I’m joining a group of co-workers riding their bike into work today, so it’s a short morning behind the keyboard. The ride is an annual thing, associated with our focus on health and welfare. Last year it was attended by 15 or 20 folks, and had a bit of fun with it. Lisa was talking last night like she may join us–she’s been threatening to ride her bike into work for weeks.
Lisa and I have different approached to bikes. We discussed it a bit at dinner last night, which due to a series of events, we ate at a restaurant we biked to. Lisa views the mere act of riding a bike as fun in itself. She doesn’t care where she’s going, she just enjoys the process. I, on the other hand, am okay with biking someplace, but I do not particularly enjoy it for what it is. To me, biking is a matter of getting where I want to go. I get value out of the exercise, I get value out of the steps, but I neither enjoy or despise the actual process. For me, the decision to bike someplace is merely a matter of cost (time and slight physical exertion) and value (“steps”…which I like to count, and feeling well due to exercise).
So, for example, today I trade about 40 minutes of time that I could use doing something else important (writing) for about two thousand “steps” and a bit of exercise. I also trade away the emotional value of continuing the streak of writing each morning that I had built recently (though it is not lost upon me that the fact that I squeezed this bit in says that I could have gotten in a few words if I had entered the morning with the right frame of mind. Sigh. Perhaps I’ll get a few words in at lunchtime. We shall see.
On the positive note, let me take what time I have this morning to say that …
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I’m happy to report that my short story “A Matter of Pride” is available for the Kindle now on Amazon.
This is a story that first appeared in Analog some time ago. It’s a piece that has a fun tone to it–especially, perhaps, if you come from a corporate environment and have a job that’s somewhat technical in nature–or, perhaps, if you work at the … well, I’ll not go too far here.
As with “The Test of Time,” which was released last week, it’s a story that always fared well in the customer rating game while it was on Fictionwise, so I hope you like it.
See you tomorrow. Or maybe tonight.
Life is so unpredictable, eh?