Monday, March 30, 2015

Do not abandon hope, all ye who enter here

My life may be mostly about drywall dust, paint, mortgages, real estate agents, plumbing repairs, scrubbing grout, and buying boring "tasteful" furnishings from Craigslist these days... but all is not lost:

Several things are wrong with this picture. Can you spot them?
The door into a new world of excitement and danger is opening. It just needs some headset bearings, a cog, a chain, and all the other things I've forgotten.


Monday, March 23, 2015

One-in, one-out

I have too many bikes. This is news to nobody. However, in the past three days I have ridden three of my bikes, so I am doing ok there. The remaining four of my bikes that I haven't ridden lately all have good excuses. My touring bike, is deficient in the handlebars department (and I haven't been bike touring), my road bike is no fun in the rain, and my BMX is too frightening.

That's only three excuses.

The delinquent bicycle is that fixed-gear I accidentally built. I did eventually finish it, and it looks nice, but as I expected, I didn't really want to ride it.

Did I fix it? Oh yes I did.

I'm done with the "fix" puns now.
Packing up the apartment for our planned transplant to the Okanagan (more on that later) has led me to get rid of a few things. In this case, the fixie had to be let go. Following time-honored tradition, I put an ad on Craigslist featuring the words "steel", "fixie" and "urban". I couldn't bring myself to put "track" or "messenger" in there. However, it worked and a nice young man with a big beard came and bought it.

If that was the end of the story, it wouldn't really be much of a story. So there's more.

Having broken my own "one-in, one-out" rule for possessions when the fixie appeared, getting rid of it would have been the right thing to do to re-balance my ju-ju. Of course that's not what happened. It turns out there's a loophole in the "one-in, one-out" rule (or perhaps that should be the "n=n" rule, in contrast to the "n+1" rule followed by bike-dorks everywhere). Selling the fixie returned me to "n" bikes, which is where I strive to remain. However, money had been realized by the sale of the fixie, leaving the balance of my resources dangerously askew. My theory is that money made in the sale of bicycles constitutes "bicycle potential" which can be released at any time. I could have resolved this imbalance by buying things I actually need (like food), but of course I didn't. This might be because I got a family sized apple pie from the sale rack at the supermarket on Saturday. In summary, I bought another bike and ate some pie. Despite failing to return to "n" bikes, I still felt like a winner.

Now into the minute details. I bought a frame... onto which I will put all the other things that were once part of this bike that I broke. That bike is still rolling around, and is now quite rusty as I never bothered painting it post-repair. However, it will itself be replaced in function (mountain biking) by yet another new bike that I've been patiently waiting for since I snapped that one. That one will have big wheels though, and replaces the bike I accidentally gave to Lina. Let's pretend it doesn't exist and not get distracted here.

So, where are we? Fixie goes away, money comes in, rusty broken bike gives up parts to create a different bike, then rusty bike will be replaced by another bike. So I didn't get rid of any bikes. I blame the man with the beard.

Thanks for this, Ned.

So, "what is this new bike?" I hear no-one asking. Well, let me tell you. It's will be a dirt-jump bike. You know, so I can do this sort of thing:

I hear the bike pretty much does this for you, at virtually no risk to your precious bodily limbs.
And back in the real world, I will be using it for this, probably even at this exact place (the first bit where the wheels are mostly on the ground, not the massive jumps and spinny-around maneuvers):


There's also an indoor winter pump-track in Vernon which may prove relevant to this bicycle's future, and mine. So I think I still ended up with one more bike than I had before... but it's getting difficult to keep track of them all.