On this day in 1949, Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kindcaid was born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson. She chose her name in 1973, as as "a way for [her] to do things without being the same person who couldn't do them — the same person who had all these weights." A novelist and essayist, she also was a featured columnist for the New Yorker's Talk of the Town for nine years under editor William Shawn. In 1979, she married Shawn's son Allen Shawn, brother of actor Wallace Shawn. In 2021, she received the 2022 Paris Review Hadada Prize. Kincaid is a Professor of African and African American Studies Emerita at Harvard University. I wanted to do another relatively challenging ride today, a day after yesterday's relatively easy ride, to get more experience with riding consecutive days. That's after the Climate Ride, two big rides (for me) on consecutive days, which was surprisingly not bad. Today, I started feeling the climbs in my knees near the end of the climing, on Amalfi and Entrada, but not bothersome. Climbing did get slower on Amalfi, the last of three big climbs. After Entrada, I felt fine and fast dodging tourists through Santa Monica to the finish in Venice. There was a police checkpoint at Amalfi and Sunset, with Sunset closed except to residents west of that intersection. Amalfi was open. I saw a few cleared lots where houses burned in the wildfires, all with untouched (or now repaired) houses next door. Some new construction. The Sullivan Ridge Fire Road is still closed "for emergency" at the trailhead at the end of Casale Road, but a mountain biker came down the trail while I was there and said the closure is not patrolled.