Rides 7/3: But where did the lighter fluid come from?

I think I'm beginning to learn that the new bike works best when I don't stomp on the pedals, but instead try to pedal smoothly and evenly and with measure. Maybe all bikes are like that. Honestly, I know basically nothing about the best practices for the proper riding of bicycles. [Best Practices for the Proper Riding of Bicycles sounds like some positivist instructional pamphlet from the 1890s. Maybe it was?] Everything I've ever learned about riding bicycles either happened when I was 6 or has happened as an incidental result of my choosing to commute by bike. I have taken approximately zero lessons, nor benefited from any taught instruction, professional or amateur. Some days I really feel like I would benefit from it. I mean, not because it's strictly necessary (I practically barely ever crash into things or fall down or catch fire mysteriously), but because sometimes even the most routinized acts can benefit from refinement. Like a Japanese tea ceremony. No one is like "Yoshi, just slam back a Lipton and get on with it." Or maybe they're exactly like that. I now even less about tea ceremonies than I do about bicycling. Is one of the T's in a TT tea? Is the other one?

Gave up on waiting out the storm and rode home in the light rain then no rain (in a bumblebee costume?) and then in the heavy downpour that opened up around the time I was only 2 miles away from the end of my trip. There's nothing about the new bike that I don't love- even its flaws are lovable, like a runty puppy- and I especially loved riding the bike in the post-storm environment and the post-post-storm environment, which was storm once more. Seals and Crofts like a summer breeze, but I prefer the summer rain and like seals, I arf wildly in enjoyment. To be stuck in an unrelenting rain is to be stuck with an irrepressible grin, a grim grin, a grim grin of determination to push through the rain but also savor it. Savory rain mixed with salty sweat and a grimey grim grin and an unimpeded, uninterrupted and unrelenting unrepressed wetter break from the wet hot heat. July is dressed up and playing her tune.