A carnival of technology

These past couple few weeks sure were miserable.  But I don’t want to talk about all the miserable things, like how I got ripped off by the car dealership because of a gas tank design flaw and because I want to pass emissions in a couple of months; or how the call center the dealership uses for surveys woke up my ass up on a Saturday morning and didn’t leave a message, and then continued calling all through the week until I finally picked up and gave them a good rating since I know if I don’t they’ll just call again to ask why; or how I forgot that I need to swerve toward the traffic lane on the way home in order to dodge that pile of jagged debris on the city border—detritus that may have been cars in some past and is now ignored by a pair of municipalities hoping that it’s the other one’s problem—and slashed right through the kevlar threads on one of my expensive German tires; or how I haven’t been able to get to my checking account, since my old card is disabled thanks to the Heartland breach, but the PIN for the new card was lost in the mail. or how the nicer weather means that I have to deal with the lycra-wearing assholes—the lowest and most obnoxious form of human life—any time I get on a bike.  I want to talk about happier things.

There are a good number of roads around here with bicycle lanes, but they tend to be pretty busy.  I usually avoid them because they don’t go where I want to go, and the Lance wannabes avoid them because they can’t get away with riding 15 abreast.  We both often end up on a road that goes mostly parallel to the railway, a relatively flat north-south street with light traffic.  I noticed that for some reason the carbon-fiber lycra brigade usually turns around at a particular point, and I have no idea why.  Maybe they all have their cycle computers set to a particular distantce.  I don’t know.  I decided to keep going.  I kept going until I ran out of road, and at the end of the road there was a bearded man wearing overalls and selling vegetables.  Then I went back.  At the other end of the road, just before the final turn toward home, there is a shop that sells strawberry ice cream and Orange Crush made with real sugar.  So today was pretty nice.