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The LATE Ride on Saturday night was solid. Over 8000 riders, and a bunch of street punks who were pulled over by the police on Roosevelt (yay!), took off at around 2a to bike 'til dawn, and lemme tell you--I am never riding in the back of the bunch again. Cin and AP registered late, so they were in the last wave and I rode with them. I forgot all the amenities of riding with the second wave, chiefly no traffic issues. It's entirely blocked off for the beginning, whereas the end (aka 'stragglers') are left to fend for themselves. It's hard to enjoy the city when you're avoiding the drunks/drivers on Lincoln.* But it was good, and we had fun, and we watched the sun lighten the horizon incrementally until it burst forth in its Hawaiian Punch-hued glory. Of course, that occured when I was on the last 4 miles, firmly headed south, so I risked dismemberment if I both enjoyed the ride and the view. I sacrificed the view and finished the ride and heavily sat down to stare numbly at the glowing (and rapidly-warming) day.**

Visual highlights included watching the Neon Gang ride by with more glowsticks than a rave, running down the drunks on north Lincoln Ave, a tandem bike with a child's 1/2 bike attached and pulling a kid-carrier--the man was pulling 4 people!, and the CBS newsgeek stuck with a 6a newscast and reporting LIVE! from the Fountain while tired bikers thought about running him down just for the fun of being on camera.

I don't think it was just me on the last one.

*The course was ridiculous. No one should have to ride 5 blocks down the heart of Division. I might have to get myself on the planning committee after all.

**There's nothing like watching the sun rise over the water, is there? Oh, yeah...watching it set over water. Or fields. Or mountains. Or pretty much anything in nature.

This was all after a pleasant day of sloth and an evening at the Grant Park Symphony (the interior of the Harris Stage looks like a cast-off set of Rent) where I thought the violin soloist was going to have either a heart attack or levitate. Nobody gets that red and intense without something really scary or amazing happening.

After a three-hour nap post-Ride, I stuttered around the house until I had to go back to the Symphony. For some ungodly reason, I committed to bookending the LATE Ride with classical music. In public. I only fell asleep once, I think. And it was Brahms; everybody falls asleep to Brahms. I passed out at 8:30p, which was a beautiful thing--it meant I couldn't eat any more. I had been steadily eating since 2:30a, and that's a lot of eating. While I understand my body needed the fuel, I don't understand why it wasn't converting all those handy fuel cells attached to my hips.

To round out the weekend, in the middle of a call Saturday night my phone all of a sudden presented the blue screen of death and promptly and resolutely died. I had just input all 107 phone numbers into the memory two nights before, so I'm sure it was a final revolt. Unfortunately, it meant I was without phone--prompting me to get a phone I mostly like, with ring tones I mostly do *not* like.

Ugh. Who the hell is loading ring tones these days? Do they not have to listen to their ring tones on the train or in crowded locations? Do they not know that The Hallelujah Chorus does not translate well into ring-tone-ese? Or La Traviata? (Apparently, I have the highbrow ringtone selection.) I just want one that doesn't make people throw things at me when they hear it...