Rides 12/9: this again again

Cold, but not winter cold. Sunglasses, but it was cloudy. December befuddles, but I'll take a befuddling December over a wintry one. How does this affect my seasonal mirth and more importantly, my atonal mumble singing of your favorite holiday tunes during my bike commute? Little. It affects it very little. The atonal mumble singing continues apace and this is regardless of whether there's anyone around and I'd just like to give a shout out to my fellow bike commuters for their remarkable chill. Not once has anyone freaked out to an atonal mumble sung line of Frosty and for that I'm grateful.

Mall route and I picked up behind another rider and more or less rode in his wake up to K Street, but he dropped off and then it was slow going up Wisco for the rest of the way. A couple of months ago, DDOT decided to stripe some very narrow lanes on Book Hill, where there used to be no stripes before. From the perspective of a northbound bicyclist, I can tell you that this decision has somewhat worked against my interests since the drivers used to pretend that there was only one very wide lane and leave me most of the right side of the road. Now with two, even though they're narrow, they occupy more space and that means there's less room for me. I mean, there's the same amount of room, but I'm more likely to have a driver in front of me or behind me and that changes the dynamic somewhat.

I bit further up the road a Prius driver with an NRA sticker (seriously) nearly made it such that the side of his car ended into my haunch. I wondered what he would say about my right to stand my ground in that situation. I declined to inquire.

Ride home was mostly uneventful down Massachusetts and 21st and across town on L. There was some car traffic but there's always some car traffic. Turns out that when a lot of people want to drive a lot of cars somewhere it doesn't really work out well. I hate car traffic. I might hate car traffic more than the average driver. Why else do you think I bike everywhere?

Saw this guy. If that's not the coolest bike in DC, I don't know what is.

bat-fiets

I also saw Justin. When I saw him, he was being honked at. Justin is a noted bike jerk and you can tell this because on the childseat of the longtail he uses to transport his adorable kid, there's a pinwheel and anyone who thinks to decorate his child portaging bike in such a way must be some kind of jerk deserving a punitive honk when, to my (admittedly biased, but not totally unobjective) eye, all he was doing was riding in the bike lane. Oh well.