Ride Lugged

recently was back in frederick for 2 weeks, with not nearly enough time to do all the riding i wanted to. i got in a watershed mtn ride with mark, rob and some shop rats, which was great, and a sweaty steamy patapsco ride with starmer, and a road ride with mark. also, aforementioned capital sweaty balls ramble, nick’s last ramble as a capitalist. he is going commie like cory.

since i have been back in PA, i’ve gotten 2 rides in, both in spectacular PA weather. i finished my 650b project, it rides great, super comfy, really stable, and pretty quick, even with the shimano generator front hub. contrary to stuff i had heard, the mafac racer brakes work really well, i can lock the wheels without trying too hard, yet they modulate well. gearing is wide rando style @ 46/34-13/30. wide enough for unloaded rides in the mtns. my wooden shifter works well, or at least as well as my suntour shifter on the other side.

riding out towards hansonville rd. smell the cow poo..

it was the best day, weather wise, of my stay in MD

my camera took blurry pictures: too much EPO

mel climbing rock hill rd

please note custom matching handlebar bag with pink and yellow lightning bolt. very GQ.

The story so far: I planned to retire my 10 year old timbuk2 messenger bag, and get a new custom Bedlam Bag, complete with DC flag embroidery and beer opener. Shittily for me, the chick who makes the bags is pregnant now, and can’t risk her baby by sniffing the waterproofing chemicals. After visiting every DC bike shop of repute, and finding only the Hot TopiCore style of Chrome, and the East Asian Bag Commodity style of the new Timbuk2s, the only solution was a Reload.

And since, as I said, no (FUCKING OBVIOUSLY RETARDED) DC bike shop carries them, and I don’t have enough time before I move to order custom, and didn’t want to order from the website without seeing it first, I had to go up to the Reload store in Philidelphia for the day, on the Chinatown bus. So $28 round trip has to be added to the price of the bag, along with a bottle of water and a magazine.

The picture’s not great, but I ended up with a “small civilian” size, blue and brown, “right shoulder” (for left handers) model. It’s a little smaller than I wanted, but about the same as my old bag. Even though it looks way kewler, I still hate being the n00b with the brand new bag.

Also: At the store I picked up a sweet brown with turquoise trim 15″ mac laptop sleeve. Suffice it to say, it does not fit my 15″ sony laptop, so I’m going to return it unless one of yous wants it. $35.

Well, I went to Austria biking in the woods of Vienna for four or five days, then I went to Italy for a bit over a week biking in the Alps in France and Italy. I took a slew of pictures, and eventually I’ll catch up and post them.

But on Tuesday night, I drove Veronika into her work to drop of some camping gear we rented from the Institutes’s outdoor club, and leaving she told me where to turn.

Come to find out there was a sign that neither of us had seen, saying the street was only 2-way for ambulances to the Institute. For regular cars, it is one way….

So I got my first ticket in Prague for driving down a restricted street. The fine a whopping 100 crowns. (today worth $4.88)

I was a bit pissed, cause I didn’t see the sign, and wasn’t sure if they were tying to stick us. But they didn’t say anything about me driving without a license (the US one is technically no longer valid here) so I didn’t complain too much.

OK, I’ll get on the other posts.
-Cory

As payment for being the guest speaker at his blogging class, Casey had to stay in DC this weekend and be exposed to whatever kind of ride I could dream up. This dream turned into the “Sweaty Balls Capitol Ramble.” We rode out from my place in Capitol Hill, past the Mall, onto the capitol crescent trail, then once that ended, back down Conneticut Ave. for a while, then down into Rock Creek Park, which put us out by the momuments. All this and the ghettoest spoke cards you ever did see.

Flickr photoset.

from a paper i graded a while back:  its safe to release now.”My cabinet of curiosity is made of my favorite childhood memory: Fraggle Rock. My collection has been in the works since I found the first season of Fraggle Rock on DVD three years ago. Since then I have accumulated all the stuffed dolls except one, season 1 and 2 on DVD, t-shirts and a poster. This stuff has been very hard to find. Most of the contents of this cabinet was found and bought online due to its rarity in stores. This collection represents the happiness in my childhood. I would sit, watch and laugh at the tiny muppets through their adventures in the hole in the wall. I was the only kid on my block that had HBO, which was the channel the store was featured on. Kids would come over to my house every Sunday night after dinner and my mom would make popcorn and other snacks for us as we watched the half hour series.”

” I then found a Victoria Secret box that I had gotten a gift in for my birthday from my dad.”

creepy…

ridiculous ramblings and rantulings:

My house is surrounded by shitty neighbors. It’s like being engulfed by people who are too dumb to really hate, but you hate them anyway. Across the street we have a family who have two very much adult sons who still live at home. Their principal occupation (the whole family) seems to be occasionally fishing and hunting. Nobody ever leaves on any sort of a schedule to go to work. They are the type of family that is so lazy that they installed an electric fence to corral their dogs: they were to lazy to walk them. They just open their doors, and out the dogs come; medium sized balls of black pubic hair, incessantly barking at anything and everything. There is no exception: they see Mel and I every single day, usually multiple times, and they still bark. These are the kinds of dogs that leave your chairs looking like Tom Sellec’s chest. The pubic balls posts themselves in opposite corners of the yard, and signal each other when an unsuspecting jogger or biker approaches. Then the barking frenzy ensues.

So I’m thinking about ways to blow them up. I think land mines would be the most comically effective. The neighbors themselves wouldn’t be at risk: they never actually set foot in their 1 acre plot of dying grass. I could place bets with myself over which mine would explode first. I thought about shooting them from my attic, but Mel won’t let me have a rifle in the house. I thought about tainted meat, a bow and arrow, a slingshot, a Molotov cocktail, a hit man, a Blackwell ‘employee’. I thought about putting fireworks in sausages.

Don’t think that I am alone in my hate: I think the previous inhabitants of our house shared my sentiment. When we moved in, they had three dogs, all black balls of crotch hair. One of these dogs had 3 legs. Landmine?

Tripod was actually the most annoying of the dogs, as he would chase after bikers at an incredible rate of speed, in the days before the electric fence. Thank god he died.

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These neighbors are smart: they have 3 cars, and a 2 car garage. Where do the cars live? Outside. What lives in the garage? A boat and a TV room for the boys, replete with a 12 inch TV screen and shitty lawn chairs. Correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn’t it be smarter to put the boat outside in the rain? Aren’t boat’s supposed to get wet? I don’t really begrudge the TV room, I too would set up one in the garage if my house was covered in a thick mat of black curly hair. (note: these people almost certainly have all off white and taupe colored furniture) They have a huge backyard deck, which they have used, by my count (and believe me, I keep close watch on these characters, as they are obviously deranged in numerous ways, as well as being gun owners) 0 times in the past year. Which really just reduces the deck to a large pressure treated tumor growing out of the back of the house.

One last note on these poor souls: the pond in the front yard. They have a blue gravel pond, which while ridiculous in itself, is made more so by the fact that is on a pretty severe slope, negating any illusion that it holds water.

Also: they like lawn sculptures.

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Our other neighbors can be examined in a more cursory fashion. First- they steal our raspberries. It would be one thing to come to the door and ask to pick some. No. They steal them, then! when confronted, avow that the bushes are shared property, which must be why we maintain them and mow around them, and they just steal them. American sharing.

Thankfully there is a dense set of bushes and trees between us and them, limiting our exposure to the bare minimum. Once, whilst sitting on my porch, we saw the father and son in the backyard. Hunting squirrels (why?) with a gun (illegal, we are in a friggin suburban neighborhood) in camo (again, why?) without shirts on (creepy). That pretty much says all you need to know about them: creepy, stupid, wannabe rednecks.

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Other neighbors include two drunks with a penchant for tie-dyed wall hangings and DUIs, and the diagonal neighbors who are outside so rarely that we couldn’t pick them out of a line up in a murder trial (which, undoubtedly we will have to do).

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So I was reading through The Gaurdian tonight…yes, I read…and found this pic of our friend Cory who apparently has joined a Go-Go band ( check the chick with the whistle! ) and is playing at radar station protests now. Hate to say it, but I kinda saw this one coming…

I bet they do a mean cover of “Doin’ the butt” by EU…I can hear it now…
“Putin got a big ole’ butt, oh yeah!….Dubya got a big ole’ butt, oh yeah!…”

So I decided to switch to some Cinelli cork tape recently and put my stock Bianchi tape on Christines newest ride, the Strada LX. This mostly came about because I thought the tan or natural color tape would look dope and bring me one step closer to being….well, dope. So I figured since I was wrapping my bars I’d try a way I heard about from James via Cory ( I think… ) where no visable electrical tape is present. Check the pic….

I started wrapping at the bottom as usual and made my way up to the hood where I stopped at the lever. I cut the tape, leaving enough to wedge up under the hood. Then I started to wrap from the top, tucking the beginning of the tape under the cables and doing a full wrap over that before starting to wind my way down to the hood. Once there I cut the tape again, leaving enough to tuck under the hood. I taped off the two ends of cork with a small strip of electrical tape and then used a small strip to hide the black tape and tucked it under the hood.

I know this isn’t really a new method of wrapping bars, but I was going for an aesthetically pleasing way to match my custom painted panels and stem spacers…..Joke.
All I have to do now is wait for the tape to get all dirty and nasty to match with the earth tones of the rest of the bike. NO, I’m not shellacing the tape James.
Also, I’ve noticed that on my last 20 miler that this tape isn’t really that comfortable. At least compared to the plush foam stuff that came stock on the Volpe. I’m sure I’ll get used to it though.
RobQ

So a neighbor of ours moved out last week and offered me a Bianchi road bike she was given when she graduated college in 88′. I, of course, accepted the offer excitedly and went over to pick it up. It had bio-pace chainrings on it and needed to be cleaned up a bit and fit for Christine. So after some new parts and a little adjustment, here is the 88′ Bianchi Strada LX with an updated crankset and a James Johnson approved stem (and hieght I think).

At first she wasn’t too into this bike and it’s drop bars, levers, and down tube shifters. But she has since warmed up to it and I think secretly really likes it. We’ll have to do some more adjustments and fine tuning and I’ll eventually put some Tourgaurds on it and better pedals.
I like it though and think it’s cool she has a lugged road bike from 80’s that was free.
RobQ