It's such a beautiful lovely wonderful first day* of Spring!

gentle warm air
bird twitter
open windows


All these corporate emails saying things like "we're here for you!".

You know what, I should take a break from working and go for a walk. Or maybe even drag my bicycle out of the garage..Huh.

.

Update:
I rode my bike! I'm not sure how long ago I rode it last; I remember doing so at least one other time since I moved here in 2007.

The bike riding itself is nice. But I don't like seeing most of the neighborhood (nor smelling it, in the case of one property! Smelled like a bad sewer problem). One of the reasons I may not have ridden the bike more often is that when the dogs were staying at my house, I'd feel I should instead take them for a walk than go for a ride.

There were lots of cars in driveways today. I'm not sure if that was due to people not going to work, or because it was already 5:30pm.

Reminder to self: When wearing long pants on a bike, need to keep bottom of pants legs tight against legs. Using binder clips to fasten the loose parts is more comfortable than putting rubber bands around them.

I was able to ride my bike without a problem even after such a long time, because the tires have foam inner tubes which never go flat and never need to be pumped. I bought them a long time ago. Last year I tried to find some for my mom's bike, without luck.

Walmart lists this, but it was out of stock when I looked last, and still is today. It's the wrong size for my mom's tires anyway:
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Bell-Sports-Cycle-Products-7015332-26-No-Mor-Flats-Bicycle-Inner-Tube/4805939

Tannus has some, but they are $80 each!
https://tannus.com/tires/

According to this page:
https://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/3890/whatever-happened-to-solid-bike-tubes
"Since a solid tube or solid manufactured tire can't by definition inflate against the bead, they were both abnormally hard to install, and prone to rolling off the wheel in use. So they were considered unsafe, and are no longer sold anywhere that I am aware of."

Mine were hard to install, but have never come off my wheels.
But that page also has a link which makes me think that searching on "solid tires" may give me better results than "foam inner tubes". The problem I had last time is that even the ones I found weren't the right size.

*Oh wait, the equinox isn't until tonight? I thought I'd read it was last night. It was still a lovely day.

City of Columbia removing bike lanes from Farrow Road shortly after putting them in

Miscommunication about the bike lanes going in and drivers’ confusion doomed the project, Nuelken believes.

The bike lanes were created during a resurfacing project on Farrow Road. The road had four northbound and southbound lanes with a central turning lane. It went to two lanes going in each direction with buffer zones and bike lanes on both sides of the road. About two weeks ago the finalization of the bike lanes, which would have included additional signage and road markings, was put on hold, according to Nuelken.

The city announced Friday that it would be removing the lanes.

Another news report mentioned that drivers had been driving in the bike lane, and that there had been some "near misses" (I think they meant car-to-car, not car-to-bike, but am not sure).

I drove down that road a few weeks ago myself, and was confused by the new lane markings. Based on those markings, I wondered if maybe the right lane was meant to be a bike lane, with a buffer zone between that lane and the car lane I was in. But I was confused because there was *NOTHING* to indicate that it was a bike lane - I kept looking for some sign. There were just extra white lines in the road. No bicycle symbols or anything like that. So of course drivers are going to be confused, and people are going to complain!

Eh. But I'd still prefer having a physical barrier between any bike lanes and car lanes, for everyone's safety.