Exuberance Can Lead To Mistakes

While the headline above is also applicable to romance and warfare, I am speaking, of course, of bicycling. In particular, I must urge that you take caution, my dear reader, lest your enthusiasm for cycling on a pleasant almost-spring evening like this one cause you to choose your route improvidently. To wit, I like riding down the steep embankment behind Sedgwick Middle School in West Hartford, starting from the parking lot at the corner of Wardwell and Sedgwick, then angling across the soccer fields and taking the dark, narrow cut-through to reach Lemay Street, near the corner of Boulevard. Until recently, this route has been impassable on two wheels owing to deep snow, which substance is easily traversed on the 65-degree decline, but becomes impossible when the terrain is flat. So tonight, finding myself obliged to head to the office after the boys were in bed to print something (I have a printer, but I'll be damned if I'm going to waste my ink cartridge on 300 pages of work stuff), and cognizant of the recent thaw and near complete absence of snow, I pointed the trusty Xootr to the afforementioned traverse. What I did not anticipate is that the soccer fields are so muddy and spongy that, while I am fully able to pedal and cause the bicycle's rear wheel to revolve in the proper fashion, I am too light and my tires too narrow for any traction to occur, causing me to pedal furiously without any forward progress until such unfortunate time as I fall over. The end result: A squishy walk across a dark field, and, naturally, damp, muddy feet:



Also, completely unrelatedly, two other things:

1. We held a race this past weekend, known as The Eel II. It was awesome. Some dude won, but I don't know his name, because I was just sitting in Elizabeth Park listening to This American Life and signing autographs for random cyclists.

2. I found this intriguing CD (pictured below) at the West Hartford library. Soon, I will remember to bring my library card with me so we can find out what treasures lie within.