Ride In 8/11

There's something about my disposition that requires me to spend a certain amount of time outside every day or I get cranky and mean. Perhaps, like me, you work inside (or perhaps you're reading this on your iPhone perched on an i-beam) and your "bosses" wouldn't like it when you wandered off with important work papers in search of a bench or patch of grass on which you sit and shuffle those important work papers in a professional-looking kind of way for fear that those important work papers might be blown away in a sudden gust of wind or swooped up by a descending ravenous bird of prey. Luckily, I can forestall this by biking to work- which affords me a good hour plus of outside time each day. It certainly makes me feel happier and since my commute is something I have to do anyway, I feel like I'm getting something for nothing, which is always good.
Of course, the something that I get for nothing is sometimes not as much something as I'd like. For example, when bike lanes are blocked by construction barrels (I don't know what else to call them), as is still the situation on Clarendon Boulevard. Or when two 18 wheelers, a FedEx truck and a Vamoose bus are all parked in the bike lane on Lynn Street. Or when a driver pulls into the intermediate space between a parking spot (so about 3 feet off the curb) and the travel lane and stops and idles for a while. If you're stopping, why not just pull into the spot? I promise that it's really easy to reintegrate into car traffic from there, almost as easy as pulling out from the fake spot you're idling in. It just so happens that you're not really parking has your car sort of exactly in the few feet of space where I can ride my bike in the safest way possible and be the most accommodating to the drivers around me. I feel like there's some weird, almost superstitious belief that if you pull into a parking spot to idle (perhaps to make a phone call?) that immediately hoards of parking enforcement officers will repel from circling black helicopters to riddle your windshield with tickets and that if you only effectively occupy up the space but remain a few feet from the curb, this will keep the parking commandos at bay. Can we reach some mutual understanding that says drivers can idle in a parking spot for like a minute as they attend to whatever they need to attend to (picking up a passenger, making a phone call, shushing a bratty kid, whatever) without feat of repercussion? It would really make my day better.
It takes every ounce of maturity I have (3 fl. oz.) to stop my from the unsolicited high-fiving of pedestrians who are trying to hail a cab. It's just so tempting. Don't tell me you haven't thought about it.
Rode past the Lynn Street/Lee Highway intersection of doom today. Man, that's an intersection of doom, I thought to myself, presaging the exact phraseology that I would use in writing this blog post four hours later. That whole side of the bridge is messed up, too, with the Whitehurst off ramp of doom and the M Street merge of doom at 34th street. And by merge, I mean place where drivers shift to the left to get out of the bus/parking lane, except when they don't. Be careful here.
Wisconsin to Calvert, which put me on the wrong end of Glover Park. I backtracked a little and almost got lost, even though I knew the exact intersection I as looking for. Someone had a fancy tri-bike u-locked to their front porch, so I don't know what that's about.
15mph in a school zone from 8AM-4PM. The sign was pretty clear about that. Not that pointing it out the guy who looked curiously like Vin Diesel would have accomplished much. 2 fast, 2 furious indeed.  Spoiler alert: he drove a black BMW.
Saw a bumper sticker that read Boycott BP. You know what would really stick it to them? Cutting back on driving.