Unicycling in the Snow

I've been putting on weight, and watching what I eat hasn't helped (mainly because I've been watching myself eat a lot of late snacks). I decided to start exercising again.

For years, when we lived in Manhattan and even more after we moved to Brooklyn, I used to unicycle many miles a week. At the maximum, when I was living in Prospect Park South in Brooklyn and working out of my mom's apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I rode 27 miles a day at least three (and usually ) fou

r days a week. But when we moved to New Paltz, my riding diminished initially to 4 miles a day and then, about a year ago, to almost zero. Almost unthinkably, there are days when I don't ride even one block.

In 2007, I signed up for a unicycle race across Nova Scotia, and after months of training, my pals and I rode about 170-180 miles each over a span of 5 days in the summer of '08. A few months after my return (and after recovering from various aches and pains including tendinitis in two different spots), I rode 89 miles on a September day, but I didn't ride a lot after that because a few months earlier, I'd bought my Smart Car. It's so small that I never have to search for parking spaces more than a block or two from my work, which means I can get out of the car and walk rather than ride.

A few weeks ago, this lack of action and increase in snacking brought about a scary sight on my scale: 185. When I turned 40, I decided to monitor my food really carefully and, aided by light exercise, I was able to drop from a high of 197 to about 165. I never want to see 190 again, and I'd really like to dip back under 170. With that in mind, I took to the trail. I rode our rode up and down our snowy road five times this morning and then, this afternoon, another three times. I thought it was about a half-mile each way, but according to an app that measures distance, it weighed in about about a third of a mile. All told, I rode about 6 miles today.

I'm going to keep this up as long as I can and see how it all goes.

New Paltz Restaurants: Suruchi

One of our favorite places to eat in New Paltz is Suruchi. I love the 'booths' (not really visible on the left side of the photo) . You tuck your shoes under your seats and sit cross-legged around a large table. The menu offers meat, vegetarian, and vegan choices in mild, medium, and high levels of spiciness. The appetizers, breads, and dinners are delicious, and they're so filling that we never fail to return home with enough for several lunches over the following days.

Tonight we ordered garlic naan to accompany our papadam, and Maeve ate white rice with various sauces. Emmett had a delicious entree I'd never tried before. I can't recall the name of it; I'm not a food critic, after all, and not much of a reporter. I had vegetable curry and Shirra had chicken curry, and Fiona, who's braces make it hard for her to eat certain foods, did quite well with a salad and some mulligatawny soup. We finished with some deserts that sounded a bit better than they tasted. One was a sort of mango ice cream that was overly frozen and barely thawed even as we tried the other, a type of fried dough ball that might have been tastier if it weren't bathed in some type of odd sauce. Maeve and I finished with a mango lasse, a smoothie that is one of our favorite drinks on earth.

The restaurant is currently open just Friday thru Sunday; we've gone there a few times when it's been closed, and they shut down for a few months over the winter. I'm glad they've reopened.

Snow Like Crème Brûlée

Today I cracked.

I would never have called shoveling 'fun,' but there was something about it that I always got a kick out of. People growing up in New York City rarely get a chance to shovel, and in the first four winters here in New Paltz, I always welcomed a chance to suit up in my tallest boots and hit the great outdoors to shovel for awhile. Sometimes I had to finish up the work of the plow man, sometimes I felt like making a luge run for the kids' sleds. Once in a while, I just felt like shoveling some snow. There was even one afternoon where I got started trying to dig out the driveway and found myself shoveling for so long that Shirra phoned to make sure I hadn't had a heart attack. I'd made it as past our driveway, past the playground, around the bend, past our neighbor's house, past the bridge, and nearly to the layby about a quarter mile away.

But this year, we've been hit hard. The timing of the first blizzard was perfect: The day after Christmas. Though we got over two feet of snow, it was light and fluffy stuff that was perfect for sledding at first and perfect for snowballs and forts a few days later. We visited my mom during the immediate aftermath of the storm, and when we found a parking spot on day one of our stay, I had to shovel for a minute before we were nestled safely next to the sidewalk, but the shoveling just added to the adventure. When it turned out that the City did its worst job ever in snow removal over the next few days, I ended up having to shovel the car out of a full-body cast thanks to the suddenly overzealous plowmen of the Sanitation Department... but that just made for a better story, too. My love of shoveling was as yet undiminished.

But that was back in late December. Then it snowed again a week later. This time, my students were back in school and I was back in business, and this meant driving into the City with a shovel in the back of my car. That shovel got plenty of use two weeks later, when the City's snow started to melt and then to freeze, creating sooty mounds of black ice, snow, and sludge. Luckily I was often able to do a bit of shoveling to get into a spot one day and then have the same spot waiting for me the next day: the advantage of having a Smart Car. At this point, I'd have still called myself a happy shoveler. At home, I didn't mind grabbing one of our many shovels -- whichever seemed best suited for the job at hand -- and going at it for five or ten minutes.

It wasn't until two days ago that I met some shoveling that I really didn't enjoy. I was in Manhattan, and I had found a smallish spot that only a Smart Car or a very aggressive Mini Cooper could possibly fit into. I prepared to back into the spot, but before putting the car into reverse, I figured I'd better shovel up some of the frozen clumps of ice that had taken up residence in my future parking spot. It so happened that it was raining softly at the time. As a result of the drizzle and the warmish temperature, there were wide rivers of cold water rushing westward towards drains that were already blocked by snow. The shoveling was hard going, and I was out of breath when I had finally managed to get most of the frozen grey stuff out of the street and into the sidewalk tree-planter next to the car. This last bit gave me some satisfaction as it clearly pissed off a doorman who could have chosen to help clear the street in front of his own building but who decided instead to make angry faces at my from inside his warm, dry lobby. At this point, sore and tired, I would have put myself squarely in the 'undecided' group if a pollster had happened to ask my opinions on shoveling.


Then yesterday, Shirra asked me to clear a path from our driveway to the propane tank near the house. While the distance was no greater than thirty feet long and two feet wide, the snow had turned our lawn into a huge crème brûlée. I tried various shovels, but in the end, I realized that I needed to choose the proper technique, too. In order to combat snow of this nature -- frozen on top and powdery beneath -- I needed to crack the top layer of ice and then scoop up the soft powder underneath. This turned each square foot of snow into a two-part job and essentially doubled the required work. My 60 square feet of snow became a 120-square-foot task, and that soon turned into a 500-square-foot burden when Shirra reminded me that I also needed to shovel a path from our road to the cottage.

Several Advils and some hot packs later, I've finally decided that the romance of shoveling is behind me. I just don't dig it anymore.