feeling recovered!

sunday, september 29th, 2024.

At the beginning of the month, I was struggling with advocacy burnout. After a month of taking it easier I think I'm on the mend, both emotionally and with my stress levels. It's amazing how burnout can creep up on you like that. It's good to recenter myself on a sense of normalcy— to be able to approach advocacy from a stable stance like a good boxer.

Giving myself permission to focus on myself has been so nice. I didn't realize just how much I needed that. I've been reading, gaming, and enjoying bicycle rides without worrying overmuch about the enormous to-do list that our city's lack of cycling infrastructure presents.

Man, this has been an awesome month. I think I'm ready to get back into advocacy at a more manageable pace!

on automobile insurance.

I switched insurance providers recently from GEICO to State Farm. I can't say that the costs changed that much— I had a longstanding relationship with GEICO and they gave me a pretty nice discount for that. But, the costs didn't go up, so that's good I suppose. Being able to work with an insurance agent to sort through my limits and deductibles was pretty nice.

I'd hesitate to call this a downside, per se, but one of the things we've done to keep our automobile insurance rate the same was concede to installing tracking software on our phones by way of State Farm's "Drive Safe & Save" program. I'm not sure how I feel about giving this tracking data to State Farm, but functionally it doesn't differ that much from carrying around a phone or driving a modern car. Seems everybody and their brother wants to know everything about you. Someday I hope that we'll treat all this data as toxic sludge.

Ever since getting involved with bicycling and advocacy, I've been a staunch follower of the speed limit. Also: I ride our e-bike in the middle of the lane where appropriate. Drivers are very aggressive here, and you'd think I'd have grown a third eyeball for the strange & aggressive way that people treat a driver actually adhering to the speed limit. In both situations, people will drive straight into head-on traffic just to get around this perceived roadblock. More often than not, I'll catch up to them at the next red light. Functionally, they've not gotten to their destination any quicker but they have been a danger on the road.

My wife and I joke that we need to find or custom print bumper stickers that say "I drive the speed limit because I left on time."

Anyway, the "Drive Safe & Save" app tells me what I already know— I'm a safe driver (if you exclude the possibility that one of these aggressive drivers plows into me angrily). Unfortunately, it doesn't take into account the miles driven in the way that it reports feedback. Eventually, this data will present a case to their actuarial adjusters that we don't put as many miles on our cars as our peers.

In a perverse sense of feedback incentives, I think the thing this app is most likely to change is my mileage. I'm setting a little bit of a challenge to myself to keep my miles driven below my miles biked. Frankly, insurance would be significantly less worthwhile if we were all getting around at human speed instead of being violent Mr. Wheelers.

upcoming plans.

I'm super excited— we're going to the Georgia Bike-Walk-Live Summit next weekend in Decatur. Now that I've recovered a bit, I'm ready to rub elbows with a bunch of advocates across the state, learn a thing or two about how to do this stuff from folks that have done it, and explore some of the nifty bicycle infrastructure up in Atlanta.

Aside from that, we've got plenty of biking to do with all this lovely fall weather, the little one's birthday party, and visiting the Monday night Flesh and Blood games at my local comic book shop.

It's going to be a real good fall.

Until next time, be well. :)