My first charity bike ride

I heard of and managed to get a 'rider scholarship'. Very excited to be doing my first charity bike ride. The ride is from Boston to Provincetown and riders have a choice of doing either Boston to Sagamore Bridge, Sagamore Bridge to P'town, which are each about 63 miles or the whole thing which is 125 miles.

I'm going to do the first leg, and then at Sagamore Bridge decide whether I want to go further or not - at or after that point if you decide you've had enough all you have to do is get to the next rest area - they're 15 miles apart - and they'll drop you at Ptown.

Earlier this year I did a 44 mile ride which is the most I've gone in a single day. The most before that was 30ish but I haven't been riding much since. Hopefully I'll be able to rack up a lot of miles before the ride.

Go to http://www.harbortothebay.org/ for more info and let me know if you'd like to support me for the ride ie contribute to the cause which is AIDS, and for the me the really cool thing is that 100% of all contributions go directly to the cause, in part because they are fully staffed by volunteers. Happy riding!

Boston to get bike sharing program

Just saw this - implementing this would be just a great step for so many reasons:

- reduce pollution

- reduce noise

- reduce gas consumption

- ease pressure on other modes eg bus and train

- reduce traffic congestion

- improve physical fitness

- improve heath

- reduce health care costs (something we desperately need with the 'success' of our universal health program :-)

- save money

We have a long way to go before we catch up to other cities. NYC added 200 miles of bike lanes last year. Boston? 5 miles. Bicycling mag named Boston the worst city to bike in THREE times!

Food meant for kids

I rarely buy any food or drink outside: I much prefer buying it at Market Basket (my favorite grocery store!) and then taking whatever I need with me. Obviously I can't do this all the time but I do it when I can, for 2 reasons: I save money and I get to eat what I want to eat which is generally a healthy choice. 

This doesn't mean I don't eat 'junk' food, but it does mean I look carefully at the nutrition label of every thing I buy and choose what I believe is the best value for something that is low in saturated fat, sodium and sugar and no trans fats. I don't want to get side tracked from my topic for today so I'll save my transfats diatribe for another post :-)

So we were out and Gerard wanted something to drink and since I was getting coffee for myself I allowed him to choose what he wanted. He wanted a strawberry drink which turned out to be a Garelick Milk Chug. I looked at the label and could not believe that it had 48 grams of sugar per serving. The second ingredient was that scourge of our times, (well not as scourgy as trans fats but still) high fructose corn sugar.

How does anyone design a drink meant for anybody that has that much sugar in it? And that too for kids? It's mind boggling. And Garelick is probably patting itself on the back for creating a healthy drink. Nutrition in general can lead me down so many different paths that I'm going to stop here, happy with the fact that I've restarted my blog.

Before I go, I have to throw in one little thing about high fructose corn sugar: check this link out http://www.foodsdatabase.com/LinkedLabel.aspx?FoodId=6660. The second AND third ingredients! Alright, good night

Changes

Ok, so clearly I havent been blogging on anything remotely like a regular basis. So, here's a list of topics that I will be writing on in the next few days:

- nutrition as it relates to children (Garelick Milk Chug)
- mountain biking, my latest passion
- got to go right now so I'll continue this list and/or expand on the above later, hopefully tonight!

HD radio and music in general

Vendor Etiquette

I just replied to a post at Mathew Diehl's SEM blog. You can read his blog and my response here

Not happy but lucky

Woke up this morning to find out that someone broke my car window presumably to rob something. I say presumably because nothing was taken. There were two pairs of sunglasses that the perp clearly saw because he kept them on the seat. I also had a GPS in the glove compartment and it seemed like the glove wasnt even opened.

So I was ticked off because I was on my way to a breakfast meeting and got delayed because I took a few pics and had to clean up the glass (amazing the amount of glass from one window) before I could leave. I couldnt get it fixed today which means I have to wait till Mon morning and drive around with the driver's window open.

All of which is inconvenient but I am glad that nothing was stolen.