More confession, more repentance, more bus arts and crafts.

So, I fell off the wagon (bus) two months ago, and it's so far away now that I might need to charter a plane to catch up.....

The day after the Clear the Air Challenge ended, I was walking around my neighborhood in the dark, really fast (I always walk really fast) and clobbered my big toe on a sidewalk slab sticking up. There was a lot of pain and an alarming popping sensation when I bent my toe, and though the doctor determined it was only a bad sprain, it made walking fast difficult for some time. And getting to/from work on the most direct bus route requires quite a bit of very quick walking. So I let myself off the bus-riding hook "just for a couple weeks," and then I fell out of the habit, fell back into my late-night habits, and that combined with my recent difficulty sleeping, quickly made bus riding seem like an ordeal not to be borne. (Ridiculous, yes, considering that so many people who ride the bus are single parents working two and three jobs and sleeping hardly at all, but I never claimed to be anything but ridiculous.) My toe was 100% fine by the end of August, but I kept driving. There was guilt, but it was dwarfed by bad habits and exhaustion from chronic sleep deprivation.

So a stellar bus riding July was followed by an awful August and September. I skipped out (not entirely unconsciously) on the hottest month of the year, August, when reducing air pollution is extra important, and now the weather I love has arrived. It's all so convenient to reform now, right? But the self-punishment must end. I'm finally sleeping a bit better and so no longer have any good excuses. I will aim to do very well in the autumn and will do my best in winter as well, when the very worst pollution happens. I will see if I can make up the lost rides, or at least get close, so that my Hive Pass financial investment will not be a bad one by the time it expires.

That reminds me--the Hive Pass currently is only slated to be available through September 30, so get yours soon if you want one! I am resolved to cease my hypocritical streak starting next week, so I can in good conscience evangelize for public transit again....

To launch my renewed resolution, here's a bit of inspiration--a reminder of all that can be accomplished during one's time on public transit if one is focused and determined. Who knew a crocheted wedding dress could be so beautiful and within the reach of a busy working woman? Yes, public transit has its inconveniences, but it offers in exchange both hands free and no requirement to watch the road. Time to write the Great American Novel.... or tat the Great American Doily....

Ninety-third runner-up....for the next hour or so.

The Clear the Air Challenge ended yesterday, and participants have until August 6th to log in and enter any unrecorded eligible pollution-reducing trips they made in July. I finished entering my trips yesterday, and they came to a grand total of 117. As others log in and add their unreported trips, I'm quickly getting shoved out of the top 100. Though this is a good sign that so many people worked so hard at this, I wanted to post proof of my total for posterity....

Are you impressed, posterity? Walking and biking and mass transit are definitely less fun in the hottest part of the summer and the coldest part of the winter, but those are the two times we in the Salt Lake Valley most need to cut back on car use. I could have done more, but doing this much felt good, and the competitive element definitely made me try harder.

It was mostly trip chaining, public transit, and walking. One or two eliminated trips and carpool rides.

How hardy are you?

In case anyone's reading this, be reminded that *%#!! UTA doesn't think that running buses on holidays makes sense, so tomorrow (Pioneer Day) will have severely limited service: trains will be running on a Saturday schedule and buses on a Sunday schedule. And many buses have no Sunday service at all. So if you don't have a bike or carpool options, you can drive, or spend the day like a pioneer.......don your bonnet

and walk

and walk

and walk

and walk

aaaaaand walk.

No remote-controlled double-decker extra-wide dirigibles on the bus.

The bandwagon's half empty! Hop on, and count it as carpooling!

Just ten more days left in the Utah Clear the Air Challenge. The results thus far have been really disappointing, to put it bluntly. We are far behind last year in participation levels and even further behind the slightly higher goals set for this year. Please sign up and participate! It's events like this that bring us together as a community to collectively reimagine our lives in this pollution-prone valley and support each other in making gradual but meaningful changes. We need to do this. Air pollution is one of the great moral challenges of our times, one on which each of us will eventually be judged by future generations and (I believe) by God. We need to be able to tell our children and grandchildren that we accepted some inconvenience and a little extra work in order to live in a way that helped preserved our world and their health.

I've been trying to do well at this, but I've been far from perfect, and there is no way I should currently be in the top 100. But low participation this year has somehow put me there.

Knock me out of there! I'm not worthy!

You can sign up any time in July, and any measures you've taken in July to cut your car pollution you can retroactively claim as part of your tally. Those measures include carpooling (for anyone in the car except the driver), riding public transit, biking, walking, telecommuting, trip chaining (doing multiple errands by car without returning home between errands), and eliminating trips altogether (for example, making the effort to bring a lunch with you to work if you normally drive to a restaurant for lunch). The basic guidelines and the rules for logging your efforts are here. If you've made a particular eligible trip more than one day you can click on multiple days on the calendar and enter it just once. They also have a smartphone app that helps log new trips, though I don't have a smartphone, so I can't say how well that works.

Also, there are fabulous prizes.   :)




P.S. There's an important trip tracking tip that I'm having trouble linking to, so I'll add it as a comment on this post. It explains how you should enter a trip that involves multiple modes of travel (for example, walking/biking to the bus stop, then taking the bus, then returning in reverse order).

The Great Tomato Bible Disaster of 2014.

Forbidden fruit juice Bible stain.

I was so proud of myself yesterday morning. I got everything ready to go the night before and got up extra early so I could ride the bus across the Avenues to the community garden, water my baby plants, and then hurry down the hill to catch my normal bus to work (trip chaining on the bus! the Clear the Air people will have to give me like a million points). My trusty NIV Study Bible was in my bag, as well as my lunch, which included a beautiful juicy heirloom tomato in a tupperware. Well, actually the tomato was in one of the recycled grocery store deli plastic containers that I use as tupperwares because I'm cheap (see also The Great Yogurt Explosion of 2014)--containers that I know from sad experience should not be used to hold juicy things....but that tomato was only juicy on the inside! How was I to anticipate that sprinting eight blocks downhill with a delicate tomato bouncing around in a tupperware would cause it to bleed

all

over

my

Bible?

Kinda pretty, but not so portable anymore.

And all over my other stuff, too. By the time I noticed the gore fest inside my bag the poor tomato looked worse than stewed and had to be chucked. The Bible was the hardest to clean, and now it's all misshapen and sad from its tomato-blood and water baptisms. Thankfully I only paid $5 for it used on Amazon, so if I have to replace it it's no tragedy, but I feel that in the name of keepin' it real I should offer up my stupidity as a (humorous) cautionary tale, and remind all that while bus riding can be part of a nice drama-free lifestyle, certain accommodations have to be made--accommodations like purchasing tupperwares with screw-on lids for transporting juicy or potentially juicy food items. Accommodations like maybe not taking delicate tomatoes for lunch if you're likely going to have to run to the bus stop. Stuff like that. Common sense stuff that smart people wouldn't need to learn the hard way or read on a blog.

*Hangs head in shame.*

I sorta wish I hadn't cleaned the tomato juice off. It looked kind of cool--like blood gushing forth from the Bible, with a crescendo on the Revelation end. Tomatopocalypse!!

Clear the Air!

Yes, I've been continuing my bus riding all this time, but no, not with the frequency I'd hoped to. Y'see, my lifelong ability to sleep well at night has completely failed me in the last few months, leading to chronic exhaustion, and after the novelty of bus riding wore off, I was left with mornings like this:

Me, lying in bed: "Oooooh. I know I should get up to catch the bus, but I spent the last two hours tossing and turning--surely if I lie here for another 10 minutes I'll finally manage to get back to sleep and I can get in another 40 minutes of sleep before work. Surely it's worth a try, even though it means I'll have to drive to work? Sleep is soooo important!"

Me, lying in bed 50 minutes later: "Nope. No sleep and no bus. I'm so lame. Now I'm going to die of sleep deprivation AND Mother Nature hates me."

So I have two new resolutions:

1) get to bed by 10:30 each night, so that even if I still can't actually sleep more than five or six hours I can spend enough time in bed to get a decent amount of rest and be a cheerful and functional non-zombie

2) get my bus riding back on track by using the annual Utah Clear the Air challenge to harness my pride--because now if I don't ride the bus (or otherwise avoid using my car), all my Facebook friends will know I'm a huge hypocrite worthy of ridicule and maybe even a pie in the face.

So I've registered again this year for Clear the Air--y'all should join me! This year they even have a great smart phone tracking device you can use to ease the process of logging your trips. The program is a great way to help motivate us to not just decrease ozone pollution in the hot summer months, but get in the habit of thinking differently about transportation and improve our long term gettin'-around skills.....including making friends with UTA. It's fun to see the cumulative effects of all our small efforts, and dream of a future of cancer-free breathing and clear blue winter skies.

I'll see you on the bus.....or the sidewalk.....or the bike lane.....or the carpool lane.....or a solar-powered horse.....

Register Here! So Mother Nature won't stop washing your metaphorical underwear!