I’ve been thinking recently about my bike ride to work, mostly after listening to this awesome podcast a friend made about commuter biking. My sister-in-law is interviewed in it, and talks about how biking made her feel more integrated with her community, because of how she commonly experienced it with all of her senses. I was thinking about this on my own ride to work this morning, and pondering what my favorite sensations are during my commute. So here they are!

Sound

There are several groups of naturalized parrots that live along Brighton where I ride, and each morning they’re always flying overhead, cawing and squawking. It feels like riding through some kind of jungle. I also love hearing crows cawing and trilling, mostly because they sound so different from the crows back in Kentucky. At night on the ride home, I love listening to the chirping crickets, though it occasionally makes me homesick for the summer katydids back home.

Scents

The world smells wonderful right now because all the flowers are blooming, so that’s a bonus. However, I must admit that my favorite bike commute scents are on the way home from work, when I pass by the homes of families cooking dinner. I feel like I’m riding through invisible wafts of mid-preparation meal scents, and I always try and guess what’s for dinner tonight at this house or that. There’s one place in particular, and I haven’t pinpointed it, that seems to frequently cook over a wood fire. The downside is that I’m usually ravenous by the time I get home.

Touch

Burbank is a great place for a bike commute. You get that mild SoCal temperature most days and it’s blissfully flat. One day recently, though, I got caught in a mild rain on my ride home. I was surprised at how peaceful the experience was, and how gentle the rain was as it fell on my skin. I think that when in a car, even light rains can seem much more noisy and foreboding than they actually are when you are outside in them.

Sights

Most of my ride takes place on Brighton, which is a quiet neighborhood street one block over from Buena Vista. I love seeing all the different styles of houses and how they keep their gardens. My favorites are the ones with proper desert yards filled with pebbles and yucca and cacti. I’m also still delighted by the common sight of citrus trees in front yards, limbs heavy and drooping with ripe fruit. I really do live in a beautiful place.

So, has my bike commute made me feel more connected to my community? Maybe! It certainly has made me appreciate the beauty I get to experience every day, and what a lovely place Burbank can be.

When Mr. Davis and I go on our walks, we sometimes spend most of it standing idly next to parked vehicles while Davis sniffs them. He has a fascination for license plates and bumpers, and will drain away the minutes sniffing and sniffing with deep intensity. Then we’ll move on to the next car and he’ll repeat the process. I thought this might have been a quirk particular to Davis, but when leaving work tonight I noticed one of the local feral cats strolling through the parking lot doing the same thing. The kitty was so intently sniffing a license plate that it didn’t even notice my approach, which is unusual for the ferals since they tend to be wary and keep away from people.

What is it that they are smelling? What is so compelling a scent that gets stuck to car bumpers? Squished bugs, perhaps? Do dogs do this? Mysterious.

Meanwhile, I’ve started using the time on our walks to practice standing with good posture. It is…difficult. I’ve found that when I stand upright without slouching and hold the position for any length of time that it becomes painful to breath. Maybe this will get better with time and when my back muscles strengthen, depending on if I can keep this up.

Mr. Davis had to have 3 teeth pulled today. He’s doing fine right now – he’d ripped the bandage from the catheter off of his paw before we even got home, and he’s currently grooming with vigor. The story goes like this:

Davis had seemed a little off for the past couple of months, but in tiny ways that I didn’t give too much notice to. One day last week after his breakfast, I noticed that his jaw was popping oddly when he licked his lips or yawned, and I caught him pawing at his face once or twice. I brought him into the vet that morning to get him checked out, and while his jaw seemed fine and nothing appeared out of order, the vet decided to do a thorough mouth exam (because Mr. Davis is so well-behaved about having vet hands all up in his grill. It’s really amazing!)

They found a localized spot of pain at one tooth, but nothing was visible on the surface that would cause it. The only way to see if there were lesions in the root of the tooth was to do an x-ray that would require Davis to go under anesthesia. I decided to go ahead and do it because:

1. Any sort of dental issue in cats can be really, really serious

2. Lesions in cat teeth are actually pretty common, so there was a good chance he would need the extraction

2. He was due for a cleaning this year anyway, so I already had a good chunk of that money saved up, and since that also requires anesthesia I got it all done at once (plus apparently it was Pet Dental Month, so, yay discounts?)

After I’d scheduled the cleaning/potential extraction, I started to think about the minor “off” things I’d seen in Davis and wondered if they were actually pain symptoms. More on that later.

So it wound up that there were lesions in 2 bottom teeth, and they also took out a top tooth that had shown the beginnings of issues during his last cleaning and was in “keep an eye on it” mode for the past 2 years and had also developed a lesion. They found a lot of infection at the lower extraction site, so it is a very good thing I had this taken care of now (they also did a deep cleaning on the other side of his mouth to try and clear up anything that might lead to the same problem).

Now, as for the issue of pain in cats, anyone who’s ever owned a cat probably knows that it’s very difficult to tell if kitty is in pain. They are solitary predators, and so in the wild any revealing of a problem or weakness makes them vulnerable to attack. They are naturally predisposed to be stoic.

To see what I mean, just look up “symptoms of pain in cats”. You’ll get stuff like:

• Is more active than usual
• Is more lethargic than usual
• Craves attention
• Wants to be left alone

They may as well say “behaves as a cat behaves.” You have to be sharp eyed and very in tune with your kitty to notice something is amiss, and sometimes even then you miss stuff.

So, here are things that I had considered “off” about Davis that may or may not have been symptoms of his dental pain.

• Would often stop in the middle of walking and crouch down. I thought that the abruptness in this was always odd, but I thought maybe he was just offering a trick (it’s the way he lays down for the “lay down” command)
  
• Yawned a lot. This one’s weird, right? Cats yawn. But I recall thinking a couple of weeks ago, “Davis sure does yawn a lot”
  
• Went on shorter walks. I usually allocate an hour a day for walking Davis, but I noticed that for the past month or so, he was only going out for 15 or 20 minutes before heading back in. I’d thought this was because he’s a SoCal cat and maybe he didn’t like the “cold,” but could it have been a pain symptom?
  
• Was not as enthusiastic about breakfast in the mornings. He’d still eat, he just wouldn’t gobble everything down all at once. He’d eat a few bites, go do something else, and finish up a little at a time later. He only really did this for breakfast.

As to whether those were pain symptoms, I have no way of really knowing. I guess I’ll see if he still does them after he recovers from his extractions.

My biggest clue that he was in pain, though, was how quickly he learned what pain medicine was. When I’d first taken him in, the vet gave me some pain medicine for him for the weekend until his surgery. It was just a small amount of liquid in a syringe that I’d squirt in his mouth.

The first time I gave it to him he resisted, as cats do when you try to shove anything in their mouth. But the second time, when Davis saw me carrying the syringe, he ran up to me and meowed, like he was about to get a treat. Did he really so quickly make the connection between the syringe and pain relief?

Anyway, I guess the lesson learned is that you shouldn’t take any sort of dental issue lightly in cats, and that they’re really tricky about pain. Send Davis kitty prayers for a speedy recovery and no post-op infection, and I’ll give him lots of snuggles and love. He’s already meowing to go out on his walk, though, so he must already be on the mend!

This is one of those books that has been on my “recommended design-related reading” list for ages. It is extremely relevant to designers of any field, game designers included, mainly in the realm of the importance of usability. Aspiring game designers, read this book!

It’s pretty interesting to read now through the lens of the future (the original was written in 1988) and seeing how the author’s predictions about the future have come true. Basically he longed for the iPhone. Thinking about electronics now compared to those of the late 80s, I wonder how many designers “grew up” on this book and came into design with usability as a priority.

Anyway, much of it was reiterating what I had learned about playtesting through other means, while providing a more systematic framework for thinking about usable design. Every time I use a public restroom now I consider whether the automatic faucets have been “playtested,” and I feel like I appreciate a well designed object much more when I run into one. I also finally learned what those weird little gates are in stairwells that lead to the basement level.