It's just an ordinary day.

I'm training for a 100K bike ride in April, so I'm going out on long hilly rides on the weekends. The weather has been delightfully sunny and warm (if a bit odd for January), and they've mostly been great rides.

However, people seem to assume they need to cheer me on. Maybe because I'm a woman, or because I'm not skinny, or because I climb hills slowly, but I do get there.

Half way up Spruce St., a woman waiting to pull out from a side street in her car gives me two big thumbs up as I approached. I smiled and kept biking. That would have been fine. But she rolls down the window and says, "You can do it!" I said, "This is only the thousandth time I've climbed this hill." She was smiling and nodding, and then her face fell as I said "thousandth," probably because she was assuming I would say, "first." Maybe she won't make as many assumptions next time.

Then, getting close to the top, a couple of guys pass me on mountain bikes and one of them says, "Good job!" I said, "You too!" After all, we had both climbed the same hill to the same point. He looked surprised, because young men get to congratulate middle-aged women, but not the other way around.

Yesterday I biked up the hill, down the far side, and then back up. At the corner of Grizzly Peak and Claremont (the beginning of the steep fast descent out of the hills), there is often a Mexican produce stand, and I like to stop there for fruit, even if it tends to end up bruised on the ride down. This time I bought pistachios and mandarins, and they did better on the descent.

When I rode up, there was an older white dude arguing about his total in Spanish with the young Mexican woman staffing the stand. They started over counting it all up and it turns out she was right (surprising me not at all). He said something about buying fruit for his friend with the nasty flu, and I said I was keeping my distance then. He said, "I didn't touch him or anything."

He had been over on the seller's side of the table, and now he came around and said, "Nice bike." I thanked him and answered his questions about it. At this point he's touching the handlebars and standing quite close to me, blocking my way forward. I paid the seller and said, "Excuse me please." He said, "Why do you have to be so rude?" I said, "I need to go home." He said, "You're being rude!" I sighed and backed up the bike to get out of there. He said, "Why do you have to be so American?" as I rode away.

Reminds me of the time a guy on a bike stopped me to ask for directions on a dark rainy night in Portland. I'm generally willing to help, but it was a wide, empty street and he stood too close and blocked my way, at which point I similarly said, "Excuse me" and biked around him. He called after me, "Don't go! I need help!" Which he may have, but he wasn't going to get it with threatening body language. He had a European-sounding accent and maybe it was ignorance of American personal space, but I wasn't going to ignore my spidey-sense to find out.

This dude at the fruit stand spoke unaccented English, so I don't know if he's from somewhere with less personal space, but I don't think I was the one being rude. I guess wherever he's from, he gets to touch other people's (women's) stuff and take up as much time as he wants.

Over the weekend, I was heading out on my bike early in the morning, and saw a small kid's book in the street just off the driveway. I picked it up to toss it to the sidewalk and went on my way.

When I got back, I was pleased to see it was gone, but then saw someone had propped it up on our fence. The next time I was going out, I took it with me and put it in the nearby Little Free Library, even though it mostly has grownup books.

When I was walking home, I ran into a couple with a two year old whom I often see walking up the block, and whom I had chatted with at a recent neighborhood gathering. I saw that the kid was happily clutching the book, and said, "Oh good, you picked it up!" They said he has been obsessed with that character.

Yesterday I was biking home from an appointment, and I saw a phone lying next to a parked car in the street. I pulled over, leaned my bike against a pole, and picked it up. It had a drivers license in the case with the address of the apartment building across the street. There was no way to get in or ring a doorbell at the gated front entrance, but there was a door open around the corner.

The people inside were noisily doing something which sounded kind of like having sex, laughing, maybe just roughhousing, but ... door open? I stood there hesitantly, and a maybe 8 year old kid inside gestured to the other people and they came out (dressed, whew). I said, "I'm so sorry to bother you, but this phone was in the street. Is this (building address)?" They said yes, and they recognized the name on the license and said she's at work. I turned the phone over to them.

I only realized later that it might be unsettling for a Black family to have a white lady come stand at the door. I'm glad I approached them with softness.

So that's two things put closer to where they belong, and hopefully a bad day averted for the phone's owner. Not sure how her phone ended up on the ground next to the driver's side door of a parked car if she's at work.

"The Sick Times is an independent news site founded by journalists Betsy Ladyzhets and Miles Griffis. We report on the Long COVID crisis, COVID-19, and infection-associated illnesses." They redacted the excerpt I had linked here because they found the whole book engaged in Covid denial and promotion of harmful treatments for ME/CFS. (Thanks to silveradept for the heads up.)

Replacement link, by one of the editors at Sick Times: The Soft Butch That Couldn’t (Or: I Got COVID-19 in March 2020 and Never Got Better) by Heather Hogan.

(On a lighter note) 6th grader's science experiment answers, 'Do cat buttholes touch every surface they sit on?' by Jacalyn Wetzel, Upworthy staff.

The results? Turns out that, no, cat buttholes do not touch every surface cats sit on. Now, let's all take a collective sigh of relief while we go over the details.

A Culture of Resilience by Lindsey Foltz, a beautifully written and photographed exploration of home food preserving in Bulgaria.

[I]ndustrial and small-scale agriculture; cultivated and wild foods; formal and informal economies; leisure and work do not function as stark polarities but rather in interconnecting, mutually supportive relationships through which home preservers practice, develop, and share their craft. The entanglement of formal and informal economies, domestic and wild foods, smallholders and industrial farms, local and global influences visible in everyday food practices in Bulgaria specifically and Eastern Europe more broadly condense in household cellars. As the cellar tour I describe below illustrates, these uniquely social practices provide resilience in terms of food security and the ability to pursue something more than mere survival.

What the World Got Wrong About Autistic People by Ludmila N. Praslova, Ph.D., SHRM-SCP via andrewducker.

Prejudice is one reason decades of research got autism so wrong. Researchers measured autistic people against neurotypical expectations and called every difference a deficit. They tested empathy by measuring in-group preference and missed commitment to universal fairness. They measured creativity by counting the number of ideas and missed originality. They saw moral consistency and called it rigidity. They saw deep engagement and called it rigidity. They saw sensory richness and called it disorder.

Most critically, they failed to ask autistic people about their inner experiences. They studied autism without genuinely listening to the autistic perspective. For decades, science examined autistic people through a lens of pathology and deficit, rather than dignity, comparing us to animals while missing our humanity. But autistic people don't lack humanity. Research just lacked the humanity to see it.