Foggiest clue

This morning was cold and shock, foggy. Well, what is a poor boy to do but go ride in it?

I could barely see across the street. As I neared the river trail it got even more dense (makes sense). Cars stopped passing me; I almost ran a stop sign because I couldn’t see it. It was like living in a new city. I can’t remember the last time we had thick fog in Tucson.

As I climbed away from the river trail and into the foothills I emerged from the shroud. The sun was shining bright. The Catalina Mountains slowly appeared. I looked down at my tights and saw water droplets frozen on them. Go sun, go!

I pedaled at an easy pace through quiet neighborhood roads and through the trails and washes that make up the suburban assault loop. Up here you’d never know that visibility was down less than to less than a tenth of a mile in the city.

I knew it once again as I descended back towards home. Back on the river trail I was once again surrounded by fog. Today would have been a cool day to do the soul ride–climbing and descending in and out of the fog. But that is an adventure for another day (two days from now, actually).

Yesterday was a day I’d rather not repeat. I sat for far too long staring at this screen, trying to multi-task 4 projects on 3 systems at the same time. My feeble brain just can’t take 12+ hours of programming/fiddling around in a day–at least not when I’m running code that takes a while to run. The problem is that I can get 2 or 3 things running (both locally and remotely), then I start wandering off to work on other things and before I know it my mind is going a million miles an hour. When a deadline looms you try extra hard to do things ‘efficiently’ (on the human side) which leads to even more burning human cycles, focused on how best to proceed. All of this wouldn’t be so bad if I had a clear objective in this project (finding trails). It’s a bit schizophrenic to begin with–there are now hundreds of ways to run the code and I could fiddle around with it for ever and ever, and even longer than that–if I wanted to. I definitely do not want to. But that’s also an attractive quality of the project–it isn’t clear what to do, so it’s interesting.

Last night I thought I was sick of working on this project, but really I was just sick of using computers, or had worked too long on it. It’s time to move on, for a while. It’s time to ride my bike.