It was raining this morning and threatening to continue, so I bailed on the SBR group ride yet again. (I haven't yet been on one.) For one thing, inexperienced riders and the first rain in a few weeks possibly shouldn't mix; for another, there would be a smaller turnout (five people, as it happened), and since those would all be hardcore vets, there'd be no one for me to ride the speed limit with. I went to aikido instead, since I haven't exercised this week, and that turned out to be an excellent choice.

Check out Speaker Pelosi's proposed legislation.

I thought, this afternoon, on the marvelous process of invention and discovery, and was comforted by the fact that, in the event of an apocalypse, the idea of chocolate chip cookies will almost certainly survive. It only takes one person to keep the idea alive, even if they can't implement it themselves. Isn't that worthwhile? You can keep telling everyone until it reaches someone with ingredients and an oven. If anyone in the US or Canada survives, so will chocolate chip cookies. It gives me that warm fuzzy feeling.

Since I'm not doing aikido as much these days, I'm all the more startled by how cool it is when I do. Setting aside what the training has done internally over the years, it turns out I've shaped my body to be able to do some pretty wacky, near-acrobatic things, in a kind of condition that I've never been in, not even as a kid. It's not simply physical: as I do the things I do in aikido, I rejoice in movement, in being able to do these things, to know where my body is, in the awareness of what I'm doing and what's going on around me. It wasn't that long ago that I'd never, ever felt that.

What a feeling, to no longer be afraid of falling down!