​Sometimes you need to say “screw it” to all that healthy veggie stuff, pull out the frozen peas, microwave them and chow down.

I’m all for eating healthy. My wife and I love many different types of fresh vegetables and work at cooking them different ways to add flavor and diversity.

Most cooking is not difficult. You can steam vegetables quite quickly, and find different types of spices to vary the flavor. Most days that works for us.
 
There are days though you put together a main dish, focusing on that, and you completely forget about the side dish. You’re tired when you get home. Motivation is gone. You’ve pulled together creative recipes relentlessly and your brain goes dry.
 
Look in the freezer. Pull out the tiny frozen peas. Toss them in a microwavable container with a bit of water, and set the timer to two minutes. Pull them out and see if they are warm (you don’t want them to get mushy). If not, give it another minute.
 
Taste them. If you haven’t eaten peas for a while, you’ll find frozen peas are nirvana. They melt in your mouth. Swirl them around your tongue. Swallow gently.
 
There’s a lot to be said for simplifying your meal. Not every evening do you have to put together a masterpiece. Many nights, it’s enough to pull together something nutritious, or dare we say it, something that’s just not bad for you. If you can pull that off, it’s a success that drives you to another day.
 
With all the food shows on TV these days, and all the new information about nutrition, you can go psycho trying to keep up. There’s no way ANY human can absorb all the potential dishes ballyhooed about in Parade Magazine, cookbooks and “Battle of the Feisty Chefs” on the Food Channel.
 
It’s impossible to keep up with all that slicing, dicing and spicing. The shows may be fun to watch, the cookbooks enjoyable to read and Parade Magazine recipes interesting to speculate on, but really? Are you going to cut out the instructions or take notes while watching the TV and replicate what they’re sharing with you?

Sure, that makes sense when you pull together a special meal, or you have extra time to spend at the grocery story speculating on what comes next to your dinner table.
 
That’s not the case when you slog it out during the week. Then it’s time for those frozen peas. Just make sure not to use too much water when you microwave them, and be sure to save enough in the bag in case you need to ice a sprained ankle.

​Everyone has a personal learning curve. We develop ways of doing things over the years, whether it’s how to solve a specific problem or hone a skill. There’s a technique we use, and over time it becomes our accepted way of doing things.

That doesn’t mean our way is good. Or the best. Or the most efficient. It’s just that we’ve decided to approach something a certain way and we’re in a comfort zone, so we proceed the way we did before.
 
I continue playing a good friend in “Words With Friends.” Maybe you’ve played it. I’ve always approached it as a version of the board game Scrabble, and that led to my downfall.
 
My friend demolishes me repeatedly. For the past three years, she has beaten me 157 times and I have beaten her once.  She regularly beats me by over 200 points. You’d think I’d learn to play the game differently, but no, I keep trying to play it like Scrabble and make tough words that please me.

You don’t win that way. As demonstrated, I lose over 99 percent of the time. This doesn’t deter me from starting a new game each time I lose. In fact, I started to thin part of the reason I lost was because I went first and the letter tiles you get for your opening gambit are almost always horrible (U, R, M, N, E, L, T, for example). See if you can make some big words that give you a lot of points with those letters.
 
Maybe if I waited until she started the next game, by going second I might improve my score. But I got the feeling she felt sorry for me and wouldn’t start the next game, so I continued to come back for further punishment and would take the opening shot.

But I’ve learned. In the past year, I lost by less than 100 points a few times. MORAL VICTORY!
 
Then, oddly, the past couple of months, I’ve found the gap narrowing further and my play improving. There’s a bit of strategy involved, one I’ve stayed away from until now because I’m a word purist and reject the notion of playing around with the letter tiles to see where they get rejected or accepted by the software program running the game.
 
Now that I’ve learned it, and accepted it (which is a whole ‘nother ballgame), I’m bearing down on my opponent, closing in, starting to get a taste of what you have to do to repeatedly increase your score. It’s a subtle change, testing out words to see what works and how the program responds, rather than solely relying on your intuitive brainpower.

I’ve avoided this until the last few months because I wanted to challenge my brain and not work within the parameters of the game’s program. Now I’ve learned. I’ve accepted how it works (which far too frequently involves giving you letters that don’t work together and don’t fit into any of the words already played), so you have to take what the game gives you in terms of opportunity.
 
It’s kind of a good lesson for life, too. Learn what works. Find how to work the system more efficiently. When this happens, things start to fall into place.

I’m not winning yet, but I’m getting closer. The words are smaller. I don’t understand all of them. But my scores are going up. I’ve learned.

​We are all (or become) wimps about something. We may be that way from the day we’re born or we get there through hard work or giving up. For anyone honest about him or herself, there are ways we just don’t measure up.
The past couple of weeks in Wisconsin, the temperatures in Wisconsin have hovered around freezing in the early morning hours. It might be a few degrees above 32 or a few below. Doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that I have seat warmers in my car. I use them. It makes me think of myself as a wimp.
 
Ten years ago, I would NEVER have considered turning on seat warmers in those temperatures. Now I look forward to it. I click the switch to “high,” and head out to work. It doesn’t matter that I turn the heater off after about 10 minutes. I’m still a wimp.
 
I look forward to the cold. I also looking forward to feeling the heat penetrate my back ever-so-slowly as I head out on the morning commute. There’s cocoon-like feeling, as if the elements can’t get inside the car. Once it warms up a bit, and the body has acclimated, the seat heater doesn’t matter any more.
 
As the weather chills, I find myself wimping out in other ways, too. One of my favorite things to do is head to the basement, where the temps are lower than the main floor of our house, and pull a comforter on to watch a sporting event. I feel wimpy, but also good, about this. The comforter helps if the weekend nap is coming up. You add to the good feeling of being in a cave, protected, covered, safe, with the ballgame helping you doze.
 
I could be a non-wimp and gut it out and sit in the easy chair without any covers over my body. I would probably still nap. But I prefer this wimpiness of covers over my body, drawing my arms in, and piling pillows next to the side for added comfort.
 
Covers and car seat warmers aren’t the only things that help me down the wimp path. We also now have stand-alone heaters to keep temperatures in specific areas of the house warmer than what the central heater does. Yeah, sometimes we use those space heaters just for a small space (like right next to your feet while you watch the game and take a nap 😊) because the central heating hasn’t kicked in, so I guess you could say in those situations I’m not a wimp. But I still think I am.

Comforters
It feels good. That’s probably the bottom line if you suspect yourself of becoming a wimp. You give in to something you’ve been denying yourself because it’s easier or makes you feel more comfortable. Like you’ve earned it.
 
I now find myself wearing a winter cap around the house if I’ve been outside wearing it in cold weather. Yes, there is way less hair to keep the top of my scalp warm than there was 15 years ago, but wearing it around the house is another wimp indicator.
 
Despite heading repeatedly down the wimpy path, I hold some hope for myself: after working out, the body warmed and revved up, I open the driver’s side window to refresh the car as winter’s call blasts inside. Once the interior cools down though, it’s time for seat warmers again.

Chapter One
Leaving Milwaukee Behind
May 1, 1982. Tom Ake, Carl Lindquist, and I head to a local dive for breakfast on Oakland Avenue on Milwaukee’s East Side. Our breath makes thick white plumes in the air. The temperature hovers around freezing. I’m going to stoke up for a 100-mile bike ride south as part of my first day on a four-month bicycle journey by myself across North America. Nerves, yes. Excitement, yes. Trepidation, yes.
Tom, Carl, and I work at Sentry Foods on Downer Avenue and attend UWM (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) with varying degrees of focus. I’ve spoken to my professors and have either finished up my classes early for the semester or they’ve allowed me to take the final when I get back at the end of the summer. They support this quest.
My older brother Peter and his wife Pat gave me a pair of pants/shorts that can be adjusted (you can shed the bottom half if it starts to get warmer). I wear these to start the day.
We eat. Goodbyes are said. I launch my bicycle loaded with bare minimal necessities (a sleeping bag, a day’s worth of food, a one-person tent, a flashlight, one change of underwear, a shirt, a pair of socks, a pair of pants, two books to read, my journal, and a map of Wisconsin/Illinois).
There is no GPS, no smart phone, no Internet, no credit card. I have $220 in my pocket to make it four months, and I know that I will have to work at some point along the way to continue this trek. Multiple friends have donated $1, $5, $10, and $20 bills and signed them so that when I spend them, I will remember their faces and our friendship. Tom’s and Seth Duhnke’s, another Sentry coworker, have been stored in a special place for motivation. Their words resonate about philosophy, jazz, and the journey of life we all must choose to experience on our own, the challenges we face, the niche we carve on the planet.
The map will get me through southeast Wisconsin and into northern Illinois. I’ve chosen only to bring that one section with me. As I approach or cross state borders, the plan is to pick up the next map at that point. I can’t get ahead of myself.
My hands are cold. There’s a hazy blue to the sky, promising a warm-up. We hug, and I shove off.
The desire to hit the road, be free, explore America, see the great Pacific Northwest, and do it on two wheels fuels me. I want to see much more of this country, be face-to-face with people, put a finger on the pulse. The itch has been with me for years, starting after graduation from the University of Illinois (UofI) in 1978. Here and there I began taking longer jaunts on my bike, pushing myself, wondering how far I could go, what the next day would hold if I just continued exerting myself. What would it be like to keep pedaling away and see where you end up? The question captivates me.
The motivation grew from there. Now I’ve got the time to take off and not worry about a job, school, or other responsibilities. A career can wait this summer. I’m ready for the road.
+++
Drivers in Wisconsin are nice. Navigating the metro area proves easy. Slowly, houses and businesses fall away. Farmland, rolling hills, and open space beckon. A rhythm develops. The sun rises in the sky. I stop after 25-30 miles and take the pant legs off, leaving just the shorts on. The result feels good, like emerging from a cocoon.
I’ve trained for this odyssey for most of the spring. The highest mileages as part of the training regime were two 50-mile days with the bicycle loaded with most of the trip’s gear. I needed to test my stamina and distance. How far would I be able to go? What would the body endure?
There were no issues then and none today. The day heats up. I finish my water and fill up (two water bottles are on the bike, one under the top of the rim and one angled up where most bicyclists place it). The extra bottle isn’t needed today, but getting out to the western part of the United States, I know there will be huge distances between towns and extra water capacity could be a potentially lifesaving measure.
I experience a mental victory crossing the border into Illinois. I’m closing in on my younger brother Kurt’s apartment in what he facetiously terms Rolling Ghettos (Rolling Meadows). I navigate the two-lane highways, which slowly change to suburban streets, until I must stop to look at the map and figure out where his apartment sits.
For the first and only time that summer, I crash. My thin front tire on the 18-speed touring bike wedges between the concrete of the curb and the asphalt of the road. There was a small gap. The tire slides into it as the bike stops, and I teeter for several seconds, then crash with a string of profanity. Nothing scraped, bloodied, or broken, just a bit of my pride going south. You think you know how to ride a bike and handle yourself, and in the most mundane situation, you eat turf.
I didn’t think about crashing my bike. I’m surprised when I fall, and it’s a small reminder to pay attention to my surroundings. The slightest incident can become dangerous and imperil the trip. I don’t want that to happen, so I file away the situation in the memory banks.
I determined before the trip, and the day’s ride reinforces, that biking gloves are one of the most important pieces of equipment when you ride a bicycle a lot. Get your hands out when you fall, let the gloves take the impact. You avoid scrapes and gravel raking your hands, and you help prevent more serious injury by using your hands to break your fall.
Pizza awaits. Kurt’s buddy Greg Tamm joins us. I eat a large pizza by myself. We drink some beer. I marvel while I’m standing on his back deck looking out that I covered 100 miles on the first day. There’s a buzz from the adrenaline – and the beer.
The conversation ranges all over the place. Greg is a roommate of Kurt’s from UofI and is a thoughtful, funny, and iconoclastic individual. We cover everything from how bridges are constructed to the prospects of the Cubs in baseball. But mostly it’s good to be with friends, knowing there’s a comfortable bed waiting.
I’m grateful to have a place to crash the first evening. There is fear in the back of my head when I have to be totally on my own, finding a place to camp and sleep by the side of the road. Tonight brings me the comfort of family and friendship. The game plan is to stay with friends through Illinois and down to St. Louis before hopping off into the great unknown of the Ozarks on my way to Dallas. I sleep well.