Le Tour de Town

One of my many hats is part of the executive committee for an event in our little town which I will refer to here as Le Tour de Town. This is really sort of several events in one. Several walks around the downtown and four different lengths of bike rides around the city and surrounding area. The purpose of the event is to highlight the various bikeways and greenways available for people to ride on the city.

Every year JP and I do the ride (we started with the 13 mile ride and this year for the first time JP finished the 50 mile ride) and AM and the girls do the four mile walk. Because of some of my duties (see below), I need to stop to SAG riders who have flat tires or other problems. So I asked JP to ride on ahead. In most years, this hasn't been too much of an issue and we have done most of the ride together. But this year, there seemed to be a lot more flats and problems, and JP probably ended up riding over half of the 50 mile on his own (although he was often with other cyclists.) At one point in time I wasn't sure if he was ahead or behind me because there is part of the route where you could make a short detour back to the start to pick up an extra rest stop for snacks. After riding about 12 miles without meeting up with him, I was getting really worried and started calling people at the command center for help tracking him down. Finally when I reached the third rest stop and inquired of the volunteer there, I found out that he was hammering away well ahead of me, so I started going as fast as a could to catch up. I finally did, and we rode together thru the next two rest stops. He actually became kind of famous on the course as he was one of the few kids doing the 50 mile and keeping up with a lot of riders, so people starting recognizing him and would talk to him, etc.. After riding together for about 10 miles, we came on a guy with a flat tire, which was apparently the third time it had gone flat that day. I had to spend a long time trying to figure out what the source of the continuing flats were and by the time I got back on the road it was twenty minutes later. I knew I wouldn't catch Jonathan by the sixth and final rest stop, but in fact I never caught him at all (some of the riders were giving me grief about him dropping his dad in his dust) and he rode across the finish line in triumph at least five minutes in front of me.

In all, we had somewhere between 1100 to 1300 participants (we have official registrants and then those who don't register because the walk and short rides are free.) I'm still going thru all the surveys but almost everyone seemed to have a great time.

My main responsibilities as chair of the route and safety committee are:
1) Designing the route and creating the maps for riders, walkers, and city permits (trying to incorporate as many sections of bikeways through out the city as possible.)
2)Marking the route with spray chalk (a more temporary form of spray paint) for the bike routes and taped arrows for the walk. This takes roughly ten hours of work because there are so many turns on all of the routes. Our "fastest" method now to mark is to drive with the "sprayer" in the shotgun seat, pull up to the exact position, throw on the hazard lights (and pray there isn't traffic behind us), the sprayer opens the door, lays down the spray stencil form, sprays the arrow, pulls it all back up into the car, we roll forward to the next arrow and repeat the process. We mark for 1 to four arrows per turn at about 25 foot intervals on the approach to turn, depending on the topography of the approach, with steep hills getting more arrows.
3)Recruiting and training the volunteers who serve as our on-bike SAG team (the help people who help riders with flat tires, small repairs, and other mechanical or first aid issues.)
4)Training the route safety volunteers who are positioned at intersections on the first 6 miles of the course to stop vehicle traffic to let the riders roll thru. (We get permission from the city to do this.)
5)Making and then doing data collection on the surveys after the ride/walk.



Going over location information with a route safety volunteer


Going over final instructions with our SAG team members



The mayor of our fair city chatting before giving the big opening speech for the ride.



JA with our one of our sponsors mascots.



The start line for the cyclists



One of our friends lining up for the walk


Spray chalk on our car door from marking the routes. (Hopefully it will wash out as advertised).

California visit

Sunday afternoon I left Tennessee to fly to California for a job interview. I arrived at the airport about midnight 10aC time, so I was pretty tired while trying to make a good impression on the head of the search committee who picked me up at the airport. I didn't get into my hotel room until 1 am 10aC time (11 pm CA time) and then had a 7 am breakfast appointment with two faculty members. Of course my circadian rhythm woke me up at 4 am CA time, and I was so nervous I couldn't go back to sleep, so I was secretly trying to suppress yawns the entire day.

After my breakfast meeting, I met with the Dean of the school and then went on a tour of the city with a real estate agent. My how expensive things are in the golden state. But you couldn't ask for a more walkable or bikeable or family friendly city! After the real estate tour, I had interviews and then a lunch meeting and then some more interviews and then it was time for my seminar. The department is pretty small, so it was pretty intimate. I felt like it went okay, but was not nearly as polished as when I gave my seminar to my own department. I had changed things around because I was saving my new grant and future directions for the chalk talk the next day, rather than having it at the end of the talk as in my own department. I got hit with lots of questions, which was good because it meant people were paying attention, but I felt like sometimes my answers were pretty lame.

After the grilling, I had a few minutes to go back to my hotel room to freshen up and then go to dinner with the search chair and the department chair. We had a great Thai dinner and it was extremely enjoyable.

Then back to the hotel fairly late and then had to work thru e-mails for le tour de town. And then I decided to rework some sections of my chalk talk for the next day. So it ended up being another late night.

The next day was another early breakfast, more interviews and then lunch with three people, one of which was perhaps the most antagonistic in my seminar the day before. It was kind of odd, this person was extremely aggressive in her questioning about science, but very friendly when it came to talking about the university and living in CA. So I don't know if she would vote for me or not.

After lunch, I had a few moments to prepare for my chalk talk, where I was suppose to talk about my teaching philosophy and my future research plans. The way it works is you start talking and then everybody jumps in with questions, and when you have covered everything to everyone's satisfaction, you move on to the next part. The chalk talk was scheduled for one hour, but it went for two and half. I don't know if that is a good sign about their interest or a bad sign that they don't think I have what it takes to cut it there.

After the chalk talk, I had a tour of potential lab space and I long talk with the department chair, (he is a great guy) and then off to an extremely interesting seafood dinner talking about obesity and diabetes.

After that it was home to the hotel room to crash and worked thru e-mail some more on le tour de town. The next morning I got up, worked more on le tour and then caught the van to the airport to make the long flight home to Tennessee.

JA's birthday

JA turned 10 this week. She has grown up to be a sweet young girl. (Okay, some of the time.)

AM had lunch with her at school, then we went to Red Robin for dinner and had some gourmet burgers and the bottomless bucket of fries. Then she stayed up to watched the Bee Movie which was one of her presents and to play with AM's new Wii (her mother's day present.)



For her birthday party she went to build a bear with some friends.

A Good Visit

Last week Nathan G. stayed for a few day along with his daughter and another friend. He was going through his graduation ceremony. His parents also came, although they stayed at another house. It was one of those very satisfying visits that make you so thankful for long friendships and make you wish that time and circumstances allowed for more frequent visits.

A long time ago, another friend of ours (MTN) once coined a phrase something like a "circle of ten". This stemmed from a political picnic where candidates running for local office gave their short stump speeches. MTN commented during the picnic that rather than say what most politicos did about why you should vote for them because of they had the answer to the city's problem, he would say that you should vote for him because his circle of ten, close friends with all different expertise, perspectives, and political leanings that could advise him. From that point in time, I started to think of that circle of friends as our circle of ten. Since that time, almost all of them have moved away from our fair city. Having Nathan G. back, along with Greg who has become a vicarious circle of ten member thru the e-mail conversations, back brought back the feeling of those halcyon days of young academic conversations, hopes and fears, and aspirations.

There are too many highlights and conversations of the visit to really recount, including a great BBQ and Wii tennis, but I think one of the most interesting and meaningful conversations was one about parenting with Nathan, his parents and I. I think all of the circle of ten, even those who retained the political party of their parents, tended to have grown up to have a very different world view than their parents, even while retaining the faith of their fathers. Our approach to life, to parenting, and to the gospel is strongly colored by our experience with our parents and by our academic training and to some extent I suppose by feeling more at home in the Mormon diaspora rather than in the heartland of Zion. It really was an impressively open conversation about disciplinary strategies, the role of parents, the meaning of family, etc... Hearing from three sides, the father, the mother, and the son now an experienced father in his own right, and the differences in the meaning of particular earlier events to the three of them was greatly enlightening. It also made me sad that in this life at least, I would never have such a three-way conversation.

I should also add that in the background of all this conversation is the reality that Nathan's other daughter had just undergone a bone marrow transplant with the hope that this will enable her to overcome a rare genetic disorder that has left her on the edge of death too many times. This little girl has been such an inspiration to us all as she has so bravely soldiered through with a sweet smile and love for everyone for so long all the hospital stays, tests, procedures, daily feeding through a tube, that have been part and parcel of her young life. We all pray that the transplant works and that she will one day get to live a pretty normal life.