This is my bike. Standing against the garage behind our Edgewater home, this bike is but a suggestion.

It is a suggestion of what might be if it were being ridden. Coasting along the Chicago lakefront, dodging pedestrians, slowing down when need be and speeding up to chase down imaginary Lance Armstrong competitors trying to outpace me.

I love the idea of a suggestion for if properly placed it serves as a reminder to be more fully what we aspire to be. And so as I aspire to be a more romantic husband or a more playful daddy or a guy who rides his really cool cruiser all I need to do is take a moment and heed the suggestion.

Years ago in any number of spiritual tomes I was hurling into the furnace of my mind writer after writer commented on the idea of waking up to "the universe's alarm clock." Surely this idea is nothing new to anybody who has ever watched a week of Oprah. And yet I constantly trend away from waking up to these alarm clocks, preferring, I guess, to stay asleep or tilt my hand to quell the alarm. Over and over and over...

But I think now is the time!

Do you remember the old Nike commercial when the simple question was raised and resolutely answered time after time, "Where do you want to go today?"

So today I will bracket my day by etching up and down Lake Shore Drive as I take and then pick up Jackson from Lycee Francaise in the Buena Park neighborhood of Chicago. And I will market each of my wonderful real estate listings in various Chicago neighborhoods, acting like the wizard behind the curtain of my internet controls and on the phone with folks looking for and purveyors of Chicago real estate.

Then I will take my technological beakers down from the shelf to continue to concoct my soon-to-be-released website called ChalkTalk Chicago that provides parents in Chicago who have kids with more than enough information to figure out the byzantine labyrinth that relates to Chicago public and private schools. There also will be a good measure of Chicago real estate related information to help these parents figure out things like home values, the overall market, boundaries related to Chicago schools.

In essence it will be one-stop shopping for Chicago parents dealing with Chicago condos and homes, schools, and the range of ancillary questions like questions to ask a nanny, good kid-related websites for clothes, places to eat and so on and so on.

If the work in the lab goes well www.ChalkTalkChicago.com (right now the url points to The Real Estate Lounge Chicago) should be up and running and helping Chicago parents figure stuff out in the next eight weeks.

But back to today. A colleague at another brokerage who is showing my property in the West Loop at 1250 W Van Buren has a tagline on his email signature that incorporates "Carpe Diem" in it. That exhortation - to seize the day - is the breath behind the universe's wake up call.

And with this in mind perhaps before it's time to nestle Jackson and Lucas into a restful framework to gain sleep for the next day I may even wrestle the beautiful bike down from its "j" hooks in the garage and let the rubber hit the road as I fancy myself to be a bike-riding cowboy realtor squinting my eyes against the wind in my face as I take a real spin around the northside of Chicago.

I will keep you posted.