Rides 1/6: trash compactor

Another cold day, but not the coldest and by the afternoon, it was reasonably warm, even for the cold. I'm tired of writing about the weather, but you can't not write about it sometimes- it's just so there. You can outrun a lot of things riding a bike, but you can't outrun the weather.

Almost rode myself into the back of a truck when the driver put on the opposite turn signal from the direction he intended to turn. This was less than ideal. Maybe he was British and they turn signal on the wrong side over there. Blimey.

Rode past the White House this morning and didn't even look at it. That seems wrong. That seems jaded. I guess you get used to things, but even if you do, there's no harm in looking at them anyway. I'm immensely grateful for getting to ride where I ride and forgetting to soak that in seems like a mistake. I rode up the other side to Penn to 25th to M and then up through Georgetown up Wisconsin and then down and up Massachusetts to work.

I thought it was warm enough on the ride home to go without gloves. I was wrong. I fumbled trying to put a glove on while riding. These gloves are thick and not prone to successfully doing that. I think these gloves are too thick- they are my thick winter gloves- and they have the curious habit of staying damp with hand sweat throughout the day between uses and there is little appetizing about putting on a wet glove, much less two. It's a small price to pay on the few days a year when I need my heavy winter gloves, but it's a price nonetheless.

Regular route home with a detour for meeting a friend and walking around some. I've ridden 9th the past two days through downtown and I really quite like it, except for its desperate need for traffic calming. If your street allows people to drive 40mph on it, unhindered, then this is not a very good city street and you need to do something about it. There is no constitutional right to 40mph driving. And there really shouldn't be. The same thing that keeps people from biking is the same thing that keeps people from picnicking on the highway median. People don't like being near fast cars. Full stop. It's an unpleasant experience and if you're not in a fast car yourself, you will barely tolerate and seek the means to avoid it whenever possible. This doesn't seem immensely complicated, but somehow we take more seriously the claims for streets to be used to funnel fast cars than the claims for streets to be used for literally anything else and so here we are. Someday, maybe, someone will stand up with the radical claim that we should fight the unpleasantness of forcing people to be near fast moving cars in the center of a city. I'd take up funds that build a statue of that person.