As of last night at 6 PM we've had about 7" of rain at my house since Monday evening, with 5" of it coming in the previous 24 hours. Lots of flooding forced me to take a very different route home from work. But the weather guys said that we should be done with the rain and that today (Friday) should be sunny and dry. Given the forecast, I packed my backpack and laid out my clothes expecting to take the road bike to work.

Wrong. I woke up to discover it continued to rain during the night, and was still raining this morning. I swapped my gear into my waterproof panniers, changed my clothes around and took the hybrid with fenders.

The temp was an optimistic 50 degrees, and the wind was blowing hard. Combine that with the rain and I really felt cold. Especially my toes, which are still chilly a half an hour after I've arrived at work. In three months I'll have my winter skin on and this will be a balmy day, but today I was freezing.

My normal route to work is along the river where it's relatively flat. Given the flooding, the area where I normally ride is underwater. So I had to take a different route to work which took me through an area of the city known as "Hilltop". You can guess why they called it that. In this area the streets are either going straight up or straight down. The hills are usually only about a block long and I was weaving through back streets trying to stay off the main arteries, which meant I was frequently turning at the intersections at the bottom of the hills and couldn't really take advantage of the speed I'd gained. Combine the hills with the headwind and needless to say I didn't set any speed records.

Had a lady close pass me for absolutely no reason. There was no oncoming traffic so she easily could have moved over. I was up against parked cars so I had nowhere to go to my right. She was only going about 5 mph faster than me so I had plenty of time to bang on her window and yell. She didn't even acknowledge my existence.