Look what the cat dragged in...

On my way home, approaching the brewery, I saw something ahead of me. Something very... radioactive? It was an insanely bright neon reflective vest being worn by a cyclist.

Turns out, it was Karen, who dropped off the planet for a few months to go bike touring in Europe with her husband. I didn't talk long, because I had to pull over for a phone conference with an office of ours in California. From what I gathered, though, they landed in Budapest, then took the long way to Prague. By "Long way", I mean they went through Vienna. All of that on a Tandem.

I laid my bike down in the grass off the side of Merriam Lane to make the phone call, and I hiked up a pretty big hill to put some distance between my phone and the noise of approaching rush-hour traffic. I sat down in the grass with some paper and a pen, relaying my team's findings to the group we're working with out in CA. It wasn't a long meeting, but this little crab spider kept "hunting" me the whole time I was sitting there on the grass. At first, he crawled up my shoe. I motioned at it with my hand and it jumped off. A few minutes later, I saw it on my pant leg. I played with it while the other people on the phone call talked about stuff that's so vaguely related to the project that it should have been an offline phone call anyways. Once the call was over, I brushed my new friend off into the grass and stood up, checking for any of his buddies that might have latched on.

There was a nice tailwind for my whole ride home. It was in the mid-50s when I left work, but had gotten up to 62 by the time I got home. I took my time and took a few small detours to my usual route, wrapping up a little more than 30 miles total today.

Random Tunage:
Laurent Wolf - Happy TV
Orbital - The Saint