Rides 8/29 and 8/30

I work in higher education and yesterday was the start of the fall semester. I decided to mix it up by riding up 19th street in the morning rather than 18th and I can tell that 19th is a little steeper and there's less to look at (at least in terms of visual interest) and while I avoid the stoplights at Florida and Columbia and Adams Mill that way, it turns out that 19th ends on a one-way going the wrong way so I had to, um, creatively approach getting to the DE Bridge. From there, it was a normal ride to work and so on.

One thing I've been thinking about is how non-local drivers seem to be vastly worse at driving around bicyclists than local ones, or at least so it seems. Disproportionately it's North Carolina or New York or Florida license plates on cars being driven too closely to me and I don't think it's just my selective memory telling me that's the case. So I guess maybe there is something to be said for drivers "learning" to be better around bicyclists when they're more used to it. This is as close as I'll get to an apology to MD Driver in DC.

Hasn't been nearly as much back-to-school traffic as I had expected, but maybe it'll pick up September. Not sure yet if the St. Albans/Cathedral students are back and I'm just fortuitous enough to miss them or whether I haven't yet experienced the madness that will be Garfield Street when they return.

This is an aside to tell you that I ride past the Belgium Embassy everyday. It's unremarkable. And yet I did a whole aside to remark about it.

Summer remains hot and it will linger through September. There's a crispiness in fall, but it's still too far off for me to crackle with excitement about wet leaves creating peril beneath my tiny Bromtpon tires. I think the ambient heat is getting to drivers and their frustration bubbles only to be emitted in periodic honks and outgassed in feckless lane changes. I wouldn't mind it so much if it didn't affect me so profoundly. It's one thing to watch the boxing match from the stands, but another entirely to be seated in the middle of the ring. And without gloves no less.

Left work a little later today and went home the normal way. I wore sunglasses, but it wasn't that sunny. I wore a belt, but I don't think my pants would have fallen down without it. Not much reason to tell you I wore a belt. That belt is the Belgium Embassy of my apparel.