One Twenty One
My favorite moment during yesterday’s festivities came while watching the swearing-in and post-swearing-in speech, I realized I was needlessly bracing myself for cringes that weren’t going to happen. There were no ‘Nookyuller’ moments, nothing about putting food on my family, and I realized that I could relax a bit. Then, a little while later, I realized (again) that President Obama is not simply an adequate speaker that won’t embarrass us with his grammar and pronunciation, but that he’s an excellent speaker that leaves one feeling better than they did before he delivered the speech. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve enjoyed seeing a presidential speech delivered, that was really nice.
And you know, I thought my farewell feelings for Bush would have been angrier, but they weren’t. I just can’t attribute as much evil to the guy as I can to someone like, for example, Kissinger. There’s a lot of people in Washington that are sharp, informed, and experienced enough to know what kind of evil they’re unleashing on the country and the world, after 8 years I’m not convinced that George W. Bush is one of them.
Cheney, by contrast, I expected to be sent back to wherever he came from via a circled pentagram drawn with magic powder on the floor of a red-walled room in the White House’s deepest basement room. Ya know what I mean? Like the kind of room where the door is made with 8″ oak timbers, and has a small window with thick, wrought iron bars and a message carved into it in Latin?
But now that they’re gone, I wish them a pleasant retirement and beseech them both to resist any temptations to come out of it. For anything. Neither of them should probably do any vacationing near The Hague, for that matter.
So, the first real ride of this glorious new America, a seemingly routine commute in to work this morning, was in the 20 degree range, but the wind was light and the sun shone brightly. After I made egg sammiches for the family, Rebbie and I rode together to drop Ruby off at school, which was a rare treat, and then I headed in to work solo. I did add a quarter mile to the trip finding out why North Capitol was completely closed off south of Washington Hospital Center in both directions. Evidently there was a fire on the west side of North Capitol, just south of Adams, that required a bunch of pumpers and a lot of water. And you know what happens when you spray the street with a few acre-inches of water in the early morning hours of a 20 degree day? You guessed it, a sheet of ice between a quarter-inch and an inch thick for about 3-4 blocks, but with formations like you’d expect to see close to a recent lava flow. So if your north-south or south-north commute this morning seemed way, way worse than usual, don’t blame the out-of-towners.
After that, the ride was wonderful. Not just wonderful like, zippy and without confrontation. Wonderful like, just this side of Sister Maria running and singing across Austrian mountain meadows. You see, last weekend I replaced my old drop bars with Nitto Noodle Bars, and my first impression after riding them for more than two test blocks is that these bars are alive with the Sound of Music. They’re nice and wide, and the top section is swept back a bit, about as much as my wrists need to feel perfectly natural. The ramps behind the brake levers are almost flat and super comfy, and the drops are dreamy. Every place on them is a usable hand position, and all the ones I’ve found so far have been really comfy. Seems like something I should review after I’ve had more time with it, more on that later.
All in all, I gotta say, it’s been a great weekend, great couple days, and it’s so good to wake up in Obama’s America. I’m not a fanboy or anything, but at some point early in Bush’s second term, I kinda started believing deep down that it was never going to end, and that this day would never come. It’s here, and it brought Noodle Bars with it. Rad.
How were your Inaugural Festivities?
Tags: bicycle commuting, bicycling, bike gear, bike mechanics and maintanence, politics, random observations
