Somehow I went on vacation for a week and the days got WAY shorter.... the trail at 6:15am is questionably dark (wildlife/people) and it'll probably be a week or so before I'm back to the winter road option for the first bit of the commute (not a big deal, light traffic that early, plus a fairly wide street and a big downhill so easy to stay with traffic). Worked later than anticipated last night and probably should've had my big headlight for the last bit of the commute as well.

Classes are starting again as well which means a whole new cohort of trail users to train (and crew teams/ROTC/etc), you'd think "keep right" is a fairly easy concept, but apparently not (as we all know). Plus K-12 starts in a week or two which means school busses and (more) harried parents....

Also, not directly commute-related, but bike parking at work has gone from awesome to serviceable to crappy. I used to bring my bike into the building and tuck it into an unused corner of the lab, not in the hallway, stairway, or anywhere else the fire marshal would have an issue with it..... unfortunately plenty of other people left bikes in hallways and now security has decided no-bikes-in-the-building is the way to go. Ok, fine, I used to park outside in front of one of the other buildings with a covered bike rack so I've been doing that for a few months. Now the school has decided to concentrate bike parking in large corrals of ~100 racks and remove all other freestanding racks. This MIGHT work, except they didn't bother to ask commuters for input and none of the new parking is covered (they installed cameras, and the security guy I spoke with said the budget allowed for one or the other..... if they'd polled commuters I'm pretty sure we'd rather have a roof than cameras. Both would be great, but pick one and it's a roof every time for me). There is one garage with a rack, but it's the useless old style where you have to either get one of the end spots or put your front wheel over the rack, and that doesn't work with fenders. They're also threatening to start charging for access to that sub-par rack. Ugh. /RANT