Sometimes I do something for 5 minutes and my wife swears it was 20. Let’s not bother talking about what this something usually is. Or why it involves reading books or magazines or whatever happens to be nearby.

The important thing is that my wife has learned that 5 minutes in my world is 20 or more in her world, and when she says, “you were gone for an hour and you said you would only be 15 minutes,” there’s a perfectly sound explanation.

See, my time/her time are universally skewed for reasons that are beyond us.

Einstein’s theory of relativity explains that all items that have mass have gravity, and the strength of their gravitational pull is some exponent of the amount of their mass.

As a result of gravity, time and energy do not travel in straight lines, but bend around objects according to how much gravity they exhibit. Since my mass is a good fifty percent greater than my wife’s, and we are relatives, there’s no doubt that things would then appear vastly differently to each of us. It’s just the universe at work.

Therefore, my ride is at the same time, too short, it appears to me, and too long, as it appears to her, but WE’RE BOTH TALKING ABOUT THE SAME RIDE. Einstein was brilliant to see how this works.

No sooner have the words left my mouth than I have been ushered out of the house with bike, 2 drink bottles, and a polite “no thanks, maybe you’re better off doing this ride by yourself.”

100% success rate thus far!

For example: I am taking my wife up to Holiday Valley in NY for a ski trip for her 40th birthday. 3 days skiing, two nights slope side. My chance to make the whole trip ‘all about her’, right?

Well… I’m taking my bike with me and have found a gorgeously hilly 65 mile route from Ellicottville down through Allegany State Park, “just in case I get tired of skiing and the roads are clear”.

My excuse, of course, is that it’s a chance to do some hill training that we don’t have here in Ohio.