Family
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The bicycle bug has bitten my brother. Years after his wife bought him a bicycle for a birthday present, he started to ride the bike in earnest over this past summer, including regularly pedaling ten miles, each way, to work.
This Saturday, he and I rode twenty-two miles together in Costa Mesa, California, to benefit the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. The ride was a milestone for both of us. It was his first organized ride, and his first single ride longer than ten miles. And it was the first organized ride where I didn’t ride for pie or beer.
Riding for Family at Two Wheels, One Planet
As skeptical as I am of these charity rides, I rode for family. Not only did my brother and I ride together, our mother has had breast cancer twice, most recently in 2011, and she benefitted both times in no small part due to early detection. Last year, when the Susan G. Komen Foundation withheld funding from Planned Parenthood, as a way of punishing the organization for its family planning efforts, I was furious. A significant number of poor and uninsured women get breast cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood, and shortening the lives of adult women to protect the unborn seems counter to what I regard as “Christian values.” I swore I wouldn’t give a penny to that organization, and it soured me on similar breast cancer events. But I got over that since my brother was really excited about the ride, decking himself out in pink, and both my mom and dad, sister-in-law, and nephew came to meet us at the finish line. Also, this ride benefitted a different organization anyway.
The ride itself was very pleasant. We started from the Two Wheels, One Planet bike shop in Costa Mesa, and rode on two very nice multiuse trails, one around the Newport Bay and the other along the San Diego Creek.
Pedaling in Pink
Shipping one of my bikes seemed impractical so I rented one from Bicycle John’s, just a few miles from the Burbank airport. It was a neat little road bike: a steel Serotta frame with a mix of lightweight Ultegra and DuraAce components. Beautiful!
Why ship when you can rent?
Because my suitcase was getting full, I left my pedals and bike shoes at home and opted to ride with a set of track pedals and Converse high-tops. It kept me from breaking away since I couldn’t get good sprint going, but that meant I could escort my brother throughout the entire route. And he could keep up.
We finished about 100 minutes after we started. As I mentioned, the ride was a bit slow, averaging just under 13 miles per hour, but we made good time because we were on bicycle paths without stop signs and traffic signals. Flat rides, as this one was, can be both easy and difficult. Sure, it’s nice not to climb hills all day, but for every uphill, there’s usually a downhill, and that’s always nice. Also, climbing helps raise my heart rate, helping to sprint on flat terrain. If I maintain an even effort throughout a ride, my body won’t bother expend more than that effort.
My brother and my nephew at the finish line outside of Two Wheels, One Planet.
At the finish, our family was there waiting for us. Not having my same “experience level” with organized rides, my brother didn’t attack the pizza, beer, and snack table as I did. We both did spend an hour browsing the wares inside the bike shop and watching people win prizes as our raffle-ticket numbers were never called. But what can you do? It’s family.
On Friday, the Dodgers six-game winning streak came to an end. And it was a remarkable loss. As beat writer Ken Gurnick wrote:
this was a hideous loss of historic proportions, a 16–1 pulverization by the Phillies for the most lopsided home loss by a Dodgers team since 1947 in Brooklyn (19–2 to the Giants) and the largest margin of defeat since 2001 (20–1 to the Cubs).
An even more remarkable fact was that my brother and I were at the 2001 game versus the Cubs…in Chicago. It remains our only trip to Wrigley Field. As sons of an airline employee, we used to be able to fly for almost free. During the 2000 and 2001 baseball seasons, we flew to a few ballparks on overnight flights and often returning the same day on the last flight of the day to Southern California.
On May 4, 2001, we took a red-eye flight from LA to Chicago, arriving super early for a Dodgers-Cubs game. After breakfast and some brief window shopping, we headed to Wrigley field. Both teams, as I remember, were playing well and were probably in first place in their divisions. (They were.) But, as any serious baseball fan knows, your positions in the standings in early May means nothing because there’s still more than 130 games of baseball to play. We expected two overachieving teams to play a good game. We were wrong. Instead, we witnessed the Cubs pummell the Dodgers, 20–1. The Dodgers’ only run came off a Gary Sheffield double. Since we arrived at the ballpark early, we saw the Dodgers take batting practices, and he was hitting shots over the brick wall. No one else stood out in my mind, and that now seemed like a prescient analysis of what was to come.
Because we were dressed in Dodgers gear, we were heckled. Nonstop. A notable taunt was “Hey, Hollywood!” We deserved it. We were in enemy territory. Our team was getting killed. And because we had no sense of “springtime” in Chicago, we were underdressed, wearing shorts on a drizzly day that seemed much colder than the afternoon temperature of 57°.
My brother and I had a strict policy of not leaving a game early. However, we agreed that if the Cubs scored twenty runs, we’re outta here. But we came back only to see that the relief pitcher for the bottom of the eighth inning was utility infielder Chris Donnells, who threw three pitches to end an eighth-run eighth inning.
This morning, my brother reminded me of that game. It was bad. But it was also great and not only in how bad it was. Thanks, brother, for the reminder.
I travelled to Los Angeles last week for my cousin’s wedding and to spend some time with my family. Among the many highlights of the trip was seeing my nephew, who is a great kid. He recognizes me, despite only seeing me a few times a year, and like his dad at this age, he’s very sociable.
Like I said, Alex is a great kid, but I hope he outgrows the fighting before he starts school.
Alex is ready for Batman Live at the Staples Center.
(Photo by my mom.)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/juanomatic/8015875852
Tomorrow is National Train Day. Why tomorrow? Because that’s the 143rd anniversary of the first transcontinental railroad. I had forgotten about this year’s train day except that last week, while in Los Angeles, Sarah and I took a tour of Union Station since Sarah and her dad were staying nearby. Also, I had to pickup a bunch of t-shirts to print at the American Apparel factory near downtown LA.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/juanomatic/8015874803
One of the best parts of the visit actually had nothing to do with the tour. We took my two-year-old nephew Alex to the station to see the trains. It’s simply amazing to see how kids are drawn to trains. We took him to the passenger platform, and he was absolutely hypnotized by the locomotives. I took him inside of a Metrolink train scheduled to depart in five minutes, and he was just absorbing all the activity. As other trains arrived and departed, a few of the engineers waved at him as their trains passed by. He loved it!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/juanomatic/8015882208
At the end of evening, my mom and I took him aboard the Metro Gold Line to ride to the next station in Little Tokyo, where I was meeting Sarah, her dad, and my dad. He was a trooper. He waved the TAP card my mom gave him and waited patiently as two northbound trains passed by our station. (In due time, I’ll teach him to read a route map. We rode the train for one station, and he loved it.) I had feared that he didn’t want to get off, but he was very well-behaved as we disembarked.
I doubt I’ll make it to Train Day events tomorrow because I’ll be doing something else that makes me feel like a kid: playing softball.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks for me, and I have basically abandoned this blog for the time being.
Two weeks ago, I flew to Los Angeles for Alex’s 2nd birthday. You can see some of the photos in my gallery. This year’s festivities featured a lot of the same attractions: food, beverages, lots of presents, and, of course, Alex. However, unlike last year, Sarah did not come with me, there were a few people absent, but Alex did blow out all of his candles.
My brother and sister-in-law staged the birthday party on the day after his second birthday at a nearby park, Veteran’s Memorial Park in Sylmar. (I should note that we did go to Shakey’s the night of Alex’s actual birthday, which sated my craving for mojo potatoes.) Alex is a popular kid so there were a bunch of his and his parents’ friends at the party, in addition to some of my family. My parents, of course, were in attendance and could hardly keep away from the birthday boy, especially my mother.
I’m not sure when I’ll be back out there, but I’m hoping for another trip before the summer.
As we prepare for the annual Fake Thanksgiving festivities in Kentucky, it looks like my parents will be joining us. As I write, my mom and dad are en route to Chicago and then on to Kentucky to partake in what I called the greatest idea for having Thanksgiving but without all the headaches.
With my parents coming, this will be the first time that I will be seeing any blood relative for a quasi-Thanksgiving celebration since the Clinton Administration.
Much like I did last year for Labor Day Weekend, I had the pleasure of going to Southern California for a long weekend, which ended up for a couple of reasons a little longer than I had originally planned. The weekend was pretty relaxing, in fact, but there was a few things I got to do.
My dad had been wanting to buy a camera for a few months now since his existing point-and-shoot was insufficient for taking photos of the nephew. On the Saturday, we drove down to the Fairfax district to Samy’s Camera for a little camera shopping. He settled on the Canon EOS 60D, the kit with the 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS UD Zoom Lens and the very popular Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 prime lens. We got to try out the camera right away, taking photos of my nephew at his home in Sylmar but also in Santa Barbara, where I was interviewed for the KCSB Documentary, currently in production.
As I’ve traveled to visit my family over the last couple of years, I’ve resisted renting a car and relying on the Southland’s somewhat limited transportation system. To get to Santa Barbara, my dad and I took Amtrak from Union Station, which we had to drive to reach, to Santa Barbara, on both the commuter-like Pacific Surfliner and the Coast Starlight, akin to a more canonical passenger rail. It was a first for both of us.
The trip was also memorable because it was the first time since I left home for college that I saw my mom for two consecutive weeks. She was here for an eight-day span, from August 23 to August 31, extended because Hurricane Irene had cancelled all flights in and out of New York for an entire weekend. The following day, I boarded my flight bound for LAX, and I saw there until I left on Tuesday, September 6.
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