Thursday, May 22, 2014

What's new?

...is a question I had trouble answering for someone the other day. This was probably because I stopped to think how I could give a real answer and not throw out a pre-prepared "not much". On the one hand, very little is new; the Earth still revolves in approximately the same way it did last week and as a consequence I am still bound to it by gravity, I like bicycles, and I should get my hair cut. On the other hand I just used a semicolon for the first time on my blog, spring has sprung, snow is melting, and I bought my first real road bike. Clearly there is plenty of new going on if you stop to think about it.

So I should share some of these things with the internet I suppose. I've not taken many photos lately, which may soon change as I just got my first digital SLR. See, another new thing. I do have a couple of pictures of things though, which might be new. I'm not sure.

This picture shows a bunch of us celebrating, via the medium on fruit and chocolate brownie (thanks Angie!), Lina's success at the ISA World Paddleboard Championships. We even managed to sing our anthem without offending any Americans (we were in America at the time). You can also see why I should get my hair cut.


This picture shows Marc performing a ritual head-cooling exercise in Pemberton the other weekend. You know the seasons have changed when you need to stick your head in a creek. That weekend in Pemberton was just one part of the recent high-quality mountain biking fun that's been going on lately.


And this picture is the hard-won summit of a ride near Ellensburg, WA last weekend, which involved more wading through snow than I usually like on a bike ride, and one of those downhills that seems to be half the length of the uphill that got you to it. It was still a fine day out, and we found some much better effort to reward riding in Roslyn the next day... even though that did involve hiking up a ditch for a while.


Sunday, May 4, 2014

It never rains, but it pours.

Springtime in Vancouver can involve weather that is rather like being in a rainforest. Funny that. Along with the deluge of water falling out of the sky  that arrived this weekend, I managed to break my second pair of cranks in a week. Coincidence? Impossible.

The first set are, to be fair, not completely broken as I have managed to bodge them back together. Having one of them fall off five times during the ride was an inconvenience, but fun times were had all the same. Today's broken-crank droplet fell rather heavily though. No amount of bashing it with a stick was going to get it to stay on, and the fun had to be postponed until next time. 

Another one bites the mud

A classic spiral fracture of the left spindle-end
I can't complain, I think I've had 8 years of complaint-free service from these, so it seems fair that their first complaint was a full resignation. Failure analysis with my eyes reveals surface rust on the upper part of the fracture, indicating that the crack has been propagating for some time. I don't like to think of some of the things I've ridden up and down on these with the axle half snapped. Thank you cranks for choosing a non-catastrophic time to leave my service.