Veloquacity

The weather seems to be a-changin’, and I must say that I’m a fan. Pretty much.

The weather outside is, to me, just about perfect for cycling: cool enough that I’m not a sweaty mess, but still sunny during most of the day. As an added bonus, the leaves are starting to change, and they aren’t yet a slippery mess along the side of the road. It’s almost perfect.

What isn’t perfect, though, is the traffic.

My family has had cats since before I was born, and now I’m the proud co-owner of two wonderful felines myself. I’ve long noticed that when the weather hits that transition from warm to cool – and to a lesser extent, the opposite – the cats go crazy. They start tearing around the house, try to get into anything they possibly can, and generally freak out on a much more frequent basis than normal.

It would seem that drivers in the Boston area are not immune to the changes either. The past few mornings, I’ve seen drivers pull some really dumb moves, often coming close to hitting both other cyclists and me personally. It’s as though they’ve stopped looking where they’re headed altogether, or at least are ignoring the cyclist bearing down on them. Both at intersections and just going along the road, there seems to be a tendency of late to steer their vehicles directly towards bicycles.

At the very least, until this passes, be careful out there, Boston cyclists. No matter who’s at fault, when bike meets car, the car almost always wins.

Well, I finally have a blog.  At least it’s something I care about - bicycling – so I am much more likely to actually use it.

Just a little bit about my cycling life and then I have to go back to work.  I started cycling for real in middle school on a lovely blue and white Sekai.  That bike got me to school until my senior year of high school when I got the use of my dad’s pickup.  When I went off to college, I purchased a Cannondale road bike – one of the higher end ones at the time, with a fantastic color-changing paint - and rode the hell out of it.  Two centuries a weekend (one to see Mom, and another to get back to campus) was pretty normal when the weather was at all good.

Then law school in Boston hit.

I knew what I was getting into in terms of winters, crazy drivers, and long hours studying, so I didn’t bring my bike with me, and it’s still in my Mom’s garage.  I’ll probably bring it back with me next summer, but for the time being, it’s far away.  At least it’s out of the weather.

I graduated from law school, got a job, and moved in with my girlfriend (also a lawyer) in a swanky downtown apartment.  I spend a lot of hours at work and Boston’s drivers still scare me, so I went without a bike.  It didn’t help that my home and my office were within four blocks of one another; commuting by bike would have been silly at best.

Then we moved to Somerville.  Better surroundings for cycling on the weekends.  A distinct distaste for the T from three years commuting from Dorchester to B.U..  A need to get a little more trim.  All of these sentence fragments pointed to one thing: I needed to get back in the saddle.

I suppose that’s what this is going to be about: getting back into cycling after a too-long hiatus.  Well, it will probably be about a whole lot more than that.  I don’t even expect that I’ll keep the title for that long (though there is that lovely Boston – Aerosmith connection to be had), but for a working title, it’s fine.  Here’s hoping that I keep with it (the blogging, that is).

Edit: Already changed the name of the blog.  It used to be “Back in the Saddle Again”