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Death Valley National Park

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Stay Home Stay healthy

Biking in COVID-19 Era

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I ride past a few parks every day. They all look the same. The swings are tied up with caution tape and the parks are blocked off.

A single mom and her little boy live in the apartment above me. He’s young, maybe first grade? It’s hard to guess because he’s so spry and hard to catch a glance at him. He runs back and forth all day long and jumps from the furniture. Sometimes he branches out to the elevator and sprints up and down the hallways of all the floors. These are not long hallways; on 2 units deep. One time I watched the mom go outside to put trash in the dumpster. The boy yelled from the balcony, “Mom! Mom! Mom! Look at me!” The mother, clearly embarrassed and worried, hushed him and told him to go inside. More than annoyed (and it is annoying to hear all this thumping!) my heart breaks for this child. Kids can’t go to school and they can’t play outside.

Swift Social Distance Cycling Club

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The Seattle event to top all Seattle events; the “Swift Social Distance Ride.” All I had to do was take a ride BY MYSELF and take picture of all the things Swift Industries decided I should take pictures of and they would send me this nifty patch! I just got the patch in the mail today! I was so excited to see it, that I opened it up before letting it sit in the 3-day mail quarantine zone. Don’t worry, I opened the letter with tongs, recycled the paper, and then washed my hands before touching the patch inside. I am so happy with this patch! The question now is, where do I put it?

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Project Sunrise: Week 1

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I decided to ride my bike to Kerry Park every morning to greet the sunrise. The goal is to bike a slightly different route to Kerry Park every morning and take a photo. I have been riding my bike to work most days for the past 8 years. I have the lucky advantage of living in a north enough latitude and have a long enough commute in each direction that I often get the chance to ride with either the sunrise or sunset and sometimes both. If it weren’t for the grey weather that hides the sunrises and sunsets, I could probably see sky colors most of the days of my commute. I’m working from home now with the “Stay Home, Stay Healthy” order that looms over most of the country as we limit contact to combat COVID-19. I don’t have a morning commute any more and the gym is closed. My job is the 24/7 sort, so the working from bit doesn’t feel all that different from normal, but having no access to the gym has been the death of me. This project gave me a destination, a way to get out of bed, and a good climb too. I finally found a repeatable ride that meets 2 of the 3 parts of a good ride: exercise, destination, social time. This activity is about half of what I did while working onsite, so it should be easy to maintain every day. I decided Sundays don’t have to be sunrise rides because there is already a “sun” in the “day” (har har). You can tell easily from the summary photos which days are not sunrises!