Ride In 8/9: Certainly I can't be the only one who can prevent wildfires

I've been riding in cargo shorts and cotton t shirts all week and I look more like a normal person than a bike commuter (whatever that distinction is) and my verdict is that cargo shorts and t shirts are fine for biking, but the distance of my trip and current summer temperatures make them less than ideal. So I'll get back to the bike gear once I get around to laundry. It remains my opinion that the clothes I wear bear no relation to the way I'm treated, by fellow bicyclists, motorists, pedestrians or anyone else. Also, when does someone become a pedestrian? Like, as soon as you walk out of your house? Are you a pedestrian when you're walking from your house to your car? Does that make every trip multimodal? If you're standing at a bus stop and a car crashes into you, are you a pedestrian injured in a car crash? I think the word pedestrian is a bit lacking in this regard. From now on, I'm going to call anyone walking on the street a streetwalker and I'm sure that this will abate all confusion.

In the Capitol plaza, which is atop the subterranean Capitol Visitors Center, there are two structures about a foot high and maybe 100 feet square that are covered in the tinted glass and the glass is covered in like an inch of sorta flowing water. I think that they're skylights into the visitor's center below and they're "fountains" to people in the plaza. Anyway, I sometimes see people let their dogs climb up on them and frolic in the water and that never gets old. I'd love to try to bike across one but there are many people about with guns and I'm sure that this will result in my getting very arrested.

Like bike carnivals? Like water bottles? Like haunted asylums? Come to the St. Elizabeth's Open House on August 25th! There will be a bike carnival, presumably with bike carnies, and an you can get one to tour the grounds of St. E's and maybe sip water from a water bottle that looks like this:

Between a stand mixer and some onions

Come one, come all (wait, that's the circus).

Pennsylvania to 11th and on 11th I noticed a guy with a Sackville saddle bag and I noticed streams and streams of bicyclists coming from every which direction. I think that thinking bike commuting is out of the ordinary has become itself out of the ordinary. We're like locusts. It's incredible. And if you can bike through a DC summer, you can pretty much bike whenever, wherever (and with Shakira if you have a tandem). It'll drop off in the winter, assuming that we still have those, but I doubt by much.

I rode behind a guy who was on a CaBi and he was wearing sort of low cowboy boots, but wasn't in cowboy attire otherwise. Perhaps it's a small act of rebellion in his otherwise mundane government employee lifestyle. Or perhaps he was on his way to rope steer. I don't know.

A pack of bicyclists pulled up behind me on R around the intersection with New Jersey and I knew there were shoalsmen among them, so to be cheeky and unsporting I decided that I'd "drop the hammer" (this is trite bicycle announcer lingo for trying to go fast) and I put some distance between me and them and that was that. There are some days when you just don't want to deal with the bad bike etiquette of other people.

Pretty good for the rest of the way from Dupont to work. I've been trying to use my smaller front chain ring more often and be less of a masher, spinning a higher cadence (whatever that is) in a lower gear rather than bullying a too high one. I think it for the most part has been a nice change. I know how to ride a bike, but I never really learned how to ride a bike, you know? Maybe I should take a spin class.

Even as summer wanes, it's important to remember to wear sunscreen. "Protect your skin from the sun or U V sorry" says generic B-list celebrity in my ideal skin cancer awareness ad campaign.