7/24/16

Rides: Last week (sorry)

I didn't really intend for this blog to go into digest format, nor do I really intend for it to be that in a future, but I had a lot of things going on last week and I'm still out of habit of doing this daily, so excuse excuse excuse apology apology apology etc. etc. I did ride to work every day last week, except for the day I didn't work and on that day, I rode Bikeshare from the house (which is now not mine) to Judiciary Square (or thereabouts), so huzzah for all that. It was my intention to ride this weekend, but aside from two rides to and from donuts (the first ride to donuts was an hour too early for the donut shop to be open), I spent the heat indoors like a normal/sane person.

A few observations from this week:

- 18th Street through Adams Morgan is sort of a bike highway. Pity it only has sharrows. It makes sense that there are so many cyclists who take it and it's a fine route (even with sharrows), but it'd be nicer if it were something more.

- Connecticut and Calvert remains the worst. At it's best, it's a bad intersection and at it's worst, it's the worst intersection.

- I can't remember when or why, but at some point during the week, I was on the Met Branch Trail and I didn't know if I was supposed to take the wide angle on the ramp down to M Street or whether I was supposed to take the narrow approach and I had an awkward, but comical and lighthearted, intersection with a cyclist riding up the ramp and it was all very haha. I think the case could be made for either wide or narrow, but I'll defer to those of you who do this more than I do and then I'll make take your wisdom and pass it off as my own in a future GP.

- Heat it hot. Humidity is humid. It's July. These things happen. It'll be August soon and then these things'll happen in August too. Seems like we have summer every year these days.

- A few years ago I bought Brooks grips for the Brompton. I wanted grips to match my saddle because I am somewhat vain and somewhat fastidious and must've also had somewhat too much money sitting around or something. I had a terrible time getting them on the bars and even after that, the ends of the grips kept falling off. This might have something to do with poor installation or it might have to do with my knocking off the Brompton a bunch, but either way, it's kind of annoying. I glued them on once, but that still doesn't seem to have done the job. Now the leather on the grips is starting to come off (it's a one inch strip of leather rolled diagonally around the barrel) and I've more or less reached the point where I'm going to have declared them as having achieved their usefulness and switch back to the standard foamy grips that came with the bike. I feel like maybe they should've lasted longer, but then again, I kind of treat the bike like crap, so I'm willing to maybe say that a few years is a good life for grips. In the mean time, I'm going to keep riding the bike and keep getting annoyed by them.

- The mean time ends tomorrow. My new route takes me right past the Adams Morgan Bicycle Space. This is dangerous. I have $40 in saved-up commuter checks left, but those won't last much longer. Pray for Sharrows.

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