Riding my bicycle to work

I was sitting here feeling a little guilty about filling my car with gas and driving it here to visit my parents this weekend. After all, there's a gas shortage going on. Some gas stations in Rocky Mount have even exhausted their supply of gasoline, and there's talk that there may be worse to come. This has contributed to a 33% increase in the price of gasoline. North Carolina's attorney general has talked about looking into charging companies with price-fixing; I think he should look first into an economics textbook, and learn about the law of supply and demand, as well as why prices are always pretty much the same in a perfect competition (such as gas stations).

In any case, I have some good reasons to drive here, and after begging my coworkers to convince me not to come, and explaining the temptation, they decided that I should come. Thus, here I am.

Maybe I shouldn't feel too much the hypocrite. First, my 1996 Saturn SL gets more than 40mpg on the highway. Second, I usually ride my bicycle in to work. And what a glorious ride it is! For twenty-five minutes, I can ride by beautiful homes in the suburbs, followed by fields of tall grass and young trees, finally woods, real, thick woods! It's quite an peaceful, and at 7.15 the morning sun bathes the trees in splendor.

The way home isn't too bad either: same woods, same fields, same suburbs, but I leave in the afternoon or early evening, so I don't get to see the world bathed in the glow of sunset. As winter approaches, that will probably change.

There isn't too much traffic on these two roads (Jeffries and Fenner), but there is the occasional citizen who thinks that bicycles have no business on the road, and blows his horn angrily as he passes by. Aside from that, though, it's a wonderful start, or end, to the day.

Time to run: my wife and I want to take our son to the Virginia Living Museum. I hope it's as great as I remember it; the Baltimore Aquarium was not a little underwhelming. But I was a child then; things were much bigger, and newer. Alik seemed to like it okay, but he doesn't quite catch the language, and there were far too many people.