Thanks!

I didn't ride yesterday, only because I doubted my road tyres performance on the layers of snow, frozen snow, ice, frozen rain and hail. I went and collected my knobbies and switched them out ready for today, and rode in this morning.

Firstly, man what a difference I notice in the amount of work I had to do to maintain the same speeds. I was keeping a 22/23mph (maybe 35-37km/h?) pace nicely going south on Spadina but it sure felt like a LOT of work. Of course, I went and swapped my tyres around and the roads are mostly clear today - but I hear more snow is on it's way, so I'll stick with the knobbies (Kenda something or other, they came with the bike).

I ride up to my nightclass tonight, too, which I did a test run of on Monday night and seemed very easy going, had a driver beeping me going north on Spadina, I was taking the lane (favouring the cleaner road vs. the door/icepack zone) and I looked back a couple times, shrugged my shoulders and said "What do you want me to do? What?" and carried on. Nothing was ever said, but it made me wonder what the person was trying to achieve. In this case I was riding a LOT slower than the traffic due to the conditions, but hell, I feel I have as much right to be there as they do.

I was almost being backed into by one of those lovely HUGE BMWs who apparently doesn't know how to check their mirrors. I was getting my bike ready to roll having just been into a store and then onto the road surface, trying not to slip/fall, in between two parked cars and the BMW was idling outside of the store waiting for whoever inside. Once the girl coming back to the car had decided how to get into the car, they proceeded to back up toward me. I had to pick my bike up off the road (it was perpendicular to traffic, too - so wasn't like I was wasting space) and I yelled "WHOA holy efff what the hell?!" but to no avail. This all happened within a couple minutes, and it was like anything else - just brush it off.

Other than that, had a great ride home, played chase to a car on a small side street - gave me a chance to feel the bike out with higher speeds in the weather, the driver, who was dutifully slowing for the stop signs seemed to be getting irritated that I kept behind him, each subsequent stop sign would be more engine revving and aggressive starts, heh. I was behind him, just using him as a chase-goal Thanks, buddy!

Edit: New temp. commute is ~3 miles, this morning took 13 mins ride time. Easily a ~10 min. ride in more favourable conditions. I'm now starting to look at how to increase that to around a 10 mile trip.