My bike, my therapist

 My therapy couch

Yeah, it was one of those days.

It seemed like I was behind on all of my housework, everyone needed me NOW, a friend had to process a very tough situation with me, and on top of it all, Helga Hormone was singing a shrill aria.You know her, right? Hat with horns, breastplate bigger than Ohio, blaring through whatever coherent thought you happen to can manage as she demands center stage . . .

I've dealt with my share of frustration, and I think that as the years go by, I'm dealing with it better. (Full disclosure: Hot Husband may have another opinion.) I think I'm switching from mentally berating myself for not being the kind of person who always looks on the bright side to knowing what's gonna shake off the gloom. Age does have a few advantages.

Hot Husband had partially saved the day by taking the boys on an outing. Far away. For hours. But the tentacles of others' needs were still too close, reaching in from too many sides.

So what's an empowered woman to do? Hop on the bike.

I shut off my cell phone, threw on comfy clothes, and headed out for a ride. Within moments, I was in that place where it's only me, the road, my quads pumping and breath going in and out. Simple freedom.

While I was milking the other day (New here? I have milk goats, chickens and pigs. Just helping you keep up.), I realized that I love biking for the same reason that I love milking. It's a time beyond time. I'm not looking at the clock, calculating how long until the next event, seeing how many things I can squeeze in before we absolutely, positively have to be at our next scheduled event. There's no phone, no kitchen counter disaster, no laundry composting in the corner.

So don't ask me how far I went, how long I was gone, or if I'd hit my target heart rate. Don't know, don't care. I flew at the feet of mountains, pushed on through spattering rain, and kicked up some nemesis hills, all at my own speed.

I came home to find Helga settling in backstage. The pile of dirty dishes looked manageable. I could imagine folding a load of clothes. My first post-ride words to my dudes were kind and patient.

Not bad for a one-time investment that keeps paying dividends.

Mountain medicine, from two wheels

My town rocks! Or, Bike Swap Success!

 So many bikes, so little time.

There's already enough glowing print about living in Bozeman, Montana that I really don't need to repeat it. I just wanted to say how lucky I am to live here.

The Gallatin Valley Bike Club, which has been in existence long before I got geeked about bikes, hosted their annual bike swap on April 17 (yeah, I'm slow posting!), and it was a smash hit this year.

When I walked in the door, there were road bikes, mountain bikes, kids' bikes, cruisers, pedals, wheels, jerseys, helmets and more filling two rooms at the Gallatin County Fairgrounds. I knew Bozeman was bike happy, but I had no idea.

For those unfamiliar with bike swaps, the group sponsoring the swap usually accepts equipment the day before, and the people dropping off the equipment set the price. Sellers can have one price, or choose to drop the price during the last hours of the sale. On sale day, the doors open, people buy, and the equipment that wasn't purchased can be picked up or donated. There was a little bit of everything at all prices, from $10 parts to $3,000 bikes. GVBC kept 15% of the selling prices, and the seller got the rest.

Our family did pretty well, with sales of our gear covering two-thirds of our purchases. We unloaded an old mountain bike of Hot Husband's, and we're hoping it has a new life as a run-around-town rig. A child-size mountain bike went, too. HH took home a set of wheels for his road bike that he'd been lusting after, and Monkey Boy nabbed a new bike helmet. With flames. I'm sure he'll be pedaling turbo-speed now.

I didn't really need another bike or more gear, but I went anyway, just to see what it was all about and to geek out in a bike-friendly venue. We got into the sale during the first wave, so it was pretty fun to see the sheer volume of gear that emerged from garages in the area.

At the end of the sale, the gear and bikes were spread out into one-third of one of the rooms. Not much left over.

GVBC, you have my compliments and my pledge to volunteer next year. It was very cool to think that so many bikes switched hands during one day.

Dedicated volunteers handling the details

The cruisers! Definitely outnumbered by road and mountain bikes this year, but that may change!

I was surprised to see one of these babies!

An ancient German cruiser from the 1950s, maybe? Oh, the stories it could tell.

Saw a couple of bikes by local frame-builder Carl Strong.

One bikin' mama goes home happy with a new road bike! Can you say freedom?

Connecting the dots

Funny what hits my email inbox at the same time.

 Not Tom's chart. From greenprintdenver.org

Copenhagen parking lot

Today, I got an message from a friend who's a climate change expert, giving me a preview of a talk on the subject that I suckered him into. (Tom, you're amazing.) Inside were beautiful, informative charts and pictures showing how much carbon emissions have changed our environment, how much more it could change in the future, and what we could be doing to reverse this trend.

A couple of hours later, I got an email from Elle linking to this article about President Obama's Transportation Secretary, Ray LaHood, announcing that the government is going to treat bicycling and walking as important forms of transportation when it comes to providing federal funding. It's not just autos and trucks that will get proper driving environments, it seems.

As you can imagine, manufacturing and trucking interest groups are up in arms, while the biking world is pinching itself, almost not daring to hope that finally, proper bike paths linking housing to business centers might emerge. More people might see that biking doesn't have to be reserved for special weekend excursions. It could happen every day. In their very town or city! Imagine!

To me, this is a perfect example of what's possible when government functions well. By increasing funding for bike lanes, fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions decrease, people get healthier, local businesses get a boost, and biking becomes more accessible and safer.

What baffles me is how long it takes government to see these connections. The United Nations' conferences on climate change happen in the city of Copenhagen, where roughly 500,000 people travel by bike every day, according to the wonderful blog Copenhagenize. Yet the folks responsible for making effective policy around the world have been dithering about, not knowing how to act. To be certain, biking isn't a silver bullet, but as Al Gore, my buddy Tom, and other climate change folks have indicated, it's going to take dozens to hundreds of changes to make a dent in the emissions situation we've created.

For now, I'm hopeful that the federal government will start taking two-wheeled transportation seriously.

Many thanks to Tom Fiddaman and Ventana Systems for trying to find viable solutions to our climate change problems.

Beret helmet?

I'm all for stylish riding. Here's one person's attempt at a more fashion forward helmet design. No plans in 2008 for full-scale production. I wonder if people would actually go for this?

Grabbed from singletracks.com. Thanks to Elle for seeing this!