Mission accomplished: biking this week

There's so many things going on that I need to tell you guys about. My apologies for not posting lately. I've been on a self-imposed media blackout until I actually manned up and biked to work this week. And I did bike to work this week! It wound up being on Thursday, notwithstanding Mrs. MM's advice to the contrary.

Last weekend I was in California for a conference. It was for my job and that means I'll be getting reimbursed for pretty much all my expenses. I paid for things like hotel, air fare, transportation, and food myself. It's actually been affecting my monthly expenses since February so I'm looking forward to getting reimbursed — it's on the order of $1500.

Last weekend's trip affected more than the time flow of my finances. My sleep schedule was way off on account of the time difference, daylight savings time, and a red-eye back to the east coast. That's my excuse for not biking Monday. Then I was expecting it to thunderstorm on Tuesday. Turns out the weather report was dead wrong, it was beautiful all day, and I lost an awesome opportunity for biking. That sucked.

Then there's Wednesday. There are a few things I've been keeping close to the chest, and one of them is the reason I didn't bike on Wednesday. I'll let the cat out of the bag (so to speak) and just mention that our household has grown by two furry members in the past month. I'll give you all the details later; what you need to know for now is that I agreed to walk the dog on Wednesday, so that was my excuse for not biking.

Biking was awesome. It's spring, it's beautiful out. The sun was shining when I biked to work and when I biked home. I wore shorts instead of sweat pants, a t-shirt instead of multiple layers. My bag was lighter and less bulky because summer clothes are lighter and less bulky than winter clothes. Everything was awesome. It was approximately infinity times better than biking during the winter and I can see now why people get so excited about biking. I'm looking forward to ramping up my bike commutes.

I used an app on my smartphone to record my path with GPS. My Tracks from the good folks at Google measured the time, speed, distance, even elevation of my commute. This is added motivation for me, so that I can track when I get faster and see improvement. The 3.4 miles took 25 minutes which really isn't bad. I think by car it's like 15 minutes but I should time it to make sure. Because of the traffic lights I'm pretty sure I can get my commute time by bike pretty close to my commute time by car.

Stay tuned for so many new happenings on my Mustachian journey.