It’s summer, so I see a lot of people on their bikes getting around. Generally you can tell the students from the professionals, but I’ve noticed a disturbing trend of not so young professionals on bikes wearing ‘bicycle’ gear. I keep telling people, you don’t need special bicycle gear to commute to work. And unless you’re actually racing or doing those long distance treks without stopping, dressing up like Lance Armstrong makes you look hilarious to the rest of us.

I own three items of clothing that are bicycle only: my helmet, my gloves and my pants strap. I only use the helmet regularly. The gloves I use when I’m doing things like Bike the Drive, or other such long-distance bike runs. The pants strap… I don’t like. I get grease on my pant leg anyway, so I just roll my pants up and wear thick ski socks when it’s cold. And boots. It’s a great look.

But today I saw the following:

• A guy (Chris, who also has a Dahon) dressed like me, pants rolled up.
• A guy in tight jeans, rolled up (i.e. hipster)
• A woman in shorts and Teva sandles
• A woman in a skirt-suit (I cheered and she smiled)
• A woman in a regular summerish clothes (I think she works at my library)
• An overweight, out of shape, beer-belly man in tight lycra shorts and a technical jersey

That last guy gave me whiplash, turning my head around so fast to go ‘What the hell?’

People. Don’t bother with the lycra/Lance Armstrong stuff. It doesn’t make you cool and it makes you look like an idiot. Nuff said.

The Wii has really been a lovely addition to my exercise routines. It has a handful of silly/fun games to play (rhythm marching band and the obstacle course to name our favorites) that actually do get you going for 3 to 5 minutes at a stretch. And you know how they tell you ‘You only need 5 good minutes, then a break, times three or four, a day’? Well, I’m thinking they’re right. My routine is a 15 minute, easy, yoga, followed by some cardio doofy games (even step class), and then a favorite useless game (like ski jumping or the tightrope) that purports to help your balance.

I still haven’t bought any add-ons or extra games, mostly because I’m house hunting right now. This is the same reason I’m not getting a new phone, or computers, or anything else that I can help.

People said I was nuts. I replied ‘I’m probably going to regret this.’ But I had a train to catch and I wanted to get home. So I went for it.

I don’t know if you heard, but it was 70mph winds that blew out windows on the Sears Tower that night. I got pushed backwards on my bike and ended up running with it a couple blocks until I got behind a wind-blocker and was able to ride. And I wasn’t the only one who had a hell of a commute home.

First to Rapid Transit Cycles, for being cool and smart and polite. I chatted with one of the owners today, and I highly recommend them for … well anything. They helped me attach non-regulation baskets to the bike (phone support!) and were my source for new helmets. Now that they have an outpost near my office, I’ll be hitting up that instead of Kozys. Nothing against Kozys, mind you! But RTC is that down-home feeling.

Second is to a good web-resource, BikeCommuters.com. The reason I pimp them is that when you’re new to this whole Bike to Work thing, it’s hard to sort out what you need and what you don’t. Finding people who are doing it, same as you, and face the same issues (showers, smelling good, weather, etc) is a gold mine.

By the way, the official Chicago site is at the ActiveTrans website, which has a remarkable ability to crash or just be unavailable on many occasions. They need a better host/server.

Frankly, if I felt like going small and low-key, this Bicycle Field Bag would be perfect. But it only has a small zipper pocket and then the main pouch (by the way, it took me 12 hours to find a picture of the inside). I kind of want more compartments. That said, I kind of dig the high volume of Etsy people who have appliquéd and embroidered and screenprinted the hell out of this boring bag. It would be a great school bag for my kid brother, who may get one of these for his birthday.

The classic Army Map case is 8.5″ x 12″ x 4.5″ which is perfect, if a little boring. Thankfully, there’s Gizmodo to find a wide variety of cases that might just work. Even a quick search on some Army Surplus Stores gets you the basic idea: plain and boring.

I work in corporate America. I will die if I have to have a plain, boring ‘this is a laptop bag’ kind of bag. I have a screaming red bicycle. I have a blue messenger bag (or a smaller pink and black one). I want something more like this herringbone bag. The Unisex iPad / netbook messenger bag looks corp, but it’s very much not. It’s retro chic, something Taffy would use if she had a laptop. And it’s exactly as big as I’d ever want to go with a ‘purse’ type thing.

Of course I saw it and thought ‘It’s not very girly.’ And now some of my friends are laughing at me. Hey, I don’t do skirts, but I am a girl! It’s not my fault most of the non-gag worthy ‘bags’ are murses. Janine King Designs has a whole section on mini-laptop/netbook bags, most of which would work. So does Bewbew designs, though theirs drift back into a bit dull.

Oddly, the CTA has a Retro CTA logo Artist Bag. I think the MTA (New York) does too, but their site won’t work on Firefox or Chrome. They also sell this ‘field bag’ that is all over Etsy and everywhere else. I guess it’s the new ‘bog standard shoulder bag’ for hipsters. The field bag comes in all sorts of colors, which is nice, but they have no compartments, so everything bangs around. On the other hand, there’s the M-51 Engineer’s Field Bag which, except for the side pockets, looks pretty good. But dull.

So do I want massive huge prints? No. Nor do I want a plain, nothing bag. I want something with some pockets, at least a place to shove a cell phone and some pens. It has to hold a magazine, and it cannot be one, boring, dull color. It has to have SOME individuality. If it doesn’t, I’ll be adding on something. It can’t be a briefcase, it can’t look like the normal laptop case.

Finally, after days of poking around, I decided that the M-51 Engineer’s Field Bag was the way to go. But. Instead of getting the plain boring one, I found the CTA’s retro one. It should be here in a week or so. Oh and since the CTA’s full of idiots, you can’t link to their pages correctly. A follow-up is sure to happen.

In my defense, I’ve only owned a bike for a year, and last year I wasn’t in good-enough bike-shape to consider it. But now I am, and I went with my buddy Sabrina on my very first “Bike the Drive.” She tells me, beforehand, that we have to go slow. I agree to this, thinking that my bike has 13″ tires (compared to the common 26″), so even if we do 15 miles, I’ll have biked 30 since, hi, tire size. This proved right, since I felt pretty good after the 15, and like I could do 15 more, but I’m glad I didn’t.

What was it like? Weird. I’ve driven Lake Shore Drive enough times now that I’m used to a certain ebb and flow. I’m used to the speed of the traffic and the sound. I’ve also biked (and rollerbladed) the bike-path, but you get the same sort of traffic sounds. Instead, it was quiet. Oh, sure, part of that was because it was 6:00am on a bloody Sunday (I got up at 4:30am, biked to the Red Line, trained to downtown, and biked to Grant Park). But the bigger part was just no cars. Just me and my 20,000 closest bike buddies.

The had food and water every 7 miles, which was perfect (you would run out about there with a water bottle), and the food was Kosher! Bananas, cookies, even the muffins! If your bike broke down, someone would get you a volunteer to fix it. Everyone was cool and encouraging and cheering. I even saw a few other people with foldy-bikes.

On the bad side, one guy died of a heart attack about 8am (he was biking the North Route to Lakeview, Sabrina and I did the south one to the Museum of Science and Industry). Also, as Sabrina and I were going past Soldier Field, a young girl (maybe 7?) had the chain come off her bike. She did the right thing and coasted to the side. The problem was they had not blocked the whole road off. The far right, southbound, lane was still open for traffic. A couple cars had gone by, though rather slow, and there were cones demarcating the line. The little girl pulled over to the cone area, and this asshole didn’t see her and didn’t start slowing down till it was too late. It was VERY lucky that he only clipped her. She was able to get up and was howling. We all stopped, Sabrina and I whipped out the phones to call 911, and we waited for the cop to get there and take over.

I have no idea if she’s okay, and if you know, I would really like to know. I’m more than happen to serve as a witness for this one. And the city should never have let people drive along the biking! That’s just insanely dangerous! The law says that when you see orange cones, you are to slow down. The speed limit on that part of LSD was 45mph anyway, and he was zooming along pretty fast. I know on the freeway, if you normally go 55/60, you’re supposed to drop down to 45, so I can presume that at a norm of 45, you’re supposed to go down to the 30s. That’d still do serious damage, but it’s a hell of a lot better than 45!

Thankfully, she was alive and looked okay when we left. I hope she was okay. Poor kid.

And still, even though there was that, I’m very much doing this again next year.

We had a really mild November, to the point that I was easily biking up till the week of Thanksgiving. Then came Thanksgiving. Snow, ice, wind, cold. Suddenly, Chicago remembered ‘Oh man! It’s almost December! I gotta turn it down!’ So we’ve had snow, ice, wind, rain, sleet and traffic all week. Sunday, Tom Skilling, our famous weather dude, said we’d get a white-out on Tuesday…

We got rain.

Of course.

What is it about Weather Men that they’re allowed to be so blatantly wrong and we accept it without much complaint? I understand that meteorology is a difficult science. You’re basically trying to predict the unpredictable, explain chaos, and apply trends and patterns to something that, by it’s very nature, is so large we can’t wrap our heads around it! The weather is just too big for us to map out reliably.

We did not get the 4-5 inches of promised snow on Tuesday. We got freezing rain all morning, cooling off into sleet (which was like being shot at by an ice-pellet gun) and then wind gusts with more icey snow. Wednesday we were promised -15 with the wind, and tomorrow a high of 12, with more wind.

Since they’ve been predicting Thursday would be between 12 and 6 all week, and they’ve been wrong about everything else, I was less worried than I was before. I knew Wednesday will be warm wool socks, my thinsulite hat, a wool sweater under my coat, and my normal pea coat. I don’t break out my down until about 0 Fahrenheit without the wind.

And I woke up to 4 degrees (-15 with the wind)… Whoops. They were right! I went for the extra ‘layer’ of wool mittens over my wool-lined leather gloves.

Still, the hardest part of the day was easy. I got a ride to the train station, spent a total of 15 minutes outside, got the train to work, the bus to the office, and pretty much kept myself as much out of the wind as I could. I mean, I’m brave and I’m hardy, but I’m not a freakin’ idiot.

Chicago is, however, pretty stupid. We have these parking meters that have been a downright problem. I referred to them as ‘wallet sodomites’ once in polite company, and got gales of laughter.Well these overpriced, privatized prices of utter crap FROZE last night. These are the same meters that make papers with sticky backing, so you can stick your receipt to your motorcycle and scooter, but the sticky bits melted off in our summer heat. The damn things are so frozen, you can’t even press the buttons!

The parking meter thing in Chicago is a drama. You can read about it at The Expired Meter on the Parking Deal. Basically, Chicago got screwed.

It’s nice, however, to see the winter brutality being even all around.

And no, I didn’t bike to work today.

As time goes on, I’m less and less fussed about showing up to work a little damp. It’s only a drizzle today, and it didn’t really start raining until my train got downtown, so I feel it was the right choice today. I’m much better about biking in the rain now than I was back in March. It’s been seven months since I started bicycle commuting, and I average four days a week right now.

I like to look at how much I’ve changed. On my first commute I said:

So today I was a really slow biker, but I made it to the train in 30 minutes (which takes into account the 10 or 12 minutes it took me to sort out the bag situation). It’s 3.3 km (2.1 miles) to the train from home. I walk it in about 40 minutes, so right there is 10 minutes saved. I know I used to be able to run faster, but this is a work in progress.

Now I get home in 15 minutes from the train, on average. I’ve done it in 10, hitting every green light along the way, but accounting for school being back in session and the construction on California street, which makes me go a couple blocks out of my way to avoid biking on the metal ‘hole covers’, I’m back to 15. I don’t like how my bike skids on them when it’s wet, and the dust is insane. I can take the hills without having to shift down, and in fact, most of the time I bike home in high-gear, since it’s a slight downhill after that hill. To work is mostly in my middle gear, though downtown I may up-shift and go faster.

Other things that have changed is I don’t always stop at a stop sign. I will always stop at a light, but for stop signs I slow down, check traffic (since most of my stop signs are at one-way streets, this is really easy), and then zip through. My only problems are when people see me signal to turn, and then decide that they’re going to be nice and let me through, when I’ve judged my speed to be able to turn AFTER they proceed through the stop sign. I try to signal for them to go, since they got to their stop sign first and legally have the right of way, but. They’re nice, I guess.

The title for this blog actually comes from my friend Rae (she who let me use her car for my license exam), who is generally mother-ish about my biking habits. Only once did I accept a ride home from her (it was pouring rain). Usually, even if the weather is iffy, I’m still pedaling to and from work. I’ve only once been caught in a downright deluge (back in April) on the way to work, and the rest of the time, I’ve not needed to worry about silly Gortex pants. One day, we were predicted an outright downpour. When I woke up, though, it was clear skies, so I decided to chance it and biked in. As soon as we walked in, the rain started. It didn’t stop until about 3:45pm, and when I left at 4pm, the sky was clear again. That lasted until I stepped into my apartment, and it poured again.

Sometimes fortune favors the bold.

I put this out there: Every time anyone, no matter what party, asks me if I’ll consider signing a petition to put someone on the ballot, I sign.

That said, it makes me wonder how that all works. I firmly believe that anyone who wants to run for office should get a chance. Even if I hate them and their ideas, the basic freedoms of this country make me want to give them a shot to show what they’re like. There are exceptions mind you (if you’re against certain human rights, for example), but in general, I think even the fuckheads deserve a chance. It’s not like anyone’s making us vote for them, right?

I do sometimes feel a little twitchy about it, since I know not everyone prints up the ballot a week or three in advance, researches the judges and what not, determines who is the most and least acceptable for electing, and takes that with them to vote. Sometimes I think a ‘pre voting test’ should be enacted. If you can’t show your work, or name at least one person running per office, you don’t get to vote for that office. That would mean everyone gets to vote for the President, but 90% of Chicago won’t be voting for the judges. Then again, I don’t like the idea of making it harder for peolpe to vote.

There needs to be a better balance between letting the idiots rule the asylum and only permitting the educated masses to control what happens. I don’t have an answer to that one.

I do wonder what makes people decide ‘I’ll ask that person to sign my petition!’ these days. Do you look for people who look like your constituency? How do you know what a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian or Green Party member looks like? Do you just ask everyone? If I dress nicely in slacks and my winter coat, will only the Republicans approach me? If I’m in jeans and a dress shirt, will I get more Democrats or Greens?

That extends to the people who pander on the street. You know the ones “Do you have a moment to talk about abortion?” And yes, someone asked me that. I said “I’m for it, so long as the reasons are seriously thought through and discussed.” Once someone challenged me on that, saying they bet I was against the death penalty too. “Nope, I’m for it, so long as the case has been tried justly, fairly and due process has been served.” Gun laws? For ‘em, but also for the people being permitted to own guns. Chicago, I’m looking at you.

I’m a contradiction and I know it, which is why I do occasionally engage with those people. I’m for marriage for everyone, gay or straight, but I won’t sign any petition for it until DOMA is struck down. If you don’t understand why, go look up exactly what Clinton nailed the country with in that bit of legislation.

The point is that I think things through before I jump into them. I research, I try to understand as best I can without an advanced degree in this stuff. But that’s the problem. We’ve made our government so complicated, the common man might as well be playing ‘Eeny Meeny Miney Moe’ with elections. And that’s a tragedy.

Much like Critical Mass, the masses can (and will) sway our country one way or the other. It’s time for all of us to pick the direction we want to see the nation go, and start pedaling.

And you guys with the sign-up sheet? Not every tree-hugger on two wheels is a frothing activist. Sometimes, we’re just people like you.