timing,”an act or instance of observing and recording the elapsed time of an act, contest, process, etc.” i like to time things…actually it can be a bit of an obsession, for example:
my best time driving from the Oakland house to the Tahoe house 3 hours and 10 minutes
my best time driving from the Sebastopol house to the Tahoe house 3 hours and 35 minutes
my best time driving from Oakland to Sebastopol 1 hour and 5 minutes
my best time driving from SF to Sebastopol 1 hour and 10 minutes
my best time driving from Oakland to Wendover 9 hours
longest bus ride from SF to Sebastopol 3 hours and 15 minutes (terrible traffic)
best bus ride from SF to Sebastopol 1 hour 25 minutes
really the list goes on, i constantly time trips. as a kid we didn’t go on road trips, we went to Tahoe and there was a routine. the places within the routine changed throughout the years, but the pattern remained the same. leave the house, stop and get something to eat/gas/bathroom, go straight to Tahoe. we rarely veered from the path, went a different way, or stopped to see something along the way.
i still travel that way. i try to get from point A to point B in the quickest time possible and feel disappointed when something out of my control gets in the way of my timing. i stop at one place and one place only (unless it’s closed) on the way up and back from Tahoe unless i have an errand to run before i get to the lake.
i like the routine, the constant, the comfort of knowing how something is going to go or be. does that mean i can change plans, that i couldn’t stop at a different place, no, i can and have done so, but it’s never quite the same. better? worse? no, just different.
photo courtesy of tekrevue.com