The Transition

Usually, come mid-September through perhaps the end of October, there's this funky transition period with nippy 40° mornings and blissful 65-70° afternoons. This necessitates lugging extra clothes around. I don't like to ride in long pants if it's much warmer than 60° and I simply can't ride in shorts below 50°.

There was about a week of that stuff. We went straight to cold, really.

Also, until the time change happens at the end of this month, even the mornings I wake up and leave late are still completely dark. Blinkies fore and aft are required gear right now, and the dark mornings make for horrible attempts at snapshottery. Anything I could post here would surely be called out as banal and blurred, not surreal and abstract.

Even though the cold usually chases the cyclists away, I've been seeing plenty of them in bike racks around town. This is in stark contrast to years past, when cool mornings mean empty bike racks all over town. This also includes a previously unseen, but far-from-new mountain bike that started showing up at my office building. It looks like something that's been hanging upside down in a basement or garage for quite a while. Old, but not in bad shape. Plenty of miles, but doesn't show signs of regular (ab)use. I see plenty of cyclists on the road, too. Full business-dress suit types downtown (some of them actually riding their bikes, not pushing them) and winter-clad fellows closer to home and downtown alike.

Then there's the inexorable rain at 30- and 40-something degrees that, combined with autumn's typically strong winds, can chill me to the bone in nothing flat if I'm not careful about my choice in clothing.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I'll take a 20-degree blizzard over a 40-degree rainstorm any day.