Ride Home 11/13: Vesuvius

TIP: don't leave a wet glove in the pocket of your shorts. It will still be wet when you go to put it on for your ride home and your hand will be very cold. Your fingers might turn to popsicles. These popsicles will be the flavor of sad.

I don't really have a backup plan if someone stole my bike lights. I should probably take them off my bike during the day, lest I be faced with the dilemma of taking home a CaBi or riding home in the dark. What would I do? Would principles or expediency win out?

Do you ever start singing The Christmas Song and end up in Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas? Jack Frost nipping at my brain/From now on my lucidity will be miles away.

An event at the British Embassy of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland caused a minor traffic backup and other car traffic concerns caused other traffic backups and it caused all sorts of bigger problems for drivers and minor problems for me, but I was soon through them and down 23rd, which was also backed up and I squeezed my way through some of this traffic in a way that was safe because nothing bad happened and that's my story and I'm sticking to it. It actually wasn't that bad, but I think that when you bike long enough you get maybe a little too comfortable a little too close to cars. I wonder if that's how zookeepers feel. But about wild animals.

Yet another day on L Street and almost nothing went too wrong. In fact, I only saw one driver make a left turn from a center lane. Here's a great suggestion of additional markings that could be added to make the mixing zones better for everyone. Ok, I saw two drivers make turns from the travel lane, but I'm going to excuse the one guy because a mail truck was parked in the turn lane. But it wasn't all bad for mail delivery- I actually saw a FedEx van parked at a loading dock! Miracles can happen. Only saw two drivers enter the bike lane too soon and only one van parked in the bike lane so that the flower seller guy could load his flowers into the back of it. In conclusion, it really wasn't better than many other nights, which is to say sort of bad, but I figure if I just keep using the word "only," the effect will be altogether ameliorating.

I spent my ride down 11th street trying to translate "Won't you take me to funky town" into Hungarian in the most accurate way possible. I arrived at Penn before arriving at an acceptable solution. Talk about, talk about, talk about...something. Riding at night does something weird to me.

Pennsylvania Avenue (I'll miss you) to the House side of the Capitol and then down Independence for a little and across the street and down Pennsylvania again and I stopped at the Yes! Organic Market for the most organic and healthful of purchases, some bottles of beer. I wouldn't be surprised if I was asked not to return to this market because I sort of got the crazy eyes and went all velo-vangelist on the poor checkout girl who asked if I biked and then I glazed over and all I remember is emphatically pointed at my Bikeshare key and at some point she stopped making eye contact and maybe even started fake coughing. True story.

After that, it was up 8th street to North Carolina and then past the park and down A Street and then at 14th I waited and waited and waited for a very slow motorcycle operator whose motorcycle might have been suffering some distress to clear the intersection. It was laughable. "Hah," I laughed. A couple blocks later and then I was home.