My truck broke. It's sitting, immobile, in the driveway right now - and has been since last September. It needs to have about $1k worth of repairs done to it. Until very recently I was paying child support, which left little dough laying around. I just finished paying my child support. 14 years. I plan to fix the truck soon.

My job is 20 miles from the house.

Luckily, Houston has a pretty good public transportation system, so I started riding the bus. The catch is that I live on one side of town and work on another side of town, so I had to take a bus downtown and then take another bus from downtown to work. That usually took from 1.5 (rarely) to 2.0 (usually) hours. On the weekends it could take 3 hours. On the weekends the buses run less frequently because there are fewer people working.

One day, in the middle of one of those three hour rides, I became incensed. I said "Holy cow, I could ride my bicycle to work more quickly than I could ride the bus." It turns out I can usually make it home more quickly on the bike than I could on my best day on the bus.

Plus, I don't have to deal with smelly winos or very vocal religious nuts when I ride my bike.

So, I gave it a whirl. I started riding. Then a funny thing happened. People started saying "wow, have you lost weight?" "Man, you're looking good!" Mind you, this was after a lifetime of struggling w/ my weight. Hearing stuff like that is like viagra for a fat man's ego.

I've got all kinds of motivation to pedal in. From the horrendously odoriferous pig that gets on the bus at Gessner and instantly turns the atmosphere on the entire bus into a noxious fume, to the weight loss, to the general health thing (approaching 50 and I don't want to go from a heart attack any time soon), to the time and the money savings - for me - there's little question as to whether I'll ride the bike or the bus.

The bus is only an option when there are actual thunderstorms going on out there.