Lina is off at the Durand Glacier Lodge teaching for a couple of months, which is the kind of job offer you can't turn down. Especially if your husband happens to know some things about one of the student's major subjects and can come up there for a week to tutor biology, ski, and shovel snow.
Nice work if you can get it eh? Yes.
Vancouver has been blanketed in the traditional winter layer of foul clouds and rain for the past few days, and frankly... I've had enough of riding my bike in the rain. Fortunately my teeth have healed up well enough that I can eat real food again, or I might have "totally flipped out and killed the whole town". Then today, like a load of sunlight falling from the sky... the sun came out. So we went skiing.
During the wetness, I have been occupying myself with a project. For a few years, Santa Cruz Bicycles made a strange sort of mountain bike... named for one thing (4-cross racing, like BMX on mountain bikes) but much better at something else. This contraption was the Blur 4X and was essentially the back end of a cross-country racing bike, glued onto the front end of something meant for riding down hills very fast. Like David Bowie's "Earthling", no one got it... so it didn't sell very well. However some people love it, and seeing as I like David Bowie... I though I might as well get one. That's not the real reason, but who cares.
What's important is that I bought one which needed some work... but had potential. An unforeseen part of that potential was the need for me to remove the back end of it off with a hacksaw. Still, that was fun. It's coming together now, and once I have one more part and a few more bearings replaced it should look like a bicycle. I should have done a photo-series of its rebirth, but I forgot... so you'll have to imagine me sawing up one of these and hitting several of these with a hammer, in the hope of ending up with something that looks somewhat like this. My hope is that it's going to be fun to ride up hills and then down them again, which is after all what mountain biking is.
