1. Bikes are like Lay's potato chips. They are greasy and delicious and when you tilt your head back and dump the crumbs into your open mouth, it's best to do it with a door closed. Also, hard to just have one.
2. Unfortunately, you (generally speaking, unless you're an acrobat) can pretty much only ride one at a time. This will lead some people in your life to ask why you need more than one, since you can pretty much only ride one at one time and aren't all bikes pretty much just the same anyway? The mature response to this question is to shove your fingers in your ears and yell a loudly "I CANT HEAR YOU." Oh, you wanted a mature response? Never mind. The mature response is to fake a knee injury and writhe around in the floor until an ambulance spirits you to safety/superfluous surgery/medical bankruptcy.
3. There's all kinds of formulae involving N, where N is a number related to the number of bikes your partner might abide before they launch you into the ocean with a trebuchet, but I don't think that's really always the best way to assess the proper number of bikes you ought to have. You might have an overly kind partner whose love for you let's you take ad tante of then and pile bike after bike into your studio apartment, even when you shouldn't. That's really not fair. Take advantage if their love to rent a storage locker! Way better than tripping over a bike on the way to the coffee maker in the morning.
4. Only buy bikes you love. If you fall out of love with a bike, even a little, sell it. Ask for money and not magic beans! Amateur move that. Sold bikes bring joy to new owners. Don't be a bike hoarder.
On the way home, I ended up behind a fellow bike commuter who apologized to me for not knowing where she was going, but unbeknownst to her, I am a sometimes helpful person, and so I helped her navigate (and led her since I was going that way) from the end of the L Street Cycletrack to the beginning of the Met Branch Trail. Two things:
1. She might've been a plant. Not a ficus or anything, but it's awfully convenient that I have this whole giving advice to bicyclists gig and then a of the sudden a real-life bicyclist asked me for some advice.
2. I've written about this before, but it is a MASSIVE problem that there is no good way to bike relatively directly and unfetteredly from downtown to NoMa and parts north and east and amplifying the worstness of this, there aren't even good signs to direct people on the kinda bad ways to get across town. We ended up riding on K (I believe I asked "are you ok riding the wrong way down this street?" Sorry!) and around Mount Vernon Square and K again, but I'm not sure had I not known how to get there, we would've been able to figure out on the fly how to get there. So, yeah, that's a problem. I wish wayfinders would a) know that bicyclists exist and b) assume bicyclists know nothing about anything. I know I certainly do.
Anyway, she was very nice and it's kinda fun to provide real-time GPing to real-life people. Being unhelpful is overrated.
I bought milk at Aldi. There's a view of the Capitol from Maryland and 17th NE that's very nice and not a few of the Capitol I've seen very often.
I bike down 14th and was behind a guy who chatted to some women in a car at a red light. They knew each other and were all going to the same place. He said that it was likely he'd beat them to the BBQ they were all heading towards (even though he had to go pick up his mail at his old place) and then said that he'd beat them there and eat a hot dog before they could eat a hot dog. Then he caveat-ed with the guarantee that he would certainly eat a hot dog before them if they're vegetarians. World-class caveat-ing, sir.
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