October

At the urging of two friends in particular, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the Big Questions of what I want to do with my life, and here is the answer: write about cycling*. So, if I’m going to get free stuff to play with like The Lovely Bicycle does, I need to make a better blog. I guess I’ll try to post at least once a month about Personal Things and try to tie it into cycling whenever possible. I guess there are worse things than writing about how lovely October was. Here are my highlights:

– My best friend came to town! As always, we had breakfast and played the crossword. I’m getting better at them. I understood the “theme” this time and got the big across clue (“BOYSENBERRY JAM” – I was so thrilled – here’s someone else’s review of the puzzle. This review reminded me of the simple pleasure of the game – of course a “party animal” is a STAG. Ha.)  Anyway, I’ll take my victories where I can get them.

– I went hiking with a new friend and met some new people. Hilariously, new friend’s grad school classmate was on the same senator’s staff as one of my good friends. Never let it be said that DC isn’t a small town. We also saw at least 10 people we knew on the mountain (including folks visiting from Seattle). Reminds me of how you run into EVERYONE from Portland at Cannon Beach over the course of the summer.

This was my first time up Old Rag and it was really tough! Those rock scrambles are no joke.

The weather has also been exceptionally fine for biking, and I’ve been spamming my Instagram with pictures from my commute. Since I’m weighing quitting social media altogether (I think my mind would be quieter, and I’d certainly post more here), I posted a collection of my pictures here.

And, of course, Halloween happened. I spent a super fun, but surprisingly somehow low-key, evening with my friend Kim. I  stayed out until 4am twice! It is good to act my age once in awhile!

We started the night on a “zombie bike ride” hosted by BicycleSpace. I’m pretty sure we were the only two zombies, but the ride was great. We went to Bardo, a brewpub by the owner of Dr. Dremo’s in Arlington (RIP). Then, we met up with Indiana Jones:

 

….and Kim fell asleep at the next party we went to (photo relegated to snapchat to protect the not-so-innocent.)

I can’t believe how great DC’s cycling scene is now. The Metropolitan Branch Trail has way more people on it this year than I saw last year. There are so many great shops that have opened since 2006. A lot of decent people have worked really hard to make this city completely awesome for biking. I still have some complaints about signage for the MBT entrance off of the Rhode Island Avenue Metro, but whatever, I guess DDOT will never really understand signage (or at least one person in particular won’t) and at least they painted some stripes by the entrance and they got rid of some parking spaces and put in a protected bike lane! Really cool.

November is off to a great start, too: I slept in and spent a lazy morning gossiping with Kim and watching movies with her roommate, then ran some errands at bike shops, where I ran into my buddy, Ray, who was buying a Brompton. Ray was my first library school friend – we bonded because during those “go around the room and introduce yourself” first day of class exercises, Ray announced that he speaks Portuguese! <<Legal>> I said, and off we went. Ray just accepted a tenure-track position at a university in North Carolina. I’d try to say something good about my program here, but the truth is that everyone in the program knew Ray was going to be a hot commodity on the job market before we even started classes! Congratulations, buddy, and enjoy that awesome bicycle and your poetry circle in the mountains. You remind me that life is long and that we can make it an adventure.

Unrelated: I had a conversation with a coworker recently who tried to remind me that money can’t buy happiness.

“No,” I said, “but it can buy a new bicycle, and that’s pretty close.”

*if anyone knows how to pitch to Bicycling magazine, holla at me.