lazy days
It is cold. The trees are barren. Winter is here. It was especially apparent when I went biking on Saturday morning.
What’s amazing is just three weeks ago I went biking on this same stretch of road with Jiro and one of his lab mates, back then the trees were still covered with autumn leaves.
Winter makes me lazy. It’s often tough to even get out of bed when it’s so cold out. But this year I’ve been trying to make a concerted effort to at least get a couple of hours of exercise each week, which usually means a bike ride on the weekends. This week I was planning to be ambitious and ride the Cantelow loop from my house, which is about 70 miles total with a good amount of elevation gain in the middle.
When I got to Winters I made the customary stop at Steady Eddy’s. Even in the middle of winter that place is filled with bikers. When I got there I saw that I had a text from my bro, he was planning to come up to Davis, so I ended up biking back home after a short lunch instead of hitting Cantelow. I took the South Davis loop home, so I ended up with about 40 miles, not too bad for a lazy Saturday, but still far short of my overly ambitious goal of 70 miles.
I ended up spending the afternoon playing golf with my bro. It reminded me of my bro’s first year in Davis. Back then we were basically both bums. We had bought a monthly pass to Davis Golf Course, and ended up playing every single day, sometimes twice a day. Somehow since then we had become responsible adults. My bro was looking for a place to save money– I advised him to open a Roth IRA and taught him how I pick my stocks. Seriously, when did that happen? When did the Hong brothers become responsible adults?
After church on Sunday my bro left to go back to the bay and I ended up hitting the driving range with Sam. Afterwards, since I was already in the neighborhood, I decided to drop by at Dan’s place to say hi. His wife has been in Taiwan, so he was taking care of the kids on his own. Mr Mom, he half jokingly calls himself. I ended up staying and helping him to prepare dinner, not that he needed the help. I consider myself decent with a chef’s knife and with cooking in general, but he’s on another level. His family used to own a Chinese restaurant, I learned, which explains why he can handle himself in the kitchen.
Before his wife Angie left for Taiwan, she had completely filled their fridge with veggies. We made short work of unhealthifying those veggies by wrapping them up as eggrolls and deep frying them. As a funny little side story, Sam had made appetizers for a church potluck that he was going to, only to find that the potluck was actually the day before. So he ended up bringing them to Dan’s place and helped wrap eggrolls too.
With three kids, with the youngest still in diapers, things are pretty busy for Mr Mom. There’s not a lot of lazy days for him, at least not like my days, where I can spend an entire morning biking and an entire afternoon playing golf. But he’s still able to go out and play, we’re planning a snow trip at the end of January and possibly an overnight biking trip sometime in the next few months.
I’ve always liked kids, and they seem to get along well with me, probably because my brain is still largely a kid’s brain. But I’ve always valued my freedom and lack of responsibility more. But as I get older I’m starting to realize that the responsibilities aren’t all that bad. Maybe it’s okay to give up lazy days. And in truth there’s still lazy days for Mr Mom, they’re just different. When I drove up to Dan’s place, he was outside watching his kids play with a homemade kite. Is that more fun than biking and golf? I don’t know. It’s hard to say. It’s just different.
