Ride Home 4/14

My eyes always tear up when I'm riding down the New Mexico hill. I'm not sad to be riding home and I'm pretty sure it's not the gift of tears. It even happens when I wear sunglasses, which I didn't today. Between the cyring and my furrowed brow and worried look of consternated concentration (cars pull out from a lot of different directions and I'm probably going too fast to stop very well), I don't think I'm doing a very good job "selling" the joys of bike commuting.
A minivan and I both yielded to a pedestrian at 42nd Street. He actually thanked me. With a considerable amount of sincerity and conviction. It's hard out there for pedestrians.
I rode alongside a car with the DC license plate 03. I sorta hoped it was the official Toyota sedan of Mary Cheh, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't. The car didn't even look "partially loaded."
On the Key Bridge, I was stuck behind a dawdly group of teenagers who looked too young to be college students but who were traveling in one of the those freshman year packs of eight, in which maybe not everyone is everyone else's friend but for fear of offending or for sheer amicability because everyone lives on the same floor, they all bunch together to go anywhere off campus. Anyway, the dawdly group was split into two groups of four and I slowly inched my way past the back group after one of them realized that I was behind them and shuffled the remainder of the group a little bit over. However, once I passed the back group, one of its members decided to shout not "hark friends, a cyclist approaches. yield to him lest we may all share the ample space of the bridge," but instead the far less helpful "WATCH OUT!" Keep in mind that if I were biking any slower at this point I would have been moving backwards. Highly unwarranted. The "WATCH OUT" led one of the girls in the first group to jump stop, and while I appreciated her demonstration of basketball fundamentals, it was a wholly superfluous maneuver. I rode by the group on the left as the jump stopper turned and dished the rock shouted "You scared me!" to the screamer. Teenagers. Ugh.
I took the Custis to Veitch to Key. I love that street so much. I think what I like about it so much is that there's always people walking on it. There was even a guy running with his (leashed) golden retriever in the street. It's a street used by people and not exclusively by cars and that it's solely residential makes that fact even better.
I stopped at Harris Teeter on the way home. Here's a picture of their crap bike parking:

Complain about this. 

If you can wedge your bike in past the propane tank, be sure that the front wheel doesn't hit a broken shopping cart. I think I'll get over my inertia and write a letter to the manager. So many more people would bike to this store if the parking were better. Right?
I bought pierogies, two pints of cherry tomatoes and some white button mushrooms. The automatic checkout asked if I qualified for a senior discount. It doesn't normally. Does the automatic checkout guess if you're old based on your groceries? Is this profiling?
When I got back to my bike, look who I saw:

The Green MF Goblin

If it's an employee, his/her shift must start around 6. Probably got there early on account of not having brakes.