Around the Neighborhood

First of all, ALL thoughts and prayers with Uncle Carl today as he goes into surgery!

I've taken to riding my bike for running errands if I can. Sometimes it's hard, because I love my car. But as much as I love my whip (and I L-O-V-E it!) but it's hard to spend so much time sitting. Even not counting the time spent walking to the subways in New York, I would stand a lot on the trains.So I like riding my orange beach cruiser with the little white basket in the front, and you really have some adventures that way.

Like, I ran into my cat Zug about two miles away from home? I know he must have adventures cause he disappears for days at a time, but I didn't expect to see him on a busy road by the dairy farms that far away.

Or like when I saw a HUGE FURRY ANIMAL, bigger than our beagle, running down the street and then into the sewer. I have to assume it was a raccoon... or a chupycabra or whatever those weird marsupials are, but it was in broad daylight, and it was huge, and it was very bizarre, and probably would have missed it had I been in my car.

Usually I reward my bike ride with a trip to Dairy Queen or Starbucks. Where I live is not very eccentric, and I hadn't even seen some of this in New York at a public Starbucks with the general masses, so it was necessary to try to take a picture now...

Exhibit A: A man in the corner who had an entire suitcase on the stool next to him, and brought a huge Mac monitor under his arm to set up at his table in order to use a computer here

Exhibit B: Very blurry (it's hard to be discreet) but this grown man with a Batman shirt at a table with what appears to be his entire collection of Magic cards, just sorting through them and organizing Magic cards.

And then of course there's always the biking home. First of all, I always listen to music, and I always sing, and I never care. There's rarely anyone out on the streets, and I bike too fast by the houses for anyone to really care and/or see me in time, and I have this theory that I'm improving my lung (and therefore aerobic) capacity. Of course the other night, I was singing out loud to my heart's content and turned a corner there was a guy walking his dog, who no doubt heard me. I didn't really care, but I did think that it was a little unfortunate that it didn't happen two minutes earlier when I was rapping Wiz Khalifa, and not pathetically sobbing out Taylor Swift lyrics.

Well, you win some, you lose some.