Ride In 9/17: My other dishwasher is a poodle

How was your weekend? How were your fantasy footballs? Fantastical? Some people say Americans are anti-intellectual, but I'd say that a people who elects to impose math and statistics as a superstructure to a game that's basically beefy dudes kicking the crap out of each other over an animal carcass is very much the opposite. I don't "play" fantasy football, but I might play Fantasia football but only if I'm the same team as all of those brooms. As you might guess, we would frequently run the sweep. I think, though, that the Sorcerer's Apprentice might lend itself more to basketball, primarily because the brooms would do a terrible job in pass protection and secondly, because they could be coached by the Wizard of Westwood. "But enough about all that," generic reader complains impatiently. " I want to read about your bike commute!" generic reader says and he/she stomps his/her foot. Very well then, generic reader.

I think one of the reasons why some drivers tend to get impatient/terrible is because they think that they're in private space (the confines of their car) when they're actually in public space (on the streets). We act different in private than we do in public (or should at least) and while a man's home is his castle, a phrase meaning that you can shoot crossbow bolts at invaders from therein (or something like that), the streets belong to us all and suggest a certain level of mutual accommodation. I think I'm less inclined to forget that I'm in public because I have neither roof nor radio to make me think otherwise, but it'd be easy to see how someone in a rolling easy chair might easily forget that he is outside the comforts of his own home. This is why I advocate making car seats less comfortable and requiring that all cars be convertible and roofs must be down unless it's raining. I'm sure that this will do the trick.

Ladies be Cat-6-ing.

I inflated my tires today and there's a noticeable squeak. [FOURTH WALL ALERT: After I wrote that sentence and before I could write the next one, which would be something like "This squeak is an unsolvable mystery and I'll never be able to get to the bottom of it because I'm helpless and the only thing I can think to do is to complain about it to the 9 of you, furthering highlighting my helplessness and haplessness," I decided that I would attempt to solve this problem myself. And I might have! I knew that it wasn't the brake pad rubbing again the sidewall because this makes an entirely different kind of noise (of which I am also well-acquainted), so I decided to sit on the floor (for some reason) and spin the rear tire and use my massive powers of "looking at it" to see that the outside of the sidewall of the tire was rubbing ever so slightly against the non-drive side fender stay, (Fender stay is also what you say when you don't want your guitar to run off). So I bent the fender stay ever so slightly, spun the tire once more and now the squeaking is gone. So, huzzah for all that]

For some of my ride, I was behind a guy wearing a Drunk'n Dragons cycling jersey. Don't let your dragon drink and ride. Or paddle, as the shirt might suggest.

I took 15th and then made a left on R Street, taking that the rest of the way. My legs felt heavy and slow, maybe because I overdid it on a leisure ride yesterday. I didn't mind it at the time, but I certainly felt like I had less juice this morning and not only because I didn't even have juice for breakfast (I had waffles, thanks for asking). This made riding up the Massachusetts Avenue hill laborious and I'm fairly certain that the time elapsed from bottom to top could have been measured in hours rather than minutes. If it were measured in minuets, it'd be a lot as well. If it were measured in minarets (which is a unit of distance and not time), it would depend on how tall the minaret is.

I wore normal people clothes today and that made the transition from the bicycling to the sitting at my desk marginally easier. Always important to nail that.