Ain't no cure for the wintertime blues

A series of winter snows has turned Denver into a holiday postcard scene - at least from our ninth floor window. Riding, powered or pedal, is for the very brave.

You could ride a motorcycle or scooter, but only on busy, wide streets. Those streets have been plowed, but they're icy and snow-packed at the curbs. And even in the traffic lanes they're far from free of snow compressed by car tires. Spooky even on a dual-purpose bike, I'd say.

The side streets, especially those that run east-west, are nearly impassible on two wheels. It's scary even to walk on the sidewalks. Each walk will provide one or two frightening incidents.

I see a few bicyclists, one or two people who appear to have no choice but to ride, and a few who are clearly die-hard cycle commuters, with rechargeable headlights and expensive bikes.

I expect the committed cyclists to be riding mountain bikes with wide tire footprints, but some of them to my amazement are on skinny-tired road bikes. And they don't appear to be "hanging about," tiptoeing along. They're moving.

Maybe it's just the same where you live. Tamar and I are not old winter hands, I guess, so it's a new challenge for us after six years in the desert - does that sound biblical, or what?

I'm talking about this because I want to explain the long spaces between posts here in my blog.

I don't understand this phenomenon fully, but it seems to me that in the winter, when some of the things I enjoy doing become practical impossibilities, part of my brain either shuts off - or occupies itself in fretting about the things I cannot do. Have I said that clearly?

It isn't that I lack mental activity. I've read several books and watched a DVD movie or two. Tamar and I have walked and taken buses and helped feed some elderly folks on Christmas morning. I've done stuff...but I haven't had impulses to write blog posts or columns about, well, one thing or another. I gotta say: I think it happens every year.

Maybe it even happened in Tucson, where you could no-way use a series of snowfalls as an excuse. You couldn't even use even one snowfall as an excuse. Hey, it didn't even rain.

What happens to me doesn't feel like depression, or what I've heard described as depression. I just can't get going somehow. And I don't find myself at the computer doing whatever it is I do: complaining about drivers or the snobbishness of self-involved hipsters on fixies.

Luckily, one of the places where my work appears, the Bicycle Paper (Pac NW), publishes one winter edition, not an issue a month. So I get a little break just when I need it.

I suppose I'm asking you to give me a similar little break. If you come to my blog and there's nothing new here, please don't stop checking my site. To tell you the truth, writing this little post about my wintertime blues has brightened my morning.

Maybe I'm on the path to productivity again. Thanks for being here...