Ride Home 5/1: Bob Aganoosh's All-You-Can-Eat Eggplant Buffet

Was my ride boring? Would I lie to you? Yes and no. That's the answer to the first question. No is the answer to the second question. So, that's an aggregate one yes and two nos, and the two nos might cancel each other out because of math or something which means two yeses, which means that my ride was boring and I would lie to you, but in the effort to pretend that that's not the case, I'll just proceed with writing the post and you can judge whether or not the ride was boring and I told you the truth or if the ride was exciting and I lied and/or any combination of excitement and truth-telling as it suits your wants and needs.
The ride was hot. I wore sunscreen and sunglasses. Please do be mindful of the harmful effects of UV rays. Bicycle riding is wonderful. Skin cancer is not. Take care of your skin, especially because your skin is your largest organ. Unless, of course, you're the Wannamaker.
How would Winston Churchill bike down Massachusetts? Well, I can't be sure that he would. Mostly because he's been dead 60 years. But if he did, I'd imagine he'd heed the manhole covers and also take the lane, so as not to be passed too closely by cars. Never give up. Never surrender.
No matter what I do I can't catch the green light at 18th and Q. Pedal hard and there's a bus. Jump the light and get stuck behind a taxi. Swing a mace overhead and scream "Get out of my way or I'll hit you with this mace" and get arrested. There's just no winning. It's better to accept this than to try to fight it, which I do every day. It's the closest thing I have to a white whale. I mean, other than that stupid white whale that consistently blocks my way by the aquarium.
I think the hardest part of bike commuting is foregoing the consumption of media during my transport to work. On the train or bus or in the car, I'd probably be listening to a podcast and I really do enjoy podcasts, podcasts being the communication of pods of dolphins. (This post has taken a weird turn towards aquatic mammals, but I'm sure it's porpoise-ful.) No, but I really do like podcasts and I really don't listen to them while bike commuting, since I tend to value my hearing during my rides to and from work. So, all in all, that's the thing I'm missing most by not getting to work another way. Trade-offs.
11th was fine, but crowded. I wonder if there's a WABA course on biking with buses. Is this covered in Confident City Cycling? And is Big Shoulder-ed City Cycling the equivalent class in Chicago?
Pennsylvania Avenue is one of my favorite avenues.
From the Capitol, it was an uphill slog on the House side, and then down Penn again. Penn SE is a good road, but it's a bit highway-y and it's wide and open and not necessarily the best for slow cycling. So, I engaged in faster cycling and that was mostly fine. I was faster than a bus, so there's that. Slower than the bus and I should've just taken the bus, but it was a commuter bus and didn't have a bike rack on it, so that might've been difficult to manage. Also, I would've ended up in Bowie. Or somewhere. At Penn and Potomac, I diverged at met Kate outside of the Harris Teeter for a button handoff. Button handoffs are the best. She paid me cash money. And we talked of karaoke and karaoke obligations and my intention to fulfill said karaoke obligations.
On the way home, I almost stopped at the pretzel place. In fact, I did stop at the pretzel place. Almost comically so. But then I decided that I shouldn't partake in pretzels without the Official Wife, with whom I'd prefer to eat and/or share and or eat-share (Capital Eatshare has thousands of finger foods distributed about the city. The rebalancing vans are Dominos guys), so I walked away and rode home.