Rain

Timing is everything. Making it in this morning dancing between showers was great. Any day you can ride in with a forecast of rain with dry socks is good. Wet roads are fine but dry socks are the litmus test. Dry = good.

As the day winds down bike commuters start refreshing the radar on rainy days. Wondering how the ride home will be. Does the radar image offer a glimmer of hope of dancing between lines of showers?

Some days the bands are lined up so the ride home can happen between them. Other days it is a matter of riding through wave after wave. I like it best when the lines run parallel to my commute home.

The other day I realized most of my commutes by car in michigan or bike here in New England have been north and south, more or less at least. And there is something pretty cool about that. And safe. Never having to ride/drive into the sun is nice, and not only good for the eyes, it is safer too.

Safe is good.

Time to saddle up. it was nice for a while having the rain cover off. It makes communicating with my passenger much easier. A lot less of "WHAT DID YOU SAY?" from both sides. The rain is good. It helps the massive amount of cell division going on right now.

But cruising through a neighborhood this morning I began to wonder. Wonder about how 'healthy' the green green lawns are. Are they no more healthy than the beef cattle force fed corn and soy protein for their lives? And if they aren't all that healthy what does that do to the quality of their muscles (meat)? Salmon is easy to tell and to taste differences between corn and soy meal fed fish and wild. Wild trout vs hatchery raised trout are different too. Those little brookies up in the Colorado streams are very different than the stocked ones pulled from the reservoirs.

I often equate fishing and reading the stream for where the fish are hiding to reading a trail when mt biking or picking a line in cross. Part of it is skill, part of it is knowledge, but the overwhelming factor? Practice.

Ride safe, and send some good thoughts out to Jacquie (the other JP). It is of great fortune that her membership into the Crumpled Bike Club comes at no harm to her physical self. But none-the-less, her loss is saddening.

Heddwch
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