List of things I should know but don't

Having biked around San Francisco for a total of over four years now, I tend to think of myself as someone who knows the flattest routes for getting around the city, avoiding the worst of the hills.

I was recently proven dramatically wrong when a friend of ours, having heard about the route we took to bike from SOMA to Golden Gate Park on Sunday, said, incredulously:

"You don't know about The Wiggle?"

No, we don't.

But now we do. The Wiggle is the flattest path through the city, in particular going from SOMA to Golden Gate Park. This discovery is akin to finding out, after a year and a half of walking up and down four flights of stairs every day, that our apartment building has an elevator*.

Eric said it best in his response to the friend's follow up email with additional info about The Wiggle:

"I can't believe we've been getting all that unnecessary exercise! I'm definitely going to wiggle from now on."


*I remain reasonably sure that it does not.

Memo To Everyone Who Is Trying to Kill Me

Attention all operators of motor vehicles in the city of San Francisco:

I kindly request that you please signal when you are going to make a right turn so that bikers like me can go around you on the left side. If flicking the little lever to use your signal is too much effort, perhaps just a brief flick of the eyes to the rearview mirror so that you don't turn right into me? Is that too much to ask to avoid senselessly murdering someone?

Further, I would ask you to please refrain from double parking in the bike lane on busy streets. I can understand how convenient that must be for you but it is a real hazard to bikers.

Also, would you be so kind as to look for approaching bicyclists before suddenly pulling out of a parking spot with no signal or any indication of imminent movement? I would be so grateful, really.

And finally, please, please, look for bicyclists in the bike lane before suddenly swerving over into it and almost hitting me. (Taxis, this applies double to you.) Do you have any idea how scary that is when you do that? If you did, you would understand why I have to yell at you and maybe give you the finger. And why I have to swear extra when I can see that you are inevitably talking on your cell phone. (You know that's illegal, right?)

Though you act as though I were, I am not in fact invisible when I put on my helmet, roll up my right pant leg and hop on my bike to ride to and from work.

I beg you to spend the infinitesimally small amount of extra energy and attention required to be more biker aware as you drive around your thousands of pounds of motor vehicle.

Summer is here

I had to wear my down coat and gloves to ride my bike to work this morning. That's how you know that it is summer in San Francisco.

Yesterday was equally chilly and horrible but I got to drive to work because I had to go to a doctor's appointment across town that was not at all bikeable by a reasonable person in professional clothing. As a side note, the patient intake form at the doctor's office asked me for my religion which I haven't seen before.* I wonder how that would affect the care that I would receive.

Last night we could see the lights on at the baseball stadium and had a moment of "that's too bad" slash "ha ha sucks for you" for the people attending the game. As we watched, the fog thickened and settled heavily into the stadium.

I could hear the tomatoes whimpering on the roof.


*Maybe because I almost never go to the doctor?

Go that way really fast

One of the many adventures of this past weekend was renting a ridiculously powerful motorcycle and driving on it for many, many hours. We went north. We went south. We came across a down home country barbecue and chili cook-off and petted some friendly dogs. We zoomed like the zoomiest.

Check out our hot wheels:
The unexpected epilogue to our badass motorcycle weekend came this morning at the rental car counter when they upgraded me to a gold Mustang. Totally unsolicited. So this week I'll be cruising around Seattle in style.

1000 words

Let me paint you a picture. It is a picture of me.

It is a picture of me riding my bike to work this morning.

In the picture, you'll notice that my backpack looks especially full. It is. It is full of meat*, buns, ketchup, mustard and mayo. It also contains my own packed lunch, and all of the items one might expect to find in a large purse.

You'll also notice that I have another bag hanging off my person. It's a yoga mat bag with two yoga mats and a set of yoga clothes all squeezed inside. It is oblong and hanging awkwardly sort of in front of my body so that my knees hit it each time they come up and around.

Upon continued examination, you will further observe that there are two Whole Foods paper shopping bags hanging from my bike, one from each handlebar. These paper bags contain approximately 20 pounds of local organic peaches and plums for my office. The effort it is taking to prevent these bags from swinging in the wind and smashing into my bike and wheel, crushing the tender fruit inside, is clearly written across my face.

If it were a video, you would see me careening wildly down the Embarcadero holding my breath and just trying not to fall. But it's just a picture. So you can't.


*Somehow the vegetarian drew the meat assignment. Go figure.

Critical, motorized

Riding my bike to yoga this morning, I unintentionally timed my trip perfectly to coincide with the Pride parade, which routes a few blocks past where I live. I tried to navigate around it when, suddenly, I found myself in sea of motorcyclists.

And these weren't just any motorcyclists: they were Dykes on Bikes.

And there were many hundreds of them!

It turned out they were turning right in front of me, trapping me in the elbow of the turn. All I could do for over 10 minutes was stand there and watch, and cheer, and be delighted and just a little scandalized at what I saw, which ran the gammet from women in full leather to women in nothing but leather thongs* and boots, and covered a lot of ground in between: leather corsets and garter stockings, topless women in tutus and bright pink fishnets, and even a couple of women dressed as bumble bees.

It, also, was quite wonderful. And just as unexpected. The mood was spectacular and it was hard not to feel, well, proud.


*I said "thong."

Critical

On my ride home from work yesterday I was on my usual route at the usual time when suddenly I found myself in a sea of bicyclers. Traffic was completely stopped as hundreds - maybe thousands? - of bikers did the equivalent of strolling down the street.

I had heard of this before but never come across it. This phenomenon is known as Critical Mass.

It was started in San Francisco (of course) in 1992 and now happens in more than 300 cities every last Friday of the month. It might be to draw attention to biker's rights in the city. Or it might just be fun to stop traffic. I don't know. But they happened to be going my way, so I joined the throng* and let them escort me the rest of the way home.

It was quite wonderful.


*I said "throng"

Unmatched grace and elegance

I ride my bike to work every day. When it is nice, it is really, really nice: along the Embarcadero with beautiful views of the bridge and the water. And when it is nasty, it is really really nasty. The wind whips and howls especially fiercely along the waterfront and even in full body rain gear I still seem to end up soaked and with a line of grit from the street up my back courtesy of my back wheel.

Today it looks really, really nice but don't be fooled - it is like a sandstorm without the sand out there. Big winds coming from all directions. I discovered this repeatedly on my ride into the office today when the wind kept trying to throw me in front of cars.

Even on a non-windy day, the trickiest part of the ride is the home stretch which is a narrow wooden ramp up onto a raised deck and the front door. No big deal, usually, but it can feel a little precarious.

Today as I swooped around the corner and onto the ramp, there was a woman walking down it, as well. This is not usually the case. I slowed down and was about to hop off my bike to walk the rest of the way when a big gust of wind rushed over us and, at the same time, my heel got caught in the pedal on the side I was planning to dismount on. That was the same moment when she walked right between me and the railing. I wouldn't say I fell on her, but I definitely leaned heavily on her squashing her against the railing for a solid 25 seconds as I struggled to get my balance and she struggled to escape. My muttered apologies didn't seem to help. She ran away.

Rhymes with floored

I got through a classic biker nightmare yesterday mostly unscathed, other than a few scrapes and bruises.

I was moving uphill at a pretty good clip (given that I was peddling uphill) on a narrow-ish street when a truck came barreling up behind me. I had my lights on and I was wearing a bright green reflective vest like some sort of runaway utilities worker so it is unlikely that this truck driver didn't see me, rather he severely underestimated what a comfortable space buffer between truck and bike would be, pushing me towards the cars parked along the side of the road.

Then, immediately in front of me, a guy sitting in a parked car opened the door.

Ouch.

I slammed into the door, vaulting off my bike but not flipping. I landed on my left side but didn't lay in the street for more than a fraction of a second. I popped up immediately did a quick scan of my body and determined that I was completely intact. I turned around and yelled at the dooring perpetrator "You're lucky I'm OK!" And then I fled the scene.

I was hyper-alert as I pedaled home. I felt like I had 359 degree peripheral vision and could maybe even see infrared. Once in the shower at home, starting to calm down, I began to discover that I was in fact somewhat scathed. A scrape on my foot from getting yanked out of the pedal cage, tender spots on my left arm, elbow and hip, and a muscle pull in my neck. But, all told, not bad.

The purpose of the bike ride had been to time my new commute* and then had turned into a longer spin to enjoy the sunset on the water. I think it will be great to be able to bike to work and with every unfortunate bike incident I have, I am reducing the probability of future unfortunate incidents. That's how that works, right?


*Yeah, I got a job. More about that later.

Vroom vroom

This past Saturday was simultaneously and at the same time a great and miserable day for me. Saturday was the day I learned how to ride a motorcycle (yay!) in weather comparable to the storm at the end of Karate Kid II (boo!).

I'm still thinking about it on a Thursday because after six hours soaking wet in black leather gloves last Saturday, today my hands still look like they are attached to the wrong body. It looks sort of like I got a manicure on opposite day*, where instead of cleaning up your hands, nails and cuticles and making them look healthy and pleasing to the eye and touch, I had a team of small Korean women rubbing inky blackness deep into every line on my hands and extra deep around my nails. They were totally talking about me in Korean while they did it, too. I hate when they do that.

I don't think it is optimal for one’s introduction to riding a motorcycle to be in three inches of standing water, but the upside is that if I ever need to ride a motorcycle through a kiddie pool, I will have much more control over which children I decide to hit.


*which usually fell on Thursdays where I was growing up, but I'm not sure if that was true everywhere.

Ticket to ride

Last night I attended the classroom portion of the three-day class that will result, if all goes well, in me having a motorcycle license within about a week.

The class was 4 1/2 hours long and felt every minute of it. The agenda consisted of watching short video clips, then working with our tables to answer blindingly obvious questions, then sharing our newfound insights with the whole group, then doing it all over again.

There were about 10 video clips, so probably about 40 minutes of video, yet by my count there were only about seven different stock clips used, just played over and over with different voiceover each time, sometimes several times within the same four-minute clip. It made me start to think I was losing my mind, which is just as well since I think that might actually be a requirement for riding a motorcycle.

"When turning while carrying a passenger," the video explained in the Passengers and Cargo clip, "the passenger should look over your shoulder to the inside of the turn, just as if you were on a bobsled."

I looked around the room; yes, this was not a group that would find bobsledding references to be particularly meaningful.

The riding portion of the class takes place this Saturday and Sunday for five hours each day. I've got a helmet and gloves but I still need to get some motorcycle boots. And then I'll be getting my full body riding suit. It might look something like this.

Hardly strictly a parking spot

There was a shortage of bike parking for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival this past weekend in the Golden Gate Park so Eric and I did the only sensible thing we could think of to do: we hung our bikes from a tree and locked them to the branch. See Exhibit A.



Off we went to enjoy some of that sweet twangy music that makes me want to laugh and weep at the same time. Many banjo solos later we came back to find that we had inadvertently caused a bicycle infestation and the tree was clearly helpless to defend itself. I give you: Exhibit B.



I don't know if it's credit or blame; I just know that it's mine.

The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

Yesterday was one of those days.

I didn't wake up with gum in my hair or lose my yo-yo, but I did take a nasty spill on my bike. (Yes, day 3. Stop laughing!) The blessed Muni tracks sucked my tire right down into the little groove and sent me sliding. Man! It was quite the yard sale. Yoga mat one way, backpack the other, the chain came off, and I ended up in a twisted heap right in front of where all the homeless fellows play chess on the sidewalk. Crowding around and "helping" me was far more interesting than pretending to play chess. A few passing bikers stopped as well to make sure everything was OK. I'm not at all sure how I am not more injured but, bruised thigh and pride aside, I seem to be fine.

There were also some low points at work that are not worth rehashing here. Also not worth mentioning is a particularly bad parallel parking job that almost resulted in me needing to leave a note for damage to another car. Almost.

Eric also had a bad day. Sick lab mice, incompetent shuttle bus driver, late train, sunglasses ruined, and experiencing the horror of my parallel parking. And he had to wear his railroad train pajamas. (He hates his railroad train pajamas.)

The teacher of the yoga class I went to shared with us that Mercury is in retrograde right now, which typically causes breakdowns in communication as well as just generally screwing things up. Damn it, Mercury. Come back!

It's not about the bike

I got my new bike yesterday! She's a hybrid bike good for commuting around the city but will also be good for some light road biking, which there is an approximately 4% chance of me ever doing. I bought her on Sunday but she had to be assembled from her component parts. The bike store dude said he couldn't promise it any sooner than 48 hours but I asked if he could pretty please write a little note to the assembly people and put a smiley face on it to see if I could get it sooner. He obliged*.

And lo and behold...I got a call yesterday afternoon saying she was ready to be picked up!

I took her out for a spin just to see how she felt (the idea had originally been to go to a yoga class but the picking up process turned out to be lengthier than I had allowed for). It has been a while since I have biked around San Francisco and I had forgotten that all automotorists are maniacs who would like to bring about my bloody, mangled not to mention untimely death. Well, they are.

As I was biking around, I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window and involuntarily started humming the Wicked-Witch-of-the-West tune to myself. This is not good, I said to myself upon realizing what I was doing.

Then again this morning, I'm cruising to work** and before I know it I'm humming that manic little tune again. Not. Good.


So I think I need a new theme song to hum to myself as I bike around. Any ideas?

*The note said "Elizabeth would enjoy riding her new bike on Monday. :)"
**It's a long block, OK?
***Note that the Wicked Witch is also riding a hybrid - but hers is the bike/broomstick combo instead.