that which rolls

I’ve been poking around looking at gear I need to get for my bike. Or maybe it’s just gear that I think I need to get for my bike. This morning was pretty dark which made me wonder if my current lighting system is going to be sufficient for much longer. I have a serfas ultrabright led light for the front. It’s probably fine as long as I’m familiar with the terrain. It wouldn’t give me much warning of obstacles at any distance ahead of me. Mostly I leave it on the flashing setting in the morning because I worry that drivers won’t see me, even though there isn’t much traffic on the morning portion of my ride.There also aren’t any streetlights.

I think that light cost me about $30 four or five years ago. I was reading on icebike about all the troubles with I can expect to have with batteries in cold weather (which had never occurred to me) and started looking at other lighting systems just to compare and you can easily spend a lot of money on lights. By lots of money I mean one hundred or more dollars and that’s just for battery powered stuff. Not even cool dynamo systems, some of which cost more than my bike. (Ok. I only spent $300 on my bike but it has served me well for a long time.) I have to admit that the prices of some of this stuff makes me cringe.

But what is reasonable when you’re outfitting your primary mode of transportation. I’m not absolutely sure I can legally call it my primary mode of transportation, but I have been riding at least 4 days a week and now that I’m back on regular hours at work I’m more likely to ride 5 days a week. You know what I mean though. You usually don’t have to buy all the stuff for your car a la cart. Your car comes with lights and a trunk. I guess there’s just an expectation that everything that comes with a car is expensive and everything that comes with a bike is cheap. But, I think it’s just me that has that expectation. People spend a lot of money on their bikes and outfitting their bikes. How much more awesome are their bike than mine? Are they getting more utility for their money or are experiencing diminishing returns. I can still get around with my tools. I just want to be sure that I’m as safe as I can be in the given conditions.

(Above: An informative sign on the trail through Blue Cut Nature Center) 

August is 3/4 over so I thought I should post a link to my July photo gallery. There’s an awful lot of junk in there & I was too lazy to weed the bad photos and the duplicates so if you’re interested, you’ll just have to suffer through them. It includes some fun underwater photos that we took with my awesome waterproof camera; Bison from a local farm, photos from Zurich Bog and Blue Cut Nature Center, shots from various bike rides during the month, and who knows what else.

I snapped this picture in my aunt’s garden a few weeks ago. It’s a hummingbird moth. Before this encounter, I had no idea that such a creature existed.

This is a photo of my cousin Jason and my grandpa.

My dad cut hay a few days ago. By yesterday afternoon it was dry and baled up. A bunch of my cousins were home visiting my aunt and uncle next door and they all came over to help with the hay. I didn’t get there until they’d already gotten one load into the barn and two more wagons loaded. Brian and I went out to join the fray at that point.

I haven’t done hay in… a lot of years. In all that time I’d never been part of the group stacking the hay in the mow until yesterday. That is really really hard. It’s kind of like a video game. Bales are coming up the hay elevator, one person is pulling them off the elevator and tossing them to one of the people who is stacking them into the mow. After a while I felt like there should be video game music in the background. You can’t stop because the bales keep coming but you can’t quite go on either. I helped stack two wagon loads and then we went out to load one last wagon. Brian helped stack the last wagon load but I opted to be part of the crew sending the bales up the elevator on that round. There’s less pressure. No one is throwing bales at you faster than you can stack them. I felt less like my heart was going to explode.

I admit it. I’m a wimp.

I spotted this sitting behind one of the buildings at the Pageant of Steam a couple of weeks ago. Note that it’s creator didn’t just weld together some stuff to create a franken-bike but took the time to paint the whole thing and coordinate the wheel colors. The paint on the mower blades makes me think that it probably isn’t really used for mowing though I would love to see it in action.

Brian and I went for a walk through the woods at dusk a few days ago. On our way there we were walking through tall grass and wood frogs & leopard frogs and other unidentified frogs were all hopping out of the way of our feet just seconds before our feet would come down. We would stop suddenly trying to make sure that we didn’t crush anything. That whole part of the walk was tiny steps and sudden stops. Once we got into the woods we were startled as 8 or 9 turkeys that had been roosting in a tree 15 feet above us suddenly lost their calm and took off flying/crashing through the brush at the edge of the woods. We tried to catch a glimpse as they hit the ground running but turkeys are fast. Once they cleared out we resumed our walk. My eyes were on the ground watching for toads and trying to choose good footing in the low light. Brian stopped suddenly & I was looking around on the ground for the toad or snake we were trying to avoid. He wasn’t looking down but ahead of us at a skunk that was poking around in the path. I’m glad we didn’t both have our eyes locked on to the ground. We would have gotten way too close before noticing. The skunk seemed either unaware or unafraid of us and we decided to avoid him entirely and took a shortcut out of the woods and made it home without needing to buy gallons of tomato juice.

As of today, I have ridden 1000.5 miles this year. This is probably more than I’ve ridden in the previous 3 years added together. I feel like I should have something to say about it but I can’t think of anything at the moment.

I haven’t been writing much the last week or so. I have been busy, but I think it’s more that I’ve finally made the commute such a habit that I don’t need to write notes to myself online to try to convince myself to get up at 5 a.m. It’s not that nothing interesting has happened. For some reason I’ve encountered a few more jerks on the road but I’ve also encountered a lot of very aware conscientious drivers that slow down to let you merge when you need to or just seem to understand that you’re not riding a bike just to irritate them.

At first when I started finally commuting regularly after five years of ‘meaning to’ commute regularly, I was really excited. I thought my daily 13 mile ride was something amazing. Then I changed my route a bit and changed it to a daily 14 miles, and from there a 15 mile ride that I didn’t think I could have done in the allotted time (due to bus schedules). Now I’m riding 22 miles a day and it’s not a big deal. I have some time constraints but I barely think about them any more. I have about 1 hour and 10 minutes to the 15 mile leg of my journey and so far it hasn’t been a problem. I don’t have time to stop at the donut shop though, no matter how many delicious smells they waft at me as I pass. It’s not that I’m not excited anymore now I’m just having fun, relaxing, and getting exercise not conquering some new formidable challenge. It’s just that it’s part of my routine.

It’s been darker and darker as I leave home each morning. I’ve got three bright blinky lights on my bike. One red, one white, and a green spoke light. I think I look like a runaway xmas decoration flying down the road at 6 a.m. It was about 50 degrees this morning and zipping down a hill at 25 mph I was sort of wondering where I had put my gloves back when it started warming up this spring. Feeling the season change coming on is causing my thoughts to turn to the next formidable challenge.

What am I going to do in the winter? My current plan is to try to outfit my bike with winter tires and extra lights and cut my daily round trip commute to 7 miles. I found a great site called icebike.com that’s all about riding in winter. It sounds do-able but I want to do it without spending a jillion dollars on equipment. I’m not buying another bike, just to have one to run with studded tires and one to run with fat low pressure tires. Besides, what if the weather changes while I’m out? I’ve got some very steep (but short) hills to contend with and I’m a little concerned about how it’s all going to work. I guess at first if I manage to start pulling it off I’ll be really excited. By the time March rolls around hopefully I’ll be thinking it’s something anyone can do.

We’ve been working to see if we can ween ourselves down to one car. For at least the past 6 months Brian has barely driven his car at all. Mostly he drives my car (since I’ve been driving it a lot less) or we ride together wherever we’re going. He has been starting it periodically to make sure it’s still doing ok but hadn’t driven it anywhere in a few weeks. I don’t know if it was because of all the rain we had but the rear wheel is completely stuck and will not turn at all. I guess we’ll get it towed to the shop, fixed, and sell it soon. I still have triple A so the cost shouldn’t be too brutal. I hope.

Dear NBC,

It’s not that I don’t think beach vollyball is worth covering at all. I just think that you could cut down the number of hours of beach vollyball from 80 hours a week to maybe 20 in order to give a few other sports a bit of a shot. I have seen zero hours of wrestling (except for the awards ceremony), zero hours of judo, 10 minutes of fencing, 10 minutes of whitewater kayaking, and 10 minutes of pursuit (cycling). I’m pretty sure there are a lot more sports in the olympics than just swimming, diving, beach vollyball, and gymnastics. It would be nice to see some of those too. I’ve heard the argument that that’s just the prime time stuff… but it’s not true… I’m tivo-ing 8 hours of olympics per day and fastforwarding through most of it.