I had the crap­pi­est, most tech­ni­cally chal­leng­ing bike ride home from MIT today. And a pretty crappy time get­ting there too. What started off as a pleas­antly rainy day—a per­fect day for pick­ing up the dry-cleaning—got crappy real fast. Allow me to enu­mer­ate the crapfulness.

1. Wind gusts to 55 MPH. Not only does this com­pli­cate bal­ance, but it makes it awfully hard to move for­ward. One head­wind gust actu­ally brought me to a near-stop before I thought about rid­ing the drops.
2. Sleet at din­ner­time. Don’t get me wrong: I like pre­cip­i­ta­tion. But sleet, for me, holds all the appeal of ama­teur acupunc­ture. Feels great on the face.
3. A slick base layer of ice on the roads. Every­one can appre­ci­ate this.
4. A thin layer of fluffy snow swept per­fectly level by the wind. This neatly con­ceals all the pot­holes until it’s too late. For­tu­nately I know most of them by heart.
5. No head­light. My Light & Motion unit died of nat­ural causes on Sun­day. Have I really logged 700 hours of night rid­ing? I doubt it. Only the fac­tory can replace the sealed HID bulb so I’m run­ning in “stealth mode” until then.

There are some good things:

• Light snow like this does not form the kind of deep, stiff-walled ridges around truck tire tracks that flip you over when you try to cross them. I was delighted to see that I could plow right through.
• Traf­fic is light. Some­how all these really busy peo­ple decide that maybe they don’t have to criss­cross town in their SUVs after all.
• Sound trav­els eas­ily. I saw a girl strug­gling across the other side of the Har­vard Bridge and thought to offer some words of encour­age­ment. Instead I heard myself shout “It gets worse!” For this neigh­borly ges­ture I earned a “Thanks!” from a range of sev­eral hun­dred feet.