25 (or possibly less) things that are true about Jill, for now

1. I was tagged by my first friend, Rebecca. We’ve been friends since we were four. We used to go on expeditions from her house to her grandparents’. It was about a quarter of a mile and involved crossing a meadow, so we had to be sure to bring snacks. She also owned the entire set of hardback Nancy Drew books – the ones with the yellow spine, and I think we might’ve read them all.

2. I think it’s a good thing to be constantly changing, so I don’t expect that all of the things I write here will necessarily be true of me even by this time next year. But I’ll start out with the more important stuff.

3. God kindly grew me up in a Christian family, where I learned my faith every day. I didn’t experience any of the stereotypical negative effects of being a “Pastor’s Kid,” and I think that’s because my parents just put a lot of prayer and faith and honest goodwill into raising my brother and me.

4. I met my husband Chad at a Bible Study at our friend Leyla’s place. We’ve been married for 8 ½ years.

5. I love the things we do to keep our lifestyle simple, like:

6. Living in a small space. Every time we’ve moved since we’ve been married, we’ve moved into a smaller space, and I’ve always liked it better. Quicker to clean, better organized, simpler.

7. Living near all the places we frequent. We can bike or walk to everything. Sometimes our car doesn’t move for weeks.

8. Not owning a pet. I dislike the very idea of owning a pet.

9. Not owning a lot of stuff. The less stuff I own, the less time I have to spend taking care of my stuff, organizing my stuff, looking at my stuff.

10. I do, however, own four bicycles.

11. I love places, exploring places, getting to know places and feeling an ownership for a place. I name my bikes after places. They are:

12. The bike I ride most is an orange 1984 Trek sport-touring with a Carradice bag on the back for groceries or library books and a front light powered by generator hub. It’s called the “Oswego” after the village-without-even-a-post-office in Indiana where my home church is located.

13. My fastest bike is a red Gunnar Roadie named “Guntersville” after a favorite family vacation spot, the Walkers’ cabin on the Tennessee river in Alabama.

14. My city bike is a blue Suteki mixte (sloping top-tube, a.k.a. “girls’ bike”) with a front basket and matching blue fenders. It’s called the “Urbana.” I also have a mountain bike, but it’s loaned out right now and hasn’t yet shown enough personality to earn a name or a numbered item.

15. I’ve never really mastered any particular skill – like speaking a second language or playing a musical instrument or being especially good at some sport or game. I attribute this to a whole set of character flaws ranging from fear of failure to laziness and a tendency to do things by halves. I’d like to improve.

16. I make rules for myself, like:

17. I don’t take up any new hobby or commit to any regularly-occurring event that excludes Chad. This rule occurred to me after a conversation with my Grandma White in which she said she thought husbands and wives should do their best to have hobbies in common.

18. Each day, I don’t allow myself to read anything else until I’ve read my Bible. I love this rule.

19. I like to watch football. However, sometimes I feel bad about liking football when I see people get badly injured, as it looked like Willis McGahee was in the Steelers/Ravens game.

20. I’m attracted to philosophies of Christian pacifism like the Mennonites’ and Leo Tolstoy’s.

21. Tolstoy is my second-favorite author. I think Constantine Levin, a character in Anna Karenina, is a lot like Chad.

22. George Eliot is my favorite author. I like her because she’s kind to her characters. If you’re beginning to read George Eliot, I suggest starting with Silas Marner, and then going to Adam Bede and Middlemarch. Leave The Mill on the Floss and Romola for last, or just skip them.

23. I prefer books that were written a hundred or more years ago. When I read more recent authors, I often get the feeling that they’re lying to me.

24. I don’t always follow directions. I’m stopping at 24, and I’m not tagging anybody. But I’d love to read random facts (in any quantity) about any of my friends who feel like sharing them.

fun times in Park City

What to do when one doesn't have to work and one's family is taking a vacation? Join them! We drove out to Park City to spend some time with my sister, her husband and 2 kids, and my parents.

At the beginning of the week there was much sunshine and warm temps. The younger group all went to Heber City to ride tubes down a hill. The advantage of going to an official tubing place is that a mini-rope tow pulls the rider and tube up the hill, saving considerable energy compared to trudging back up the hill. Here's the gang after cruising down the hill all hooked together. Fun ride!

Despite the massive development of the Park City area in the last 30 years, one doesn't have to walk far to see signs of the pre-yuppy settlers that did some ranching in the area. Prior to that, there was significant mining in the area and the remains can be observed throughout the Park City Mountain ski resort. We took a couple apples to feed to this neighborhood horse.

And now for too many words on skiing.

During my teenage years, skiing was by far my favorite activity and I tried to ski at least 10 days per year. This included a number of one day events in which I'd wake up at 4am, drive 4 hours to Kirkwood, ski all day, and drive the 4 hours home. I still enjoy skiing very much but with some reservations.

I haven't experienced anything similar to making a perfect turn in skiing. On steep runs, I try to predict the snow texture, hill slope, and how much fear I can handle when planning my turn. The turn consists of what angle to move my skis, where to land, and how hard to drive my skis into the snow. When this works out correctly, pure bliss. When I'm wrong, down I go. And here's the great thing about skiing: nearly always the cost of falling is neglible because snow is soft which allows me to take more risks than I otherwise would.

But I've known one guy that was killed in an avalanche, met the widow and son of another guy, and have skied in the remains of an avalanche that killed 2 people (see red dot in the photo below taken from The Canyons website. This is the north slope off of the 9990 chairlift.). So really, it's not all that safe.

My other hangup is chairlifts. A great joy of cycling is riding to the top of hills and then cruising down feeling like I earned the descent. Maybe I don't feel that I've really earned the skiing downhill. But I'm really not too interested in hiking to the top while wearing ski boots and carrying skis.

So I now ski 1 or 2 days each year, usually with the family, sort of. Nobody in my immediate family actually skis with me now. But I look forward to the day when my daredevil niece joins me.

back from Utah

Our roadweary souls are back in Abq after spending a little over a week in Park City, UT. I'm too tired to write much, but here's a pic from our 12 hour drive home located somewhere between Shiprock and Gallup. Love that snow in the desert.
Look for reports of our adventures soon.

short trip to OH

I went to Ohio on Thursday and just got back today (Saturday). No more than 5 years ago, I'm almost sure that I didn't know a soul in the whole state. Suddenly, everyone lives there.


Mom and dad-in-law don't live there, but after a short drive, there they were. We ate dinner and drove around the town together.



Professor Todd and Leigh live there. I stayed at their lovely home on Friday night. It was very nice to catch up with them.

Oh yeah, I went there for an interview at Ohio Northern University. Nice place! Did you know that the footballs used in the NFL are made in Ada, OH, home of ONU?

observations from home

Tomorrow will mark the 3rd week of my unemployment, so it seems that now is good time to put down some thoughts about this experience.

First, I don't miss my old job. At all. This has been surprising to me because though I didn't care for it much, I certainly didn't hate it. The biggest issue for me was having zero coworkers in the traditional sense, which I take to mean people that work together. I can and do miss people, but I don't miss doing tasks in my old office.

Second, financially this report is a bit early. Due to the week delay between work done and paycheck as well as the some saved vacation time, I have more money right now than had I worked the last 3 weeks. But this state ends very soon. And I haven't had to pay for health insurance yet.

Third, I've been pretty busy. I have had one interview and will have another on Friday. Preparations for these interviews takes some time, especially for Friday's as I need to give a 30 minute presentation. Other tasks have been writing cover letters, filling out applications, and reviewing a paper for a journal. I had Staples print out the paper for me since we don't have a printer. The Staples employees said the paper looked boring and very long. Does my career field lack excitement? I found the paper to be moderately exciting but will recommend a couple significant changes. Look for it soon in Water Resources Research.

Fourth, I have taken up much more of the household chores. While working, I did dishes maybe once a week and only sometimes helped cook dinner. Now, I do most of the dishes and help with cooking most meals. By the way, another nice feature of living in a small apartment is the small number of chores to do.

I made ice cream. Maybe I used too much cream and too little milk, because it was very creamy and not so frozen.
Still, we enjoyed eating it.


Fifth, I have been doing more bicycling, but not as much as I would have expected. With temps in the 50s for the whole month of Jan, the riding weather has been fantastic. But I was sick much of last week. Still, I haven't done a ride longer than 1 1/2 hours yet.

Finally, I'm in a new-to-me-and-not-my-favorite mental state. During working life, I spent most of my time living my life -- doing my job and living my family life. Now, I spend a good deal of time imagining our lives with each prospective job/location. So my mind is several months in the future while my body remains in the present.

Hannah Coulter -- Jill's take

Hannah Coulter had one great regret in her life, and that was the way she'd talked to her children about her own childhood. She was afraid that, in telling them stories of the hard times she'd endured, she'd given them the idea that hardships were to be avoided and that it was possible to "move on" to some better life. She had wanted her children to have a good education so that they could have a better chance than she'd had. Later, she learned not to complain about the chance she'd had. The chance she'd had was her life. She'd had sadness and troubles in her life, but a lot of happiness too. Hannah was afraid that her children had left home looking for a better place that they would never find.

I do not believe in "the pursuit of happiness." People who are pursuing something better are usually unhappy, because they are always comparing what they have now to what they might someday have or where they live now to where they might someday live.

I know that there is no better place than our our little piece of Albuquerque. Having biked and walked this place extensively, I know it well enough to love it. We may move, and if we do I will bike and walk that place until I love it, and then there will be no better place for me than that place.

But that will take some time because learning to love a place involves learning to love the people in the place. Here we have a "membership." We have people. I love my part of Albuquerque because I know it because I live with it. And I love my people here because I know them because I live close to them and see them often. Even the wondrous Facebook doesn't allow me to live with people that I just don't live with. There is nothing like actual proximity for growing love.

So I preach the membership like Burley Coulter did: love your place, love your people. You should know by now that your place and your people are good. Live in your place. Live with your people. Proximity is a gift from God. Don't waste it looking off into the distance.

Angels and ice cream

While riding back home from Coldstone (finally got around to using my birthday gift certificate), I noticed one of my old bikes parked at a bike rack. I sold 4 bikes in 2007 via Craigslist, and this was the first one I have seen post-sale. Very little had been changed since I sold it; same tires, same mismatched brakes (sidepull front and centerpull rear), and the angel sticker.

On a visit to Santa Fe, a woman approached me and asked if I believed in angels. I was a little caught off-guard, but answered that yes I do believe in angels. Satisfied by the answer, she gave me a 0.5 by 1 cm sticker (and one to Jill also) for protection. I stuck mine to the back side of the seat tube just below the seat stays. Jill placed hers somewhere, but I think it fell off.

I wonder if I still get the benefit of the sticker since it was given to me? Or does the new rider (or any of his friends) benefit, though he/they might not know it exists? My friend Dave thinks that it's inevitable that bike riders will get in a bike wreck some day. I disagree. I hope that I'm right.

On Saturday, I decided to join the club ride from my favorite local bike shop. In my mind, a group ride will be a fun time of cruising smoothly in a paceline, enjoying the draft of a large number of people until one takes a pull in the front. Instead, it was more of a disjointed slug of people that stopped to wait periodically for the dropped riders only to drop them again straight away. But my dream lives on!

I talked to a young man that admired my big boy blue bike. I told him that I liked his older bike frame with new components. This got him to explain that he had to replace the fork and who knows what else due to a crash. He was riding down Comanche (that's our road) perhaps using his clip-on aerobars (details are fuzzy for good reason) when a car made a left turn in front of him. He supermanned through the closed passenger window, cutting his face and breaking his back and something else (I forget).

I'm always curious to know how crashes happen, partly to not repeat them myself and partly for the same reason people slow to look at car crashes. In this particular case, I suggest that though the car driver was technically at fault, better awareness by the rider could have prevented it. Not getting hurt is much better than not being at fault. Separate turn lanes are present on Comanche for all roads, so a rider should take note whenever a car enters one. Also, riding on aerobars is not such a good idea when cars are present because the brake levers take time to grab.

Finally, I had a 70 minute phone interview this morning for a very challenging job. I feel good about my performance, but my experience does not line up perfectly with their projects. We shall see.