Today’s ride: 50 miles, on a beautiful warm sunny day that felt nothing at all like winter, south on the bike path through the beach cities and into Palos Verdes, down to the Point Vicente Lighthouse. The surf was up, with waves about 10 feet high at the point. On the way home, I ran afoul of the seagulls at the Marina Del Rey jetty, who are apparently evolving into sentient, tool-using beings; they pick mollusks from the rocks with their beaks and drop them on the concrete bike path to crack them open, exposing the yummy, no doubt highly polluted mollusk meat inside. In the process, razor-sharp shell fragments are left on the bike path—and one of these little daggers punctured right through the carbon layer of my brand new tire, giving me a flat tire only a few miles from home and leaving such a big gash that the tire’s probably ruined.

I think the gulls do it on purpose to cause flats. I swear I heard them laughing as I fixed it.