Ride Home 8/1

Arlington Bicycle Advisory Committee tonight! I think this evening's agenda involves figuring out how to replace all parking spots in Rosslyn with bikeshare stations, secretly painting bike lanes in the HOT lanes on the Beltway and asking the county to pass a $5/gal excise tax and earmarking the money for spandex and French lessons for urban youth. We can't conspire to enact Zimmerman and Fissette's dangerous pro-bike agenda without citizen rubber-stamping. Or we might just talk about the state of various bike trails and infrastructure improvements and way-finding and bike parking improvements. In either case, if you live in Arlington and care about bike issues, we encourage you to attend.
Riding down New Mexico through Glover-Archbold Park, I thought, this is the forest primeval. Weird weather and tree canopy made it seem way more ominous than usual. I have now blogged the entirety of my Longfellow knowledge. Sorry, high school English teachers.
Front brake is scraping. Worst noise ever.
The sky was like a Rubik's cube, both in that it was inscrutable and in that every direction I looked with drastically different from the other. Every time I turned, I had to reassess the weather. Crazy dark clouds and thunderstorms ahead until I pivoted and it was bright blue skies until I turned towards a partly cloudy  late afternoon. The direction that I was ultimately heading was the ominous dark skies, so regardless of how many times I turned along the way, I knew I was heading towards badness.
Two guys on beach cruisers and a woman on a CaBi and I all converged at the intersection of M and the bridge. Throw in a priest and a rabbi and you've got half a joke.
Bridge itself was miserable, except for a sighting of Gorton's who was smiling like a loon (probably because he was riding away from the thunderclouds), as the wind kicked up sand and river spit and blew it directly into my right cheek and forehead. No sunglasses meant no eye protection, so it was a squinty, windswept, face-hurting ride made slower by a countering wind.
Why are they called sports cars? What sport exactly? Is scaring the crap out of bicyclist by cutting them off with tires screeching in a far too sharp turn?
And the rain started but it didn't. It barely rained and not in any really sustained way. I think this means it'll rain worse later, perhaps on the way to or from the bike meeting.
A bunch of other riders around, struggling with the heat and humidity and looking generally new to the whole exercise of being put out. I don't know if one should start bike commuting in the summer months. Maybe start riding March 1 and work your way to summer. I think that sounds prudent.
If a truck is blocking a travel lane, pass it on the left and not the right. You're much more visible that way and less likely to be right hooked. Squeezing past on the inside, even if in a bike lane, is not a great idea.