Ride In 12/5

Buttons! Buttons! Buttons! (and other stuff, like my blogging your commute and/or blogging our sharing a sandwich). Soon you will be able to order them, thanks to a friend of the blog. All profits to go WABA. Possibly by the way on a comically large (in size, not dollar amount, but maybe?) novelty check. Details forthcoming as I know them.
Apparently I forgot to set my poodle alarm clock last night, so I got off to a slow start this morning. I even forgot to change out of my slippers and only realized this once I was out the door. Whoops.
Not that cold at all, really. If you've given up bike commuting for the winter, you might have done so prematurely.
Saw a guy with orange, feathery plumage a la mode mohawk-aise running atop his bicycle helmet. I assume that he knows it's there, but I'm not totally sure. I find it to be somewhat gaudy and odd, but maybe that's just me. Whatever gets you on the bike, I guess. But then again, I ride in a tuxedo and a gorilla mask (it's an old costume from the never-made movie Prom of the Apes), so I'm far from one to pass judgment. Other than the plumage, the guy was wearing the standard bike clothes, yellow jacket, SIDIs of the "athlete"-type of bike commuter. I've decided that there's a semi-false dialectic in which all bike commuters fit somewhere on the athlete/aesthete spectrum, which ranges from superbikers on one end to Copenhagen Cycle Chic on the other.
No one other than the Great Citrus himself jaywalking across the Pennsylvania Avenue bike lanes when I rode by. I've seen three councilmembers in front of the JAWB since we've moved: Tommy Wells on a CaBi, Jack Evans making an illegal u-turn and now VO.It's multi-modal council bingo and if I ever spot Kwame Brown in the back of a  "fully loaded" pedicab, I'm pretty sure I win. I said, maybe too loudly, "Good morning, Mr. Orange!" and got a "Hey, good morning" back. I think he was happy to be recognized. I decided to go with that over "So, HTJ, huh?" because that begs a much longer response than one I'd be able to hear while biking past. Local politics is the best.
No more Occupy Barn in McPherson Square. My biggest fear during the whole thing yesterday was that once the barn was raised, NIMBYism would set in and  the group would reorganize as Occupiers for Better Bike Lanes and demand the removal the 15th street cycle track. This did not come to pass.
Way bad car traffic this morning at K and again on Mass and Rhode Island. At Rhode Island, I counted 14 bicyclists stopped on the other side of the intersection waiting for the light. That's pretty great. Another 6 rode past me between there and P. R Street was also crowded and seemed a bit contentious even. There was a guy behind me who kept trying to pass from the right but was rebuffed each time due to something or someone blocking his way. And that on the other side of Connecticut, a woman planned on making a left turn from the right-side bike lane and was denied because another woman was riding right on her back wheel and blocked her from moving over. I think the blocker even said "Were you trying to turn?" but I didn't stay for the rest of the conversation.
A rather large dead deer was in the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the road across the way from the British Embassy. I found this to be troubling, so I stopped at the Naval Observatory to suggest to the Secret Service guys that they might "call it in." I said "I don't know if you know or if it's your jurisdiction, but there's a dead deer between the road and the sidewalk about five trees down." One of the guards was like "Before the park?" and I said "yeah, after the park, right across from the embassy" because it was after a rode past the park, but I suppose from his perspective, it's before. He said he'd call it in. Civic responsibility makes for awkward conversation about uncomfortable topics.
Accordingly, I rode up the west side of Mass, which seemed, incline-wise, to be about the same as the east side. A few more hazardous street crossings, most notably at Observatory Circle. I crossed back over at Garfield and I only had to wait for two drivers to completely ignore me before there was enough gap in the traffic to allow me to take my legally appointed turn to use the roadway.