BRWT

That summer, we decided to go on an Alexis-introducing family trip. At this point, she was a roller. If you left her on the floor for even a short period of time, you might not be able to find her right away because she would have rolled across the room. If there were no walls, you might not ever find her.

My family rarely had the chance to all get together but my sister and her family had moved back to Canada from Hong Kong for a few years for her husband to go to school. We thought this would be a good opportunity. Our family had become even more international. My sister had been unable to have children so they had adopted two Chinese boys in Hong Kong. My brother, Samuel had had two girls. They came from Hawaii with my mom and we all met at my sister’s place near Vancouver. It was also particularly fun for my brother’s family from Hawaii to go see snow in the mountains nearby. It was my first time to Canada

We also went to see Laura’s family in California, which we did far more often. It was during one of these visits that we started one of our family jokes on her side. One day we went into San Francisco to do the city. When it comes to going pee, I always say that I am worse than a pregnant woman. If I’ve been somewhere before, I will usually know all the spots to find relief. If I haven’t been there, it won’t take me long to discover them. Per usual, I had gone pee on a number of occasions throughout the day.

As we were preparing to leave, I wanted to go once more before the ride back to the house. Laura’s nieces were all amazed that I had to go again. I uttered the now infamous words, 

“I go a lot but I’m quick.”

As I still had a slight English accent, they began to mimic what I said with an exaggerated Cockney accent which would pop up again and again as the years went by until it became a legendary family saying.


I was now the producer of the International 700 Club and taking classes at Regent. I love school so I was really enjoying the classes. There were also some great people in CBN’s International department who were a pleasure to work with. As with most offices, we would go out to lunch from time to time for birthday’s and such and I developed a reputation. I was blessed with a great metabolism so I could eat whatever I wanted with no noticeable consequences. I became the go-to guy when others couldn’t finish their meals – the human garbage can.

We had a health incentive program at work. If you accumulated a certain number of points, obtained through proscribed amounts of exercise, you would get paid extra money. I biked to get mine. I had to go a certain number of miles within a certain amount of time each month. There were two periods a year so I did the one that included summer and skipped the one that included winter because it was too cold to bike.

I would usually go right after work. Laura would be with Alexis all day and needed a break so I got a baby seat to go on the back. There’s something touching about your child on the back of your bike. As you feel the bike move with their movements, you feel a connection of the shared experience. And when the movement stops, you know they’re asleep.

I would ride around through the Greenbrier neighborhoods but that could be tricky as you had to navigate stop signs and corners and cars and people. Then they developed Kempsville Road. It used to be just a two- lane road with ditches on both sides (in which you could usually see a car or two during a bad snow event). They developed it into a six-lane highway with a wide sidewalk, which completed the shape of a rough triangle with two other roads which I call the Greenbrier Triangle. That’s where I learned the Law of BRWT.

BRWT or Bike Riding Wind in a Triangle is a frustrating phenomenon. It seemed that when I rode the triangle, the wind would be against me on at least two of the roads and sometimes even all three! This was frustrating because my health incentive points were accrued by time over distance. So when the wind was against me, I had to ride longer because it took more time to cover the distance. First World Problems, I know, but it frustrated me, even though it probably made me healthier.

On yer bike


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Bit of A Wander

That summer our family went travelling. My father had a speaking engagement at a YWAM base on the island of Cyprus so he took us with him. Cyprus is an island in the eastern Mediterranean that has been contested by Greece and Turkey for many years. It is now an independent country but Turkey still controls the northeast. The YWAM base was right near the border between the two sides. We were told not to go up into the nearby hills because there were land mines. From there we traveled to Israel. We stayed in an apartment in the new part of Jerusalem, arranged for by a Messianic Jewish friend we had known in Hawaii. For some reason, Samuel and I spent a lot of time at the apartment playing cards but we did get to see a lot of the sights.  We got to run on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. We went inside the Dome of the Rock or Al Aqsa Mosque, which is built on the site of the destroyed Jewish temple. It is holy to the Muslims because that is where Muhammed was supposed to have a...
Read more

A Challenge

Image
That first vacation in the Outer Banks began a seven-year tradition. As the kids got bigger, we moved on to a six-bedroom house in the same neighborhood so the girls could split up into two rooms. I found different adventures to break up the week each year like jet-skiing and go-carting or a trip down to the southern-most island. We also started a mini-golf night tradition for the dads and kids. The ladies were only too happy to have a night to themselves. As the kids got too big for my sand pools, I started to take them out boogie boarding, until we eventually held boogie-boarding competitions with me as the judge. I tried to not show favoritism but my kids usually won. In the later years, everyone started getting into surfing. We would play various games on the beach and made teams to compete in relay races. One year, inspired by the Summer Olympics, we set up all the boogie and skim boards to create hurdles. Back at the house, we began to teach the older girls how to play strategy g...
Read more

Outer Banksious

Image
We finally moved into our new house and just as we were getting settled in, we went on what was to become a vacation tradition. Just south of where we live, there is a string of barrier islands in North Carolina called the Outer Banks, which is a big vacation spot. For years we had been talking about getting together with some other families to rent a big house all together for a week. Our friend and pastor, Eric Hughes told us and our other good friends, the Waskos that, despite the fact that none of us had a whole lot of money, we should finally just go for it. We all agreed and I went to work. While Eric and Brian Wasko are the more visionary types, I am good at the details. I researched finding a house to rent at a price we could all manage. Both the Hughes’s and Waskos have four children so there were 17 of us all together, with 8 girls and 3 boys. The houses have a maximum occupancy so I had to find something with the right configuration of rooms and beds to handle all of us. I f...
Read more