Ride Home 2/10

I broke this. 

A two-part ride, interrupted by a two hour bike maintenance class. More on that maybe tomorrow or this weekend. True to form, it didn't even take getting to class before I managed to break something on my bike. I have a frame pump, which was hitherto affixed to my bike by resting in a plastic piece attached to my brazeons underneath the water bottle cage. Well, the fram pump came out of its plastic home and with the next downward stroke of the left pedal, the plastic bit where the head of the pump rests snapped right out. I didn't know what happened at first, but I heard something drop on the street. I even doubled back to get it- littering is a crime. I think that the couple exiting their SUV next to me thought that I was picking up trash from the street. That's so what those crazy bikers would do!
Riding home from class, I passed about 10 people on the Key Bridge. My winter gloves make it such that I can't ring my bell, which I very much like doing for the purposes of notifying pedestrians of my presence. I'm getting so tired of the "on your left" over and over and over- one because I dislike the timbre of my voice and don't know how to exactly module my volume. You don't want to sound agressive, but being meek utterly fails the task. I'd get a horn, but I don't want people to think that they need to flee the oncoming rush of a clown car. I could probably just get a better bell, but winter is slowly drawing to an end and I'll be switching to thinner gloves soon.
Since I rode back in street clothes, I became once again well-acquainted with my considerably under-soft Brooks saddle. Where is your promised suppleness? It's a skeezy sounding question, but a valid one. I've been riding on it daily-ish since July about 14 miles a day. Shouldn't it be less like granite at this point? I guess I have proofide-ed-ed-ed it since maybe September, but I did a few rounds of it. Oh well, just a few thousand more miles and it will be ever-so-soft.