Thunder woke me a half hour before my alarm this morning, and I enjoyed lying in bed listening to the rain, being glad I was still warm in bed and not getting rained on. But eventually my alarm went off, and the rain continued. The rain seemed to have stopped when I left the house, but it started up again before I got to the station. Pretty wet. I don't really mind getting rained on, and I don't mind sitting on the train for an hour, but sitting on the train wet, for an hour, well... I don't like that so much. My feet are still wet.

I ride less than a mile of Manhattan traffic between Penn Station and my office, and it's generally a hoot. I very rarely experience the kind of driver aggression [MENTION=397406]snow_echo_NY[/MENTION] describes. As I'm fond of saying, almost all Manhattan drivers are professionals, and they generally know how to coexist with cyclists. That said, even professionals make mistakes. Today, riding east on 36th St, I passed a long line of cars stopped at a traffic light at 7th Ave, I think. A lot of them had right turn signals on, and I wanted to get around them before the light turned. Complicating this, there's construction on the east side of the avenue, reducing 36th St to one lane for a short while. Well, while I'm waiting, a full size tour bus comes down 7th Ave and tries to make the left turn onto 36th. He got about halfway around the corner before he realized it wasn't going to work. Then my light went green. I crossed and got on the sidewalk, gave a friendly "excuse me, officer!" to two policemen who were standing there. Clearly they were debating giving me a citation for riding on the sidewalk, but then their attention was drawn to the tour bus. By the time one of them looked back at me, I was on the street again. The rest of the ride, all the way to my office, I had the whole street to myself. In my helmet mirror I could still see the front half of a tour bus jammed into the corner where I'd left it.