Heh.

…the next morning, Nagourney awoke to an e-mail from Talking Points Memo writer Greg Sargent asking him to comment on an eight-point rebuttal trashing his piece that the Obama campaign had released to reporters and bloggers like The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder and Politico’s Ben Smith. Nagourney had not heard the complaints from the Obama camp and had no idea they were so steamed. “I’m looking at this thing, and I’m like, ‘What the hell is this?’ ” Nagourney recently recalled. “I really flipped out.”

Later that afternoon, Nagourney got permission from Times editors to e-mail Sargent a response to the Obama memo. But the episode still grates. “I’ve never had an experience like this, with this campaign or others,” Nagourney tells me. “I thought they crossed the line. If you have a problem with a story I write, call me first. I’m a big boy. I can handle it. But they never called. They attacked me like I’m a political opponent.”

No! That’s so unfair! Why would they treat you like an opponent?

Last year, when Hillary Clinton campaigned as a front-runner, Obama provided access to the press corps and won over the media. One night, during a campaign stop in Iowa, he met reporters for off-the-record drinks. He cooperated for magazine profiles and appeared on the cover of GQ. And Clinton’s relationship with the press wasn’t half as easy. “The difference is the Clinton people were hostile for no reason,” a reporter who has covered both Democrats tells me.

I can think of a reason! My hand’s raised! Pick me! Pick me!

It’s because you, the press corps, spent 8 years savaging the Clintons by playing stenographer to the ratfuckingest Republicans to come along since Nixon, continued to do so during Hillary Clinton’s senate career, and then outdid yourselves during her run at the Democratic nomination! You said things like:

…the reason she’s a US Senator, the reason she’s a candidate for President, the reason she may be a front runner, is that her husband messed around.

And:

I have often said, when she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs

And let’s not forget:

But doesn’t it seem like Chelsea’s sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?

Those are just a few gems off the top of a 16-year stack of vicious, bullshit coverage. Look, I wasn’t a Clinton supporter in the primaries per se, in fact for much of the primaries I was prohibited from publicly expressing a preference. I thought she’d be a right fine candidate, I thought the same thing about Obama. But there’s really no denying that going all the way back to 1992, there’s been plenty of reasons for the Clintons to treat you assholes like… assholes. It amazes me constantly, given the celebrity-journalism quality of political and campaign coverage, that they’re able to treat you as well as they do.

So, given the fact that this ain’t Obama’s first rodeo, and that he’s evidently really, really good at this, he’s going to work you fuckers to his advantage, and work to keep you from fucking him the way you’ve been fucking Democrats since Gingrich, Delay and Rove have had their hands up your puppet asses. It’s not new, LBJ was a master at this, and it’s not personal, any more than it is when you play video clips of Rev. Wright saying, “God Damn America!” several thousand times in a couple of weeks.

Hope this clears things up, and you’re welcome!

(h/t Atrios)

Here he comes, here comes Bob Novak
He is Satan on wheels!

Syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak was cited by police after he hit a pedestrian with his black Corvette in downtown Washington, D.C., on Wednesday morning.

He is Satan and he’s gonna be
Runnin’ over someone!

The pedestrian, a 66-year-old man who was not further identified by authorities, was treated at George Washington University Hospital for minor injuries, according to D.C. Fire and EMS.

He’s disappointed that he hasn’t killed you yet
He’s busy revvin’ up his powerful CORVETTE!

“I didn’t know I hit him. … I feel terrible,” a shaken Novak told reporters from Politico and WJLA as he was returning to his car. “He’s not dead, that’s the main thing.”

And when the odds are against him and there’s
Righteous cyclists…

Bono said that the pedestrian, who was crossing the street on a “Walk” signal and was in the crosswalk, rolled off the windshield and that Novak then made a right into the service lane of K Street. “This car is speeding away. What’s going through my mind is, you just can’t hit a pedestrian and drive away,” Bono said.

He said he chased Novak half a block down K Street, finally caught up with him and then put his bike in front of the car to block it and called 911. Traffic immediately backed up, horns blaring, until commuters behind Novak backed up so he could pull over.

Bono said that throughout, Novak “keeps trying to get away. He keeps trying to go.”

You bet your life Bob Novak
Won’t go to jail

I saw on television earlier this morning that for breaking traffic laws and seriously injuring a man through conduct that could easily have killed him, Novak is going to get . . . a $50 fine.

Go Bob Novak!
Go Bob Novak!
Go Bob Novak GOOOOOOOOOOOO!

A young lady here in D.C. was killed riding her bicycle in the Dupont Circle area last week. Evidently she was going straight through an intersection and was run over by a garbage truck turning right. It’s the kind of story that makes my stomach knot and my heart break for her, for the family, and for the driver as well. The life of everyone involved has been redefined in that instant, and not in a good way.

The blog pundits have weighed in. Matthew Yglesias isn’t looking to accommodate, he thinks we ought to take more street back from the cars and use it for bus lanes, bike lanes, and light rail. Megan McArdle stokes flames by asking whether drivers or cyclists suck worse, and comes to the easy conclusion that it’s the drivers, and further that it’s D.C. drivers in particular. I disagree with Ms. McArdle on a variety of issues, but we’re solidly in concurrence on this one.

Ezra Klein draws attention to a study finding countries with more cyclists are safer. Sounds about right to me, the more familiar people are with mixed traffic, the less freaked out they should be sharing the road. Additionally, as more and more people turn to bicycles for relief from rising fuel costs, we’ll have a larger, more affluent, and therefore more powerful constituency. Sucks that you need numbers and money to get anyone in power to take notice, but that’s life. Mayor Fenty is already a strong supporter of alternative transportation, I’m hoping that between the growing ranks of cyclists and smart, progressive administrations we should see some real improvements in infrastructure.

And then come the comments (some of them mine) where each side shouts J’accuse!, and describes how they saw this bike/car run this red light/stop sign etc, etc. It’s predictable, like a fight in a small town bar that keeps happening between the same drunks over habitual insults and injuries. I frequently throw a punch or two, because shit, someone is wrong on the internet. But every so often, a stranger will walk through the door and throw down with something really special that just leaves jaws on the floor.

This country is not set up for bikers like Europe is, with its smaller city streets and huge population of bikers. Biking to work in most American cities is just taking an unnecessary risk. Go bike on a bike path for fun, but get the hell out of traffic.

Yeah that’s nothin’ I haven’t heard before. Blow it out your…

Biking to work is an affectation, and selfish in many ways. Look at the consequences to the family of that poor girl who was killed.

Wha-wha-Whatdidyoujustsay?!?

It IS selfish to unneccessarily risk your life if you have a family. Of course you can find cities in Europe that are not good for biking — such as Paris and Prague. Those that are, and have by COMMON practice and agreement, a large urban bike population, like Amsterdam, are the ones I was speaking of.

Paris, huh?

On July 15, the day after Bastille Day, Parisians will wake up to discover thousands of low-cost rental bikes at hundreds of high-tech bicycle stations scattered throughout the city, an ambitious program to cut traffic, reduce pollution, improve parking and enhance the city’s image as a greener, quieter, more relaxed place.

Hey, those Frenchie bike rental stations look just like… ah nevermind. It should be noted that we do have common agreements, called laws, that lay out how we share the road. But g’head, continue.

Here, biking to work is eccentric, and therefore often done by people trying to strike a pose. There are some people who refuse to go along with the herd on most things, insisting that every single thing they do be marked by the stamp of their individuality. In my experience, that’s the person who bikes to work in a large U.S. city.

I was angry about this yesterday, but now I can’t stop giggling. Put aside the laughable Eisenhower-era attack on “eccentricity”, or the false equivalencies of cycling with eccentricity, or eccentricity with vanity. Put aside the fact that anyone who’s paying attention knows that your “stamp of individuality” in modern America comes from the products and media you consume. I mean really, c’mon, whattaya new here?

What I’m really curious about is this person’s experience. I know plenty of folks that ride to work, and I read a bunch who care to write about it. Many do it because they love bicycling, some do it because they hate driving, some do it to reduce their impact on the environment, and some believe it’s great for their health. Self sufficiency comes up pretty frequently, as does the need to respond to our country’s addiction to oil. Some even see it as an alternative to war, ambitious! At least one person believes that it saved his life. There are as many reasons for biking to work as there are people doing it, and most of us have more than one.

But I have never, ever heard anyone say, “I bike to work because it’s an expression of my individuality.” I’ve heard people say that about their hair, their clothes, their tattoos, their jewelry, their kitchens, their barbeques, and their lawns. People say it about their cars and motorcycles every day. After all, what’s a Hummer but an attempt to show the world your hairy swingin’ grapefruit-filled ballsack? But I’ve never heard anything remotely like, “I’m going to ride my bike to work and show the world who I am!” (Well, okay, there’s these guys, but to be fair, lookin’ hip is their business, and business is good.)

Which leads me to conclude that this commenter’s “experience” isn’t worth a shot of warm spit.

…in a city like DC, there is ample public transport. Taking a bike is not a practical choice, but some other kind of choice.

Au contraire, mon frer. If we leave the Brookland station of the Red Line, you on the train, and I on my bike, and we both head for Capitol South, I will have been waiting for you for about 20 minutes when you emerge from the station, and that’s if I’ve waited at every red light on the way. I will also be eating a breakfast sandwich, paid for with the $4 I’ve saved from not taking the train both ways. I will also have an extra one to three hours of my day that you do not have, due to your slower mode of transit, and the hour that you now need to spend at the gym to make up for your suffocating cubicle-based job. A gym which, I must remind you, requires lighting, air conditioning, and power so that you can watch television while spinning your hamster wheel.

Tell me again about practicality?

And so long as we’re talking public transportation, let’s return to your original point about selfishness. If you’re driving your automobile (I’ll even assume that it’s not a Ford Excursion for sake of argument) to work in this city, contributing to congestion, pollution, lack of parking, and a general decline in the quality of life for everyone else when there’s ample public transport available, then who’s being selfish?

If you drive a car and are honest about your observations, you know that the lives of bikers are entirely dependent on your driving accuracy and attention in a way that other drivers’ lives are not — you are behind tons of steel, and they are exposed. It’s just that simple — a huge risk, with utterly predictable tragic consequences for some bikers and their poor families. It’s just not a risk worth defending.

Living life in a steel box, decoupled from people and terrain, spending precious moments of a finite life hating everything is not worth defending. Vainly attempting to meet our transportation needs by escalating car-centric solutions is not worth defending. Destroying the livability of a city by accommodating the selfish desires of suburban car commuters, at the expense of our quality of life, is not worth defending. Continuing this way of life that’s wrecking the environment, changing the climate, miring us in middle-east geopolitical conflicts and transferring trillions of dollars of our wealth into the coffers of foreign dictators while our economy continues to degrade is not worth defending.

Riding bikes certainly involves some risk, but the stakes are high and the upside is huge. I think the risk is well worth defending.

On the commute home last night:

• Coming up T St. NW, I come upon this fellow with his truck parked across the bike lane, which was both narrowing the lane for cars and forcing cyclists out into the traffic trying to get around his pickup. He had, oh, 8 bags of mulch or soil or something like that. I let him know that there was a parking spot 14 feet behind where he was double parked, and he yelled back that he was unloading. Evidently, he couldn’t be bothered to move those bags 14 extra feet, so commute traffic had to accommodate him.
• Don’t mistake my anecdotal evidence for real data, but I’m pretty sure that I’m one of the very few cyclists in D.C. who stop at lights and stop signs downtown. So I’m stopped at a light on New Hampshire, with about a foot and a half or so between me and the car stopped next to me. A woman on a road bike in business casual mode squeezes between me and the car, then blows through the intersection forcing cross traffic to brake. I only realized she was shooting the narrow gap between the car and I as it was happening, because she didn’t see fit to break her ninja silence at any point during her approach. She looked annoyed with me as she snaked past.
• Coming down the east side of the Taylor St. overpass, where it crosses over the Red Line, I’m doing about 30, keeping up with traffic, and taking the lane. Much to my astonishment, a yuppie scumbag (now now, no need for that) young professional in a Yukon passes me on a pretty tight part of the street, with traffic oncoming, giving me about a foot of space on my left. Since I’m on pace with traffic, I actually have to slow down to let him back in (or not get hit by him as he floats right, though I can’t say for sure if he’d have actually hit me). I look into the Yuke’s window to see if he’s doing this because he’s pissed at me, and he’s got the blankest, most apathetic look on his face imaginable.

Some days, there’s just no winning. Last night’s ride didn’t trip any serious pressure valves, but it did depress me enough to consider riding the Red Line for the rest of this week to relax and maybe catch up on some reading. I woke up and shook that off, it’s a beautiful day and I couldn’t let the jerks steal my morning ride.

But it did get me thinking about whether or not it was realistic to expect anything but ignorance, arrogance, and self-centeredness from our single-strand society. If I’m not well acquainted with the people who provide my sustenance, or my entertainment, and my job doesn’t involve me directly providing anything to the people in my community, then where’s the value in kindness, consideration, or humility? Why wouldn’t I adopt a philosophy of I got mine, now fuck you? What’s the penalty for treating my neighbors and fellow citizens contemptuously in the pursuit of my own goals, or the benefit of putting my own desires aside for the good of the community (much less my country or the world)?

I mean, aside from avoiding a physical attack. But is that what it’s coming down to, where the only reason for me to signal a turn is so that I don’t end up having another driver pull a bat or a gun on me? Is that the end state of a society where we dispense money and fuel from machines that say “Thank You”, order every scrap of our Chinese-made clothes and every shiny gadget from the internet, get our food from factories a thousand miles away, and only find pleasure in entertainment made by professionals? That courtesy is self-defense, and nothing more?

(I should make clear that, for me, the answer to “why” is: “My kindness, consideration, and humility shouldn’t be a response to you as a reward or punishment. That’s about who I am, and who I want to be, not who you are or whether or not you deserve it.” I should also make clear that I don’t think I’m particularly overflowing in those qualities, but I care enough to keep workin’ on it. I don’t know what other people’s answer to those questions are.)

Makes one feel like heading into eastern Pennsylvania, growing a mustache-less beard, and learning to live Amish just to see what it’s like. Hell, I don’t even need a barn, but I’d sure like to raise one in the neighborhood just to build something with my neighbors and share some lemonade. Ya know? It also makes me want to redouble my efforts to find a local bike shop in which I don’t feel like a plebe diminished by the whithering gaze of a barrista with a bone through his nose because I made the mistake of ordering a “large” coffee instead of a “venti”. Or maybe to open one.

Of course, I could be wrong, and I’ll probably do something on the way home tonight out of obliviousness that will convince someone else that the world is gone to Hell. And maybe I just rode through the wake of a few people having a bad day. Fuck do I know, anyway?

The new job began yesterday, and so far I’m delighted. Here’s a few observations contrasting the old job and the new one after the first day.

The old job was south of the Capitol, with a commanding view of the Capitol Power Plant, and a couple government buildings done in the 70’s “Brutalist” style. There was one place to score food within short walking distance, the coffee sucked, and when the half-and-half thimble packets ran out at 9:50 a.m., that was it for the day.

The new job is around Farragut Square, a few blocks from the White House and smack in the middle of DC’s bustling downtown. There’s pedestrian traffic everywhere, more eateries than my appetite could index in a day, urban cyclists of many varieties, and plenty of coffee (some of which doesn’t suck at all). Additionally, I saw several hundred people not wearing gray suits. Neat.

At the old job, trying to find so much as a BicStic and a legal pad was a pain. The new job has plenty of supplies, but there’s also a Staples right around the corner. I now have 4 gel pens with comfort grips and two brand spankin’ new spiral bound graph paper notebooks. I’d have gotten more, but there’s no need to hoard. I can just go back, it’s right there.

Code at the old job was a series of hacks on top of hacks. The main platform was PHP, and had no discernable architecture. Occasionally, I’d find SQL queries in the goddam templates. With the exception of one valiant team’s efforts, coding style, revision control, and release schedules were foreign concepts. One Tuesday morning after a 3-day weekend, we came in to find the site broken, because a couple cowboys decided to push some untested code into our production environment the night before (yep, on a holiday!) without telling anyone. Yeehaw!

The new gig is all about Perl. An initial survey of one application I’ll be working on revealed a solid architecture almost immediately, and the first few modules I opened up featured well commented code. I’m not talking about “this does that thing to the whatsit” kind of comments, I mean a paragraph in plain English explaining what a method does, how it’s meant to be used, caveats, and exceptions. I saw a copy of Damien Conway’s Perl Best Practices out on one developer’s desk. Aw yeah, that’s it.

The new gig has a wiki, and it’s useful. Besides a section of Perl coding practices they cleave to, there’s a Perl Cookbook section that gives real examples of how to use the various utilities and how to subclass important superclasses. This isn’t the kind of documentation you wring out of unwilling developers, this is the kind created by people who believe documenting code is important.

Here’s the kicker: we have a system that can configure and deploy a complete development environment from a code branch auto-magically by way of a web-based application. Very slick. Releases are once a week, assuming that the release passes a battery of automated regression tests. Sexy? You bet.

It’s hard to predict accurately how things are going to work out, even dream jobs are capable of turning sour, but the indicators are excellent so far. I was looking out the third-floor window, behind my desk, and the world was lookin’ pretty good. Best of all, I think there’s a solid possibility I’m going to enjoy coding again.

Now, I don’t believe in signs or omens or messages from the universe, other than obvious ones like a funnel cloud being a message from the sky meaning, “get in your basement and get away from windows”, or “fuck you, Shady Glen Mobile Home Park”. But this view off the back porch last night sure seemed to put a nice finish on the day.

Double rainbow for the win! WOOOOO!

I had an errand to run downtown today, and I got an early jump on it so I could ride in the relative cool of the morning before we head towards the upper 80’s (which is a nice break from the upper 90’s we’ve had for the past couple days). My old commute to Capitol South flowed down the east side of the city, through residential areas that I’ve found to be pretty mellow traffic-wise. Often I’d float along, keeping up with traffic or even passing it by, and notice that the people in the cars weren’t having any fun. I’d sorta feel sorry for ‘em.

This morning’s route cut southwest across the city on some much busier streets, which left me feeling more vulnerable and brought my adrenaline up a bit. I found trouble on the way, getting into a spirited disagreement with a fellow commuter. The odd thing was that on any of the multi-lane, really busy streets, I was able to ride in and with traffic without trouble. But going south on 4th St NW through beautiful LeDroit Park (which is a slow, narrow street featuring a series of speed bumps), a motorist gave me an unfriendly honk before passing me dangerously. He also advised me that I should be riding on the sidewalk, and that the street was no bike lane. He also said, “fuck” quite a bit between the other words.

Now, the gentleman clearly was unaware of the municipal codes regarding bicycling on city streets, or the law regarding passing another vehicle safely and legally. Traffic ahead of us was stopped, passing me gained him nothing, so it’s unclear what advantage he was pursuing.

But none of that concerned me much at that point. What did concern me was the rather cavalier regard this hostile motorist had for my safety. Closely following the startled fear was intense, red-hot anger that I associate with car commuting. I loudly explained to him that I was well within my rights to be riding on the road, and that I was traffic.

It would be a lie of omission if I didn’t also mention that I used two shorthand terms that 1.) accused him of having sexual relations with his mother, and 2.) asserted that he was a provider of oral sex to men. (Please don’t construe this as meaning that I disparage those who are skilled at fellatio, it makes the world a better place, salute.) He attempted to rebut my points, but I let him know that I was no longer interested in continuing the discussion, and then invited him to stop talking. The words “fuck” and “fucking” were sprinkled liberally throughout my invitation.

Well, that didn’t get either of us anywhere. I’m reasonably certain that our discussion didn’t result in his rethinking his beliefs on sharing the road, and for my part I came away trying to remember how that Supreme Court decision came out regarding handguns in D.C., and whether or not I could apply for a bike-mount holster permit. And I don’t like either of those results.

One of the reasons I despise driving in the city is that driving among people who are casual about safety and oblivious to the flow of the world around them annoys the shit out of me, which accumulates over the course of the trip and converts to rage. And I don’t like being that way, especially when I’m piloting a few thousand pounds of metal. Bicycling, on the other hand, frequently melts away whatever concerns I had when I got on the bike, and leaves me feeling more alive at the end of the trip than when I started. What’s not to like about that?

So this is disconcerting. I don’t want to go back to the world of road rage, and I don’t want to inspire it in my fellow citizens. I’m mostly friendly to motorists and give them the benefit of the doubt when they violate my vehicular rights, because everyone makes mistakes, right? I’ve certainly pulled boneheaded maneuvers.

But there’s thousands of drivers in this town whose attitudes towards sharing the road with cyclists range between dull-edged apathy to aggressive hostility. It’s beyond my abilities to do anything about them, so I’m trying to figure out what to do about me, but some part of me thinks that without strong infrastructural support and traffic enforcement from the city, this is just how it’s going to be. Until the city actually treats us like traffic, the public won’t either.

I don’t know, ultimately I need to learn how to blow these things off, especially in those circumstances when my gorge rises because I feel like my safety’s been threatened. What do you do?

NOTE: I updated verb tense in a couple places, and made a couple edits for clarity.

I had to come in early this morning to work on a server migration. Waking up at 4:15 a.m. sucked out loud, but hitting the streets at 4:45 under the low light of a cloud covered early morning was superb. It’s a perfectly refreshing 60 degrees or so, and there’s a medium wind out of the north that made it feel like I was sailing, on a broad reach, all the way down here.

And there’s barely a car on the road. Yummy.

As Howard Cosell might have opined, what a spec-TAC-yuh-luh weekend this was.

Saturday, Rebbie and I enjoyed a few early morning moments with coffee before she shot out the door to manage the Mt. Pleasant Farmer’s Market. On cue, the kids were up just a little bit later, and by 10 a.m. I had the Donkey (or whatever it is we’re calling it these days) loaded up with the kids, bottles, an extra tank of milk. Off we rode to join her, under crystal blue skies and marching clouds, at the market.

A Beautiful Day at the Farmer’s Market

The market was bustling and the kids found other children to run around with in short order. Rebbie had put out an appeal in the market newsletter for anyone that wanted to come and provide entertainment, and a couple of enterprising jugglers took up the challenge. They were excellent and had the kids attention all morning.

Jugglin’ Up A Storm at the Mt. Pleasant Farmers’ Market

(Before you start pointing and yelling and asserting that I photoshopped the defocused background in the image, it’s not true. I use The Gimp. The bird is real, though it is not freakishly large, nor is it threatening the juggler on the right.

We rode home after the market to relax a bit before preparing for the Grand Opening of the PG Pool. Shortly after moving to D.C., several folks we met independently suggested we join this pool that we knew nothing about. Pressed as to why, they’d rarely elaborate more than saying, “You just have to join. Just do it. You’ll see.” Of course, they were right.

It’s a community co-op pool, large and inviting, surrounded by a couple acres of grassy meadow and large shade trees. It also has a pretty big toddler pool, lots of play equipment, a couple sandboxes, a volleyball court, and propane barbeque grills.

Best of all, the whole thing is wrapped in a fence high enough to keep the kids inside. But it’s mostly symbolic, since the place if full of other parents and older kids, and they all keep their eyes open for toddlers who think they can make a break for it. Not that many want to, they love being there.

Last summer, I had a recurring pleasant experience of taking a long pull off a beer, realizing I didn’t have a precise bead on either of my kids, and knowing that it was okay. Occasionally I’d look around and notice other parents having the same realization. It’s a real good feeling, I suspect from my mother’s descriptions of growing up in West Peoria that it’s what entire neighborhoods were like in the 50’s.

We lived there last summer, leaving only to attend to unimportant things like work or laundry. The day after Labor Day, when we realized that there’d be no more pool until May, was marked by howling laments, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. So on Saturday, after the kids had woken from their naps, we loaded up and rode over to the pool for the first time this year. Glory, glory, hallelujah it was good to be back.

Sunday we actually got in the car, which is becoming a rare and strange occurence. We drove up to Baltimore to visit the big Farmers’ Market, and to watch the Indy 500 with my Dad. Pop doesn’t get into most sports, but he loves open-wheel racing, so Indy is his SuperWorldSeriesBowlCupChampionship. My little brother graciously brought his little television out to the deck, where we cooked brats, watched the race, and made the occasional ritual adjustments to the antennae to make the fuzz look different. We also had salad made with lettuce from Gramma Tawny’s garden. Outstanding.

On the way back to D.C., we stopped by Jo-Ann Fabrics in Columbia for foam and batting. We don’t make it up to that neck of the woods often, and it’s a little like docking in the Fabric Quadrant of the Death Star of Consumption. Columbia Circle’s real big, yeah that sucker’s huge.

Foam? Yes, foam! Check out the new pads on the Somethin’R'Nother!

White pads? Wait… are those… is that… it is! It’s Sparkle Vinyl! The seat pads still have to be done, but man those make me happy.

From the very beginning, when the Family Bike of Indeterminate Moniker was just a gleam in my eye, that gleam was sparkle vinyl. I was pretty sure that it was going to be Candy Apple Red. But as the bike came together, the black-and-white look started to assert itself, and it became pretty clear that Pearl Sparkle Vinyl was the way to go.

I can now add “shitty upholsterer”, as well as “inexperienced woodworker” and “inept finish painter”, to the list of skills I’ve acquired building this bike. Man, I can’t wait to add “dangerously unqualified welder” to my skill set.

So on Monday, we had perfect weather. We had the joy in seeing familiar faces, as well as the mostly-familiar faces of children grown 3 seasons older. We had a sweet sparkly ride. What could be better?

2 racks of spare ribs (pre-baked slow and low), asparagus to grill, a big salad, and a pie that I wish I’d taken a picture of before we ate the livin’ hell out of it, that’s what. Three-quarters cherry and one-quarter blueberry, with pastry stripes over the cherries and stars over the blueberry. It was the most delicious flag pie I’ve ever eaten.

How was your weekend?