a break in the rain

It’s funny what the rain does to the city: I took the bus into campus on Friday (having left my bike there because I didn’t feel up for riding in the gathering dark Thursday night) and waited in the light drizzle that morning with everyone else. It’s just such a strange sight to see umbrellas on the street in Los Angeles; perfectly normal, I suppose, to see a crowd of mushrooming umbrellas in New York or San Francisco or Chicago, but there was something so odd about the sight of umbrellas on the sidewalk at the intersection of Wilshire and Vermont.

As a brief aside: We use umbrellas so rarely here that people have no sense of umbrella etiquette. I’m a reasonably tall person, so it’s not usually too much of a problem to lift my umbrella up and over oncoming pedestrians, but it’s sometimes kind of funny to see people shorter than me barrel through a cluster of people with their umbrella.

As another brief aside: Props to everyone who cycled through the rain. I saw a couple of people working through Westwood and have nothing but respect for people willing to brave the automotive equivalent of chickens with their heads cut off that results when the rains come.

I hope to back to this a bit more regularly, but I’m realizing there’s an inverse relationship between the amount of work I accomplish that I’m supposed to do and the amount of time I spend about the interwebs. Who knew? But as a last note, Ingrid has a new effort called The Bicycle Librarian gathering everything you might want to know about biking in Los Angeles, and Jim Haygood has a new biking blog up at Bike Date. Check them out.

And as for why I’m not riding today: The bike’s still in Westwood and I’m not. Such is life.

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