behind Sun bikes/trikes. Might as well see what low end stuff is coming out for next year and discover whether or not the UAX still sorta sucks.

5231 - Keen Inc - Only reason for Keen to be here is for new cycling sandals. I’ve had my Keen Commuters for a year now and they’re still quite comfortable.

4363 - Kenda Tires/Tubes - Not personally interested, but RBR.info visitors might like some new info on Kenda gear.

1659 - Kidz Tandem - Interested from the BikeAble perspective.

6225 - KMX Karts Ltd - BMX Trike manufacturer.

2049/2053 - Magura USA - The only thing bent riders like more than disc brakes are hydraulic disc brakes.

709 - MapMyRide.com - Want to find out why they had to shit things up with all the ads. Okay, I know why, but it really makes me want to move to another service.

809 - Mirrycle Corp - Most famous mirrors in bentdom. The packaging now even states they’re for recumbents.

4575 - NuVinci - RBR sells a lot of their hubs.

4621 - Old Man Mountain - Maker of Catrike friendly hubs. Curious to see what else they have that would be bent suitable.

1425 - Planet Bike - Just want to see if they’re aware how much bent riders try to shoehorn their products onto recumbent frames and forks.

4381 - Power Grips - Hoping for something lightweight but strong.

1025 - Primal Wear - I just want to see the Stormtrooper Armor jersey up close.

5145 - Primo - Another popular bent tire manufacturer.

3425 - Schwalbe - More tires.

3929/4125/4133 - Shimano - Because we have to. How can you not want to see what Shimano has coming up?

3351 - Sigma Sport - RBR carries their computers.

4519 - SockGuy - Why not? I have a pair of SockGuy socks.

2923 - Speedplay - Manufacturers of Frog pedals, quite popular among relaxed recumbent riders.

1339 - SRAM - See Shimano.

3915 - Topeak - I’m a big fan of the Joe Blow Pro.

1339 - Truvativ - I’ll be cranky by the time we get to these guys. Ha ha.

2252 - Uvex Sports Inc - RBR carries their helmets.

I’m a little disappointed that neither Catrike nor Lazer Helmets are there this year, but I’ll survive. That’s more than enough booths to visit as it is.

Brandy and I sat down last night to watch a movie, something we do with decreasing frequency due to the demands of a two child household that is also inhabited by an adult dependent. It’s tough to find time to squeeze in two hours for passive entertainment.

But last night, we did it. We found the time. And we used it to watch Rachel Getting Married.  At 1:53 in length, it was going to run right up until Gareth’s nurse arrived, so time was precious if we hoped to finish the movie before having our evening interrupted by yet another outside influence. With that in mind, we loaded in the Blu-Ray disc.

And waited for the progress bar.

And saw it start to play BD promos.

And discovered we couldn’t stop the promos. Or open the menus. In fact, my attempts to do so inexplicably resulted in us being dumped out to the PS3 crossbar interface. We went through this process four times before I relented and decided we were just going to have to sit through the promo.

Once the promo ended, the trailers started. In the immortal words of Will Smith in all of his action films, “Oh HELL naw!”

Menu still wouldn’t work. Stop didn’t work. So I tried Next. That worked! It… skipped to the next trailer. I had to do this several more times to get through the trailers and finally get to the damn menu!

Once there, everything was fine, but I turned to Brandy and said, “You know who made us go through all that crap? Somebody in marketing.”

The lesson here, folks, is that you aren’t going to sell stuff by annoying your consumer. So stop annoying them.

Bonus tip for marketing folks: If your customer is already in the process of consuming your product, you don’t need to remind them how great it is. Putting an ad for Blu-Ray at the start of a Blu-Ray disc is relatively pointless. The viewer had a choice to watch a standard DVD, but chose not to - you have them, they don’t need to be beat over the head with it.

I was having some trouble with RokBox and RokNewsRotator. On the CRBC site, we use RokBox to display inset thumbnails for expansion directly from our Section and Category pages, but since we do the inset first in the content, RokNewsRotator was stripping out the tags and leaving the image path in plain text, including it in the RNR teaser.

The solution was to strip out RokBox and everything between the RB tags first by making the following change in helper.php:

Original

function prepareContent( $text, $length=300 ) {
        // strips tags won't remove the actual jscript
        $text = preg_replace( "'<script[^>]*>.*?</script>'si", "", $text );
        $text = preg_replace( '/{.+?}/', '', $text);

Modified

function prepareContent( $text, $length=300 ) {
        // remove rokbox references
        $regex = "#{rokbox\s(.*?){/rokbox}#s";
        $text = preg_replace( $regex, "", $text );
        // strips tags won't remove the actual jscript
        $text = preg_replace( "'<script[^>]*>.*?</script>'si", "", $text );
        $text = preg_replace( '/{.+?}/', '', $text);

Works great so far!

In the run-up to Mother’s Day, Gareth let me know that he wanted to bake chocolate chip cookies for Mom. This sounded like a perfectly wonderful idea to me as Gareth and I had never baked together before and because I knew there would be plenty of leftover cookies for me to eat.

We went with the dough-in-a-tube variety of baking since there would be less kitchen mess and, as a result, less stress for Brandy.  Even seeing a disaster in progress will throw her off kilter until such time as the disaster is resolved.  

I busted out the cookie sheets, the tube of dough, a spoon, and some parchment paper.  I wanted this to go as easily as possible.  While the oven was preheating, I put the parchment paper out on the sheets, sliced open the dough, and got Gareth in there to help me spoon the dough out onto the trays.

During this process, he started looking up at me and gesturing, which is usually his way of telling us he needs his letter board.  I grabbed the letter board, put his hand in mine, and let him go to town.

D - O - Y - O - U - N - O - W - W - U - T - Y - O - U - R - D - O - N - G

“Do you know what you’re doing?”

Come on, really?  All we have to do is scoop out dough and plunk it on a cookie sheet.  What’s there to know?  But I had a good laugh at his moxie and we kept on with the baking.

The oven was ready, so I popped our cookies in, setting the timer for 5 minutes so I could rotate the trays mid-bake.  When the 5 minute point hit, I opened the oven only to see a cloud of smoke rapidly exit from within, clouding the kitchen and making its way to the smoke detector.

Letting the oven door slam shut, I threw on the ceiling fan and grabbed something to wave smoke away from the now blaring detector as my family wondered what the heck was going on.

After things settled down a bit, Brandy came out to the kitchen to see exactly what happened.  I professed innocence, saying I did nothing wrong, but then she asked, “Did you put parchment paper on the trays?”  Yes, yes I did.  ”That’s not parchment paper.  That’s wax paper.”

Sure enough, it was.  Turns out that if you’re using wax paper, it’s best to have the entire surface of the paper covered by whatever you’re baking on it.  It’s also best to not exceed 350 degrees when using it.  I violated both rules of wax paper use and paid the price.

Amazingly, I did spare the cookies!  But now, when my son looks at me and asks if I know what I’m doing, I’m going to seriously consider his question and make sure that I can answer it with confidence.

To celebrate Bike To Work Week, I did just that - I biked to work from Pleasant Gap to Pine Hall Road on May 1st. It was my first bike commute in Centre County, and it will likely be my last.

Not because of the distance. No, that was a mere 11 miles. Not because of the time involved, as it required only an hour (the same time it would take using public transportation). It was all because of two words: College Avenue.

Pleasant Gap to the Nittany Mall wasn’t all that bad. The shoulder along that stretch is very wide and almost always kept clear of gravel and other obstacles, except for the occasional dead animal.

But after reaching the Nittany Mall, College Ave turns into Death Race 2000. There’s no taking the lane on this 45mph legal/60mph actual stretch of road, and the shoulders, while often generous, are so covered in gravel from the winter season that one has to stick to the line for most of the ride.

Sticking to the line doesn’t work too well, though, since there’s barely enough room in the lanes as it is. There are just some times when you’re pulled to a stop at a light only to have an 18 wheel truck slide in inches from your elbow that makes you think, “This was a bad idea.”

Whenever possible, I ditched College Ave, cutting through parking lots or taking back roads that weren’t going to add miles to my ride. Certainly, that helped, but the stretches where I had to be on College were enough to make my testicles ascend. Everything from Decibel Road to just past Elmwood made me feel like a very small bug being approached at high velocity by a very large wind shield.

It begs the question - why did I use that road at all? The alternatives weren’t all that attractive. I could have veered off onto Decibel Road and taken back roads to Lemont, which would have dumped me out on College Ave again anyway. Or, I could have taken Shiloh Road and followed back roads up to Park Ave, which itself is a fairly high traffic area as it is an entrance/exit point for 322.

In order to not constantly feel like I’m about to die, I would have to take College to Shiloh to Houserville, take Puddintown to Orchard to Park, ride through campus and across the IST walkway, and then take West Campus to Blue Course where I would, inevitably, have to ride College Ave to Science Park to Pine Hall Road. That would reduce my exposure to College Ave greatly, but also take me on back roads that have no shoulder at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I love to ride, but getting from point A to point B in this case is severely painful. It’s enough to convince me that driving isn’t so bad after all.

So what would make me feel better about making such a commute in the future?

1. Take my trike. Sure, it’s lower to the ground, but I have a far higher degree of confidence on the trike. I’m sure the lack of confidence on my Speedmachine played into my fears that day.

2. Form a multi-municipality committee to create a pathway from the outlying burbs to downtown State College. Of course, that’s what the Bellefonte Central Rail Trail was supposed to be before it was halted by property owners along the proposed route. Besides, doing this would take 20 years.

3. Choose a new, longer, less exposed route. I don’t really want to have more than an hour of travel time to get to and from work. It’s a shame I can’t use the most direct route, but I can’t.

4. Realize that I ride my bike for fun and not to make a point about saving the planet, so it’s okay to drive my bike to safe riding locations. This is the most likely solution.

Yes, I could make a public stand and decry congestion, the dangers of distracted drivers, and convince others that the more cyclists there are, the safer the streets become, but I have a very strong sense of self-preservation that makes me want to hide out until a bunch of other brave souls do the hard work and make things safer for me.

I never denied being a lazy opportunist. And yet, I feel some degree of guilt in the matter, as though taking on the label of “cyclist” brings with it a certain requisite sense of representing a population of people who pedal. But I don’t want to be a representative. I just want to be a guy out on his bike not worrying about death.

Thanks to his speech therapist, Gareth has been using a keyboard/touchpad system to type out his thoughts for the past couple weeks.  Usually, it’s pretty typical stuff.  “Play videogames” or “when is dad coming home” or “go bookstore”.

But not today.  Today, Gareth asked something I’m sure he’s wondered about for a very long time.  He asked why he doesn’t eat with his mouth.

Brandy sat down with him and explained why it is that he doesn’t eat like everybody else.  I don’t know whether or not he was satisfied with the answer or whether or not being different has caused him any heartache, but it’s so incredibly amazing that he can finally ask us these questions.

I’m sure we have many more topics to cover - why he can’t walk, why he needs suction, why he can’t talk like us.  And we’ll answer every one of them openly and honestly.

And while it won’t always be easy to talk about these things, we at least now have the opportunity to do so.  We have about 5 years of talking to catch up on.