As I’m sure you know, we’ve all been having a heat wave of science fiction proportions. Yesterday in Baltimore it was EIGHTY FIVE DEGREES. That’s summertime weather, and we’re just on March’s downhill. I loved having that weather for my week off. I got in some wonderful bike rides, and Thursday’s trip to DC was a feast with all those cherry blossoms and 15 miles of strolling through neighborhoods, monuments, and museums (a perfect situation for a tiny clown bike, I must say). This morning, though, started with a thunderstorm and rained off and on all day long, giving it the feel of spring instead of summer. I threw my new raincoat (thanks, E.!) into my pannier and hopped on my bike to meet J. for coffee. We worked together on bike stuff in New Orleans, and he’s in town for the National Bike Summit. It was such a treat to sit there and just go on and on about bikes, bike infrastructure, his new expensive grips, my new expensive bike being hand-tooled somewhere in the UK (“you need a quiver of bicycles,” he said, and I have decided I agree), and why we are safest when we act and are treated like drivers of vehicles. He left me with a magazine and some buttons, and I sat out some more rain before getting on the bike and heading back up the hill to home. The storm left the streets wet and also littered with the petals of stone fruit trees, like this sidewalk at Guilford and McAlister. There’s trash piled up under that tree and a garbage bag on the other side of that steel door, but somehow it’s still pretty with the carpet of flower petals everywhere. But come on, people, put your trash in a trash can. I pedaled on up to home, secretly happy for the rainy weather’s insistence that I sit down for awhile and rest.