Today’s riding included a task ride to campus where I set up my new office. This may make me unpopular with some of my colleagues, but I’m actually really looking forward to classes starting. Clean slate, new students, new readings…I love the start of school. After a long afternoon of unpacking and photocopying, I zipped home for a quick dinner and then rode down to D.’s in the Treme. I decided to shift my perspective a bit. I mean, I ride the same routes almost every single day, for over a year now. How can I continue to see new things? But there’s always a different view, and today I found one by looking up. I know the potholes of Baronne, so I don’t need to fixate on the street surface quite so much. Looking up at the CBD, I noticed how uneven the development is in just these few blocks. The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities building seems throughly out of place next to the decaying buildings around it, for example. I took this shot while waiting at the light at O’Keefe and Girod, I think. I’m guessing, because as you may notice, there are no street signs here. That is a maddening part of this city. There are often significant stretches of road with no signage at all. Lord, that was frustrating when I first moved to town. But now I know my way around. J. and R. can’t say the same quite yet. They just moved here last week, into the unit in front of D. We all sat around in their new apartment, chatting, snacking, laughing, and feeling generally neighborly. That’s what you’ve got to do to feel at home here, because you’ve got to put up your own road signs. D. and I ended the night with a trip to the movies–I’m going to ignore the weird gender politics, xenophobia, and gratuitous violence and say I completely enjoyed that. I rode home on Baronne, as fast as I could, bouncing along to music, breezing through the surprisingly cool night air, grateful, again, that I go by bike.