This shouldn’t happen to anyone before their first cup of coffee: As I was bicycling in to work this morning, pre-dawn, cruising down Rose Garden at a decent clip, I found the road to be completely covered with dried seed-pods. So covered that the lane stripes were difficult to see. This, in itself wasn’t so unusual — at certain times of the year I’ve seen them blown about and scattered across the road by the wind. It was only after about a mile of spinning through them, tires constantly crunching, did I realize they weren’t seed-pods, but were really grasshoppers completely covering the ground. Not an easy thing to try to come to terms with so early in the morning.