Know when to flash'em

As I've said before, it's fairly easy to ride in most skirts,  with the occasional pencil skirt exception.
I do have a couple of skirts that are not decent without opaque tights.  They're mostly shirt dresses where the last button is higher than the hem.  In the summer when opaque tights are both hot and odd looking, I do resort to wearing shorts under those few skirts.

I have a couple of pair of just above the knee mostly cotton "workout shorts"  that I bought a couple of years ago at a big box sports store.   I should go back and see if  I can pick up a few more pair, because I also end up using them as painting clothes, and they're getting a lot of "character".

These do have a gusset,  but are unpadded, and mostly cotton with just enough stretch to stay put, not enough to feel sausage-like  I have tried riding with shorter, less form fitting shorts under skirts, but they tend to ride up too,  and even though I am not technically flashing anyone anything other than my shorts,  it doesn't look that way to the casual viewer,  and I don't care to think about the intent viewer!

5 minutes in Cambridge

On a whim, I decided to stop for a moment at a busy corner on my route in and document all the cyclists coming by for about two cycles of the light.  I can't be certain that I got everyone, but it's a nice sampling.  At this corner it's a 50-50 mix of people coming in from Cambridge and points west and Somerville,  and it's also about a 50-50 mix of people peeling off at MIT/ Kendall and people headed over the bridge into Boston.

This woman was the only one to ask what I was doing-although a lot of people  looked at me curiously

Fixing it so it brakes-part 1

I did a lot of bike work last Saturday- It was sunny for the first time in what felt like forever, so I dragged my bikestand outside and put Minerva up.

I removed her rear brake shoes, and slid the black rubber out of the metal part.  That makes it sound really simple.  The first one was really that simple.  The second one, was more like getting lobster out of the tip of a claw-  it came out reluctantly and in pieces.

       

Once the black rubber was out, the salmon Kool Stop pads slid in easily,  and then I reassembled them on the bike.

I can't really say until I ride in the rain, but the performance on dry tires was awesome!  I'm going to see if Harris will let me return a couple of packages of unopened Fibrax pads and exchange them for these on all three of my rod brake bikes.

Bike Dancing

The lovely weather is bringing out bikers right and left.

The first thing I noticed about this rider was the sparkly hula hoops that she had slung across her body.
The next was her enormous smile-  a smile that took over her whole face (even though she was squinting into the sun)

We chatted a bit at a light, and she said that she was off to a meetup of hoop dancers in Cambridge Common.  I wished I hadn't had to go to my livable streets meeting so that I could have followed her there to check it out.  Hoop dancing on youtube,

Speaking of Youtube, bikes and dancing,  I really loved the People For Bikes video that's been going round the blogosphere- especially the BMX trick guys.  This prompted a Youtube search which resulted in the most amazing bike video I have ever seen.   Wikipedia says that  Danny MacAskill  is perhaps the world's most renowned practitioner of what in the UK is called trials biking.  To me it looks like parkour or dancing on a bike.  It's incredibly amazing and terrifying, and he's an amazing athlete- absolutely one with his bike.  It's a bit long, but worthwhile!

Urban Repair Squad and the Perfect is the enemy of the Good

Image of DIY sharrow from URS website

I was at an advocacy committee meeting last night, and the subject came up of the perfect being the enemy of the good in infrastructure.  One of the guys at the meeting works for the T,  and often at a bus stop there will be a crumbling curb, or a cracked and broken sidewalk.  Unfortunately the way things work, if you touch it at all, you have to make it 100% compliant with current codes, including access ramps, pavement textures etc.   Now I think that all those things are good and I understand that the mechanism for making them universal is to tie them into repairs, so that they get done piece by piece and eventually they'll be everywhere.   But unfortunately too often it becomes an incentive to delay maintenance, because there isn't the money to do it "Right"  we can't do anything.

Anyway,  the guy was saying that we needed an Urban Repair Squad.
Evidently this is a loose collective that started in Toronto that dressed up as city workers and installed DIY sharrows, bike lanes, bike boxes. etc.   Obviously painting lines and stencils is easier than repairing curbs and patching potholes, but there's some appeal to having citizen initiative on things...

Their Manifesto is quite amusing-lots of great doodle cartoons explaining basic infrastructure types.  I think there are a couple of traffic engineers who could get something out of it.

Spandex free at the stoplight

Today was the first really glorious day in a month that's supposed to be full of glorious days.  68- headed to 72, sunny, breezy!  Aside from nearly getting run over by a sidewalk cyclist going really fast down my narrow sidewalk as I put out the recycling (and yes I did yell at her)  it was a lovely morning!

I was so distracted by the lovely weather that I overshot my first stop of the morning- compost dropoff.  I was 4 blocks past the Whole Foods on a one way street,  but I didn't think my office mates would appreciate a bag of partially rotted food sitting in the corner all day, so I turned back.

The area where they have the compost bins at the back of the parking lot is being maxed out for employee parking and storage, but  Gilbert could squeeze in just fine.

We headed out through the construction zone again..

And then found ourselves in a mini-convoy of lycra free ladies riding down broadway, over the Longfellow and up to City Hall.  I got a shot of the the other ladies at a stoplight- Such big smiles!

What a lovely day to ride a bike!

Oh no, not again

After a beautiful day on Saturday where everyone came out into the sun and tried to get the moss out from between their toes,  it's back to the slog,  with pouring rain this morning,   and a chance of rain most days this week.  le sigh.

The small brown dog looked at me this morning as if to say,  Really?  You want me to go out in that?  He raced out, did his business and crawled back into his bed.

I find myself feeling the same way, without the option of crawling back into bed.   Think I need a day off the bike- gonna ride in to the train with the Scientist I think.