I had a “funny” commute yesterday. As I said recently, I’ve been taking the NYC subway every day because I haven’t gotten my “stuff” together to commute by bike. My spouse has a car, and she uses street parking, and that requires moving the car every day or so for street cleaning. She was planning to sit in the car for 90 minutes which isn’t legal but you can get away with it; she just moves it aside when the street sweeper comes. She asked me if I’d be willing to take the car to my workplace just so she wouldn’t have to do this dance. I reluctantly said yes. I don’t like driving, and city driving is the worst, but this route isn’t really very bad. Parking is not hard to find near work. So that went well. When I got home in the evening, just as I approached my building, I realized I had come home the habitual way and left the car at work. Duh.

Well, I haven’t been riding enough, so I rode my bike there. It’s 13 miles. Doing it after sunset is nice because the path is less crowded, but much of it is through a park where the entrances are over a mile apart. It seems ripe for crime, though actual incidence seems low. It wasn’t a problem for me this time. I was using a new powerful headlight, and I found that the beam pattern is no better than my weaker lights. And in fact, it has artifacts that tickles my peripheral vision making me feel like someone is coming up from behind when there’s no one there. Noted. So it’s a super terrific being-seen light but offers nothing special in the seeing ability.

I didn’t have to bring anything with me so I was lightly burdened, and I got to ride my nice bike.

I tossed the bike into the car and drove home. That’s when I hit some pretty awful traffic. I’m pretty relaxed when that happens, so I wasn’t super irritated. I did get home late and therefore didn’t get to sleep until late. This new kind of work (teaching) is really hard on my sleep. It’s taking a long time to get used to getting up at 5:30 and pushing myself so I’m never late.