Days Off

• What with Patriot's Day and Easter this week, I had last Monday and Friday off, and I have this coming Monday off as well. Final projects for school are keeping me busy so I spent my time off doing work in my "mobile office" as Miss Sarah of Girls and Bicycles calls it.

AKA I went to the Dam Cafe. It's basically the only cafe in my whole town. I miss having the options of Rao's or Amherst Coffee or Cushman when I was doing my undergrad, but I like the atmosphere and they have really good lunch food if I don't feel like going home for lunch.

Monday looked like this:
Baseball game going on in the park.
Loving riding in the bike lane.
Obligatory panda shot.

And then here's Friday:
A stack of library books, a latte, my notebook and my favorite pen. I was incredibly productive. I'm also thrilled by the fact that not only can I get books from any public library in Western Massachusetts through interlibrary loan (I just requested Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Dream Country to join in the I Will If You Will book club at Monkey See), BUT I can also take out any book from Mt. Holyoke library since I'm a Simmons GSLIS West student, and from Amherst College and UMass libraries because I'm a resident of one of the counties adjacent to them. It's great! So I currently have 4 library cards and I have books checked out from 3 different libraries.

It was a little chilly on Friday, so here were my shoes of choice:

If you're wondering what I've been reading lately (aside from textbooks and articles about library research) the answer is The Mysteries of Udolpho, a gothic novel with suspense and the supernatural and castles and romance, which I liked but didn't love; The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar which I absolutely adored, go read it; My Best Friend is a Wookie, a memoir about being a diehard Star Wars fan which I couldn't get into because I am not a huge fan of Star Wars; and now I've just started The Toss of a Lemon by Padma Viswanathan which is about a Brahmin woman who is widowed in the early 1900s and challenges the rules about widowhood that existed at that time.

In college I took a course on South Asian women writers, which I loved, and I still really enjoy reading books about India and Pakistan and the like, so I'm sort of on a "fiction about Indian women" kick. I'll let you know how Toss of a Lemon turns out.

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Some people have class.

I'm currently taking grad school courses on Saturdays. One is online half the time, so I usually do that class from home in the morning and then drive in to school after lunch. Last week, though, was one of our few face-to-face classes for my morning class, and it was a beautiful day, so I decided to try biking to school for the first time.

But here's the thing: to get to my school, I have to cross a river, and there are only 2 bridges I can take unless I want to ride like 12 miles out of the way, which is not happening. One bridge is in a bad part of town (although during the day it's usually fine), and the other leads to a busy rotary/roundabout that doesn't feel safe.

I decided to take the rotary, since I know my way around in that part of town better, only to be confronted with this:

I know it's a little hard to see, but that sign is showing "no pedestrians, no bikes, no horses" basically. Oops. I took that way anyway and made it to school fine, but I knew I couldn't go back that way, so I rode home through the bad part of town known as "the flats". And of course I got lost. Thank goodness for brothers, though - I called my brother and he looked up a the route I needed to take to get home. I didn't encounter any trouble in the flats.

Funnily enough, it was when I was almost home that a guy yelled out his car window at me "It's called a sidewalk, a**hole!" On a road that has a designated bike lane. Sigh. Some people just don't have class.

New Basket

Sorry for my long absence, blog, it's been winter! But now the weather is warming up and I've biked to the grocery store twice and to my classes once.

I finally attached my new basket to Marin! It was a little harder than I imagined it would be since the metal parts meant to attach to my rack were a little small and I had to bend them out of shape to get them to work. But eventually, success!

The main basket covers up the side one a little, so I have to take it off to put full bags into the side and then put it back on, but it works. My mom and Brian have asked if I felt off-balance having a basket only on one side now, but I actually feel much more balanced than when I used to carry heavy things just on my 1 rear basket! I think because this is lower to the ground it gives me a lower center of gravity?

Anyway, with the warmer weather I can wear shoes like this:

and my feet weren't even cold! This Sunday when I went grocery shopping I regretted taking a coat.
The side basket folds up. It's nice that when I'm not using it I don't have to have it in the way. Here's what I can carry now with my additional cargo space. This is what went into the rear basket:

• 3 fresh beets
• gallon of milk
• full-size orange juice
• family-size Kashi Go Lean Crunch cereal
• large container of arugula
• carton of vegetable stock

And here's what went into my side basket:

• 5 small yogurts
• 1 jar of pickles
• small bunch bananas
• 5 cans of cat food
• 1 can corn
• bottle of white wine vinegar
• 1 orange
• 1 onion
• 1 red bell pepper
• 2 pears
• 2 pickling cucumbers

So if the weather is nice where you are - get out there and bike or walk or do something outdoors. I can't wait for sundresses!