Ride Lugged

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Mel has been riding some sugino xd 500s for a while now, but for some reason, no matter what, they get chain suck. not every ride, not every shift, but sometimes it happens. And its not her fault. I rode it and the same thing sporatically happens to me. What gives? Changed the rings, changed the chain… She knows how to shift… Anyway, I have been planning on getting rich and buying her either the white industries road double or a pair of TA cranks, set up as a wide range double. That would be minimum 200 bucks though, 200 bucks I dont have. Unless my couch is holding out on me.

Anyway, digging and shooting shit at freeze thaw the other day, and ran across some SR apex cranks. Never heard of them. Minor interweb research led me to believe they were introduced around 1980-1981, had a short market life, and the world moved onto the soon to be standard 11o BCD we all know and sort of love.

here they are, prior to some time with some polish and steel wool, and they still have all 3 rings

118 BCD, came stock with 48/46/28 rings, looked to have a low Q, used standard bolts, standard crank puller, SR made them so they were probally cold forged… nice finish and low wear despite the years in a dust pile. I traded a salsa stem for them, made them a wide range 46/28 double, and slapped them on Mel’s Atlantis.

they look sharp I think. more elegant than the sugino cranks. lighter, lower q.

Ahh lower Q factor. Mel doesnt really know or care about Q factor. But we went for a ride yesterday, and she said something like “why does my bike feel so fast?” also, perhaps more bizarre: “why do i feel more stretched out?” well, didnt know Q did that…. But check out the tread photo:

if this were the 1990s, and it was a basketball game and not a bike part set up thing, and you had made a basket from say, 3 yards beyond the 3 point line, you would say booyah.

OK what else?

Sorry, this post will just go on and on and on and on.

Mel hasnt been on a mtn bike for a while. Last summer. Like me. I suck, I bet she does too. Logs? Ahhhh! Ok so we took a cue from Rob’s Christine course. And set up some obstacles.

start with a rock garden. rock and brick garden that is. you cant not hit some rocks, its a good thing.

log. not big, not small, just right.

log pile with easy finish. for now.

really annoying square edged stutter bumps. ratchet pedal. ratchet!

tiny north shore thing. for balance and confidence building. ends in a drop off.

said drop off. note quality construction.

ends with a teeter totter. easy, but fun. to come: bigger logs, more rocks, a jump. Mel likes jumping.

What else?

Our power went out a while ago, and I decided to try to make an olive oil lamp. I used a tiny glass jar, a rag for a wick, olive oil, and a coat hanger. It worked pretty well, for a while. Then I dont think the kink in my hanger was tight enough. The flame just kept creeping closer to the olive oil.

would cino cinelli hate on me?

I’ve been working on yard salads: using mostly stuff from the yard to put in wraps, have for dinner, etc. I have added dandilion greens now, but this is what i generally use.

I’ve been reworking some images into quadtone images. Here is a sample image, in quadtone and a link to the flickr gallery where more live.

Holy cow: Walking consumes more gasoline than driving! | Brad Ideas

I’m a little offended that he didn’t include segways in his analysis. I’m also suprised that he’s the chairman of the EFF.

Biking’s better. The average-diet cyclist is getting 85 miles per gallon of fossil fuel. Still better for 2 to share a Prius. The beefeater is, as before only 1/4 as good. At 21mpg he’s better than a Hummer, but not that much better.

Yehuda Moon and the Kickstand Cyclery

Not quite as many stereotypes as I had hoped for but still kind of funny.

OK not only do i wanna know who is coming to the ride so i can make spoke cards, but christine wantsta know so she can make grub for post ride consumption.  So, um, 2 people so far have let me know.  Everyone else get up on it.  Leave a comment.  Yeah, Nah, or ProbablAH.

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Ride Update!  Jan 26, 10 am, at the Sugarloaf/Foot o’ the mtn stonghold parking lot place.  I’ve made a revised and more accurate map, that still shows the mileage to be sub 50, and the climbing to be negligible.  I have added what appear to be more dirt roads, more roads without real names, and more instructions like turn at the pond with island and the big tree.  it’ll be like a scavenger hunt, with the prize being ‘getting home before its dark’.  we’ll have lunch somewhere, so pack one, and toe warmers, and noggin protectors, and all that, if its going to be cold.  it appears the ferry charge is MAX 4 dollars.  I bet its less, for bikers.

Car pool people, if’ns ya can.

ok, we havnt had a really long ride in over 2 months. obviously, we are all even more out of shape than we were before we ate that kilo of fudge, 2.1 gallons of nog, and 36 new years toasts.

i have a ride proposal for either next weekend or two weekends after that. a ride from sugar loaf into VA and back, 50 miles, less than 2300 ft of climbing. thats nothing. thats like walking to the mail box. thats like playing cards with your grandmother. thats like chef bouyarde’s tomato sauce.

here’s the link: look at that ride profile. its like the current housing market. its like pat boone singing tutti fruiti. its like vanilla pudding with a plastic spoon.

ok, so how about it? it’ll be fun. you get to ride a boat. you get to go to VA. you get to ride on dirt roads. ditch the kids! ditch the husband! ditch your coke habit so you can pay for the gas!

holla back if your interested and shit and shit. i vote for the last weekend in jan. pick a date. we’ll have lunch. we’ll have dinner. we’ll have flats, broken frames, and cold fingers! we’ll have a half century of rolling hills. we’ll smell cow shit. we’ll look like dip shits. we’ll ford a stream. maybe. i cant really remember where that stream crossing is.

shit i gotta go: i’m on reserve battery power, yo!

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So i haven’t been riding much. The weather has been British, and the motivation leaches out of my pores like the black sweats of the hippo. There is no better way to get back on the bike than to make a list of asinine things to bring for a short ride: 3 pairs of gloves, a jacket and undershirt in reserve, 2 hats, newtons, (hippie variety) a sandwich, a 1932 Kodak brownie camera aka my pen cam, ect ect. Lists son fantasticas. Lists, on their own, exist as open texts onto which we can project personalized events, each with its own particular narrative. Look at any list, say a list like this: 6 apps: GS, 1 bro, can tom, Italian.

What can we get from that? I would say any number of things. Each interpretation is significant because it has A. personal significance, B. an infinite number of possibilities or interpretations can emerge from a fixed series of words and numbers, (unlike, say a series of numbers like a phone number, where we are at the mercy of a finite series of combinations) and C. thru the combination of A+B we reach possibilités infinies for potential narratives. 6 apples: Granny Smith, 1 Broccoli Head, a Can of Tomatoes, and a loaf of Italian bread. Or is it 6 appliances, or applications. When the 6 is hand written readings change: could the 6 be read as an upper-case G? This multiplies the interpretations by 100 percent. Can Tom do it? Cancel Tomorrow? Cancel what? The Italian Dinner?

Lists are open stories, stories that are completed by the writer and the reader, independently of each other. Even the straight forward list is deceptively and infinitely variable, not only on the part of the reader but also the writer, who, often are the same person. Par exemple: 6 granny smith apples, 1 broccoli head, a can of tomatoes and an italian loaf of bakery bread accurately describes a series of items that most grocery stores would have. Most Farmers markets would as well, as would a series of small speciality shops and road side stands. The narrative and possibilities for narrative travel do not end at mere location selection, but carry over to moods, brand possiblities and financial restraints, physical restraints (is so and so allergic to apples, ect). When we choose a product from our list, we are thinking about all of these things in a uniquely personal and narrative driven way. We are thinking about what we will prepare with said ingredients, how they will be received, the social signifiers of brand x over brand q.

Bike lists do the same thing and more. “Rain Gear” gives us the hiss of tires of on wet pavement, the reaction of others as it starts raining and you pull out the only rain coat among 10 people, projecting forward we think about the ride after it has finished, and how much that rain gear has helped, or that it didn’t rain at all and but it was dragged in a sack with 10 other unused things for 43 miles.

Taken at 2.13 on an overcast day: f/2.8-1/125-ISO 200. My brownie has been acting up recently. Hence the too dark fore-ground.

The cows looked like they had mud socks on. They were definitely out in their wooly winter coats.

The pond in Linden Hall. It was partially frozen and quite fetching. f/5.6-1/250-ISO 200

The scenic drainage from above pond.

Rock Hill School House. They have raised 75,000 of 100,000 dollars to needed to restore it. I hope it becomes something useful, like an artists studio, or a pencil sharpening store.

I had lunch in this grave yard; off in the distance 3 big horses chased each other around. That big white house is abandoned. Gimme.

Ok so that’s my ride. It was nice enough out, although a bit overcast.

here it is in all its glory. one per customer.

spoke card for the ride spoken of below.

you will be there.

nick, get your ticket. or hide in cory’s baggage.

Just Soap is a hand-crafted, all natural soap - blended by bicycle! Why the bicycle? Traditional soap making demands hours of stirring! So founder Frederick Breeden - a biking enthusiast and environmentalist - had plenty of time to dream up a more efficient and eco-friendly method of mixing the soap. He shared his vision with a bicycle builder, and the result is a one-of-a-kind bicycle-powered soap blender.

School is out for a few days, so I celebrated by putting 13 year old Tioga Psycos on my 13 year old MB1 and heading out to Scotia Range, which for ye non-locals is the easy mtn biking round here. Its pretty vast, maybe 10 square miles, and none of the trails are marked, and there is no map. So I usually get marginally lost and have to climb some ridiculous hill to get back.

This time around, I was lost like John McCain’s political strategy. I kept guessing about the way back, and guessing seriously wrong. I would end up jammed in huge briar patches on trails that hadnt seen use since the WPA built them during the New Deal. Then things started to get creepy. I passed all these abandoned houses that werent all that old, but were in the middle of the woods with seemingly no access point, ie a drive way. Like Patapsco, but the houses were in better shape. Mildly creepy, but then just as I was passing those, some sort of spring animal/insect started that woodsy X-files whine, that modulates in a creepy way. Nothing like a soundtrack to complete the mood. I climbed a retarded hill, pics below, to get my bearings, which I misread, and headed exactly the wrong way back into the woods. I started passing these black ponds, which dont look nearly as creepy in these pictures, but the leaves were all rotting on the bottom, so even though they were clear, they were black. And those spring soundtrack providers congregated around these ponds so the sound would increase when I got closer. The trail would go right next to them, and I kept waiting for the gilled black anaconda of central PA to shoot out of the water and grab my ankle.

Then I hear what distinctly sounded like a child screaming in the woods. I hit the gas, which was hard, cause I had at this point been lost for 3 hours, and I was out of water and Newtons. Within two minutes I was out of the woods, and basically in some backyard, where there were kids screaming. Thank god.

I was still lost, because the woods swallowed that house, and I still had some faith that I was getting closer to home. (you know the self convincing talk: oh i think i recognize that tire print in the mud as mine, oh that lichen looks familar…)

I pulled my last granola bar out, and opening it sent out a hippy distress signal: a granola woman stepped out of the foliage with her blind dog and came to my bizarre rescue. The dog, being blind, could hear me but didnt know I was on a bike. So he kept jumping up and jabbing his eye on my brake lever. The hippy couldnt tell me how to get home via the woods for obvious reasons. (no trail markers, generic woods, lack of land marks ect, for those who dont understand what obvious means in this context).

She sent me back via a swamp to the road, and gave me the following directions which I remembered due to the power of the granola.

“Ok, you head down this hill, I think, and pass the swamp on your both sides, and stop there and look for owls, there are a few out right now, (gesturing wildly with her binoculars) and then you’ll come to a stump, which you know, you have down into, offer the toad some granola crumbs, and he will tell you the trail forks and I think you go left, no right, then the next right by the pond, and then you come to a gate, which you know, you have to go around, watch out for the prickers, and then you come to a helicopter landing pad, which you follow to its end, hang a right on toll house cookie road, right on, oooh, i forget the name of the next right, but go right there, and then take that down and go right by the way right farm, and follow that, minding the traffic, and you’ll pass the town of half moon which locals call stormtown, and look at the graveyard there, they have a cool sign, continueing for about 7 miles over a series of blind turns with speeding trucks and huge farm implements, then you go right by a big red church, get passed by a roadie because you are hopelessly lost by now and show him your granola wrapper. He will tell you in an australian accent how to finish your saga.” Except for the toad, all of that is hyberbole free.

Getting my bearing at the top of a ridiculous hill. Shortly before the hippy.

Creepy pond no. 1

I just ran across the Sprockettes. It’s nice to see ladies on bikes writhing around and getting wet. I don’t know how much this promotes bicycles but at least they’re trying.