cycling « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

cycling

cycling / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
3
Jun 25

World Bicycle Day — and universal cat day

I was pulling this post together and a cat — I won’t say who — barged in and demanded that this was the day they be celebrated. I’m contractually obligated to provide regular updates and they are the most popular feature on the site. What’s more, they know it. And so these demands come in from time to time. And, this week, Tuesday is the day.

I have two taskmasters.

Two furry taskmasters.

Two shedding taskmasters.

I’ve mentioned the joke about when they’re occasionally doing the same thing and I say “YOU’RE FREAKING ME OUT!” in mock alarm. Sometimes they almost do the same thing. I guess I should develop a “You know, I am moderately unsettled right now,” joke.

Like they care about any of that, when there’s a good patch of sunlight to enjoy.

One of my favorite Poseidon poses is when he covers his eyes. I took two shots here. In one, his leg is tucked securely over his eyes. In this one, it looks like he’s just starting to peek out.

On those occasions when a box arrives, the cats of course take it over. Since I don’t dare disturb the furry taskmasters, this particular box sat unopened for a few days. It’s in the hallway, commanding a view around a corner if they’re interested, and standing on its end, its a nice cat height. So, of course, once I opened the box I put it back in the hallway. Recently, Phoebe has discovered a new adventure, if she works her way between the wall and the now opened box.

So that’s a permanent fixture in the house now.

The kitties, as you can see, are doing well. And they’re pleased they could help the site traffic around here.

Now one of them, and I’m not allowed to say who, is demanding treats and pets for all of their hard work.

I pedaled my bike down to the local bike shop today. My friend there replaced my cracked wheel and busted hub with an all new rear wheel setup on Saturday. Shiny new cassette, a wheel with zero miles on it and a hub that will surely last as long as the last one, which started all of this. (It’ll last, right? RIGHT!?)

He’s closed on Sunday and Monday, but told me to come back today to upgrade my chain, which was due a replacement. They wear. They can get stretched. Mine, today, was a full half-chain-length longer than it should have been. ~~I’m just that strong.~~ I’d just gotten that much use out of it.

So I rode a few miles Sunday and yesterday on the new rear wheel and old chain, and three miles and change down to the shop for the change today.

He fixed me up and then sent me out into the world. So I went out for a little 34 mile ride, about half of which was on roads I’ve never seen before, which is the best sort of ride, if you ask me.

The new chain moves easily, shifts smoothly and is nice and quite.

Didn’t make me faster though. And here, Mike at the bike shop and I will disagree on an important point. He seems to think that it is my job to go fast. I say that’s why I’m buying new parts from him.

He and I went on a little ride together once and we were talking about how we used to ride and what we’d like to ride. When it came my turn to discuss the nuances of aging out of performance he said to me, “Sure, but how many of the people that you grew up with are still out riding a bike these days?”

I haven’t the faintest idea. Probably not many. Maybe that means I’m riding faster, better and longer than they are. And this, I am sure, is where Mike would suddenly swap sides and say, “See? That new chain and wheel and ball bearings did the trick!”

Because bike shop philosophers are tricky people, is what I’m saying.

This was a delightful little detour I took. At one point I came to a curve in the road where a fork went to the right. I couldn’t decide which to take. When I’m on all new roads I’ve learned to keep it simple. I don’t get lost going out — I already don’t now precisely where I am. Coming back though, can be a challenge because where even are any of these roads? And was that my turn? Or is this my turn? So I’ve recently decided to stay straight when I’m riding on new roads.

But that fork looked so tantalizing. So I decided, Go around the curve. Stay straight. This road will T-off or do something else and you’ll double back eventually. Then you can take that fork. Which is what I did. It, too, became a T-intersection, but not before I discovered what I call a Pro Ghost Hill. I’m going uphill, but I’m speeding up while doing so. It’s a fascinating sensation. It looks like watching a race. I am pushed by ghosts. Pro Ghost Hills.

Anyway, along the route I saw a few of these signs, which are always nice. On these particular new-to-me roads, I saw as many tractors and signs as I did cars, which was even better.

Right about the place I turned around I ran across a sign that gave me a clue where I was. I’m going to have to ride that direction more often.

cycling / Monday / photo / woodworking, sorta — Comments Off
2
Jun 25

To the joys of June

Happy Monday, where the temperatures are mild, the sun is bright and the whole week is stretched out before us. The first week of June is always a magical one. Historically, seasonally, optimistically, all of it. And why should this one, this first week of June, be anything less?

It’s always like this, though. Every first week has it’s celebrants, and every week holds its importance for some person or people. In truth, if you held a complete memory of your life’s moments there would be something in every week to give the old hip-hip-hooray to.

But it’s warm, it’s June, the days are long, the birds are birding, the bees are buzzing, everything is green and it’s easy to slip into a frame of mind that allows you to enjoy the moment.

If you can turn off the outside world for a few minutes — which is simultaneously a danger and a challenge — which we should all do, for a little bit, every now and then.

I do that on weekends now, which makes it weird to talk about on a Monday. But then, already on a Monday I, a news junkie, sometimes find myself thinking, I can turn off the news machine early, right?

Anyway.

Last week, I sawed some lumber into french cleats. Saturday, I picked up the appropriate sized wood screws to attach the cleats to the shelves. And since it rained during the evening, I went ahead and finished the project.

This is what I did first. I attached the brace lumber to the bottom of the shelves, using a clever series of clamps to keep things level. And then I did the same for the cleats. These had to actually be level and even with one another, because these are corner cabinets. They were level, according to the bubble on my phone. They were even according to the tape measure. But they were not even to the eye. (The back of the left-side cleat was a little high.)

Then I took the wall cleats and started working through the multi-layered strategy necessary to mount these suckers to the walls. There are two of them. And they are in a corner. Also, the studs in our garage are either 14 inches or 3 hectares apart. Plus, now I have this uneven cleat thing on the back of the shelves.

Also, it was during this moment that I was obliged to be in a text message conversation that I didn’t need to be in. So a job that required four hands had one. But at least dinner was decided.

This is how I solved those problems: I clamped the wall cleats to the shelves, under their cleats. Then I drilled the two wall cleats together as a simple butt joint. Now, at least, the cleats were in the proper relationship. Then, I mounted them to the walls. This took a little creativity, given to the studs, but I made it work. Then I hung the shelves, which are a light bit of MDF. The good news is all of this is going to hold a light load, anyway. The best news, is that the bike shoes, helmets and assorted accessories now have their own out of the way space.

Because the studs are so odd, I just ran the cleats out beyond the shelves. This was a happy accident, really, but it worked perfectly for the current needs. And there’s extra cleat space should I ever need to expand or upgrade those shelves.

So that’s a project completed, and from that one builds momentum.

The view Saturday evening.

This was at the local custard shop, which traces its roots back to a 1950s creamery. Times change, but our appreciation of treats stays the same.

Also on Saturday I got my new wheel from the local bike shop. By the time I was ready to go out and give it a try the storms blew in. Wet roads didn’t seem to be the way to try a brand new wheel holding a may-as-well-be-new tire. So I waited until yesterday evening, when the roads were dry and the breeze was dying down.

Here’s the newly mounted wheel. Look at that shiny new cassette!

When I took in the old wheel last week the bike shop was surprised when I showed him the busted hub, he found a small crack in the wheel, and we discussed the cassette. I’m pushing 20,000 miles on the thing, and I bought this bike used. As far as I know, these are all still the factory stock.

“This wheel,” he said, “owes you nothing.”

He told me a cassette should last about 3,000 miles, making it sound like a fragile piece of equipment. It seemed like a good way to make me feel good about buying a new wheel.

Anyway, I had a little 28-mile shakeout ride yesterday. You know how when you are riding along in your car, or sitting in your home, and you hear a noise you don’t recognize? Suddenly you’re on heightened alert to identify every noise, bump, rattle, shudder and sigh?

It felt like that.

It wasn’t a fast ride because of that, but also because I haven’t been on my bike in a week and my legs felt like it. And because I was told to ride in the middle of the cassette until I get the chain replaced next week. All of which meant I was going slow enough to see this, react, pull my phone from my back pocket and get an almost-shot.

Exactly one sheep was looking up as I went by. That tracks.

Before I went out this evening I checked the air pressure, and just as I thought, I rode yesterday at a lower PSI than that to which I am accustomed, explaining a lot of the physical sensations.

It didn’t explain the slowness! I pumped more air into the thing and didn’t move around much faster today.

But, tomorrow, World Bicycle Day, I’ll get a new chain slapped onto the thing. Then I’ll go at a very average speed, indeed!

cycling / photo / Tuesday / woodworking, sorta — Comments Off
27
May 25

I love the smell of sawed pine in the late morning

Today we will lead off with an update on the bike. You’ll recall from yesterday that I busted my rear wheel hub on Saturday. There I was, happy to be out of the wind, pedaling along when POP! wobble wobble wobble. The hub was what popped. Three spokes were displaced, which took the wheel out of round and caused the wobble wobble. And thus ended Saturday’s ride.

The bike shop is closed on Sundays and Mondays which brings us to today.

So, this morning I took the rear wheel to the bike shop.

Mike was just getting off the phone when I walked in. Someone had two flats and, thus, couldn’t ride today. I held up my wheel and he said, “What is this? The day of flats?”

No, no I said, I broke a —

“You busted a spoke!”

Nope, I said, pointing to the hub.

Like I’d go win with a tube.

He told me I should just get a new wheel. By the time we bought a hub and he installed everything and so on and so forth.

I told him my plans for the bike, and he said, that it should be a wheel.

Then he saw a crack in the wheel. So it was a matter of time. And a matter of timing. And maybe good luck.

And my good luck continued. He said he was ordering round things today.

He would not tell me how long this would take. I told him I had only part of my Saturday ride and none sense and I was afraid of going into withdrawal and he made a joke about fitness, and that was that.

So it’ll probably be a fortnight. Bike shops operate on their own schedule, and their suppliers are often in their own universe.

Usually this happens when I’m riding well. I could have several strong rides in a row, and then we have to travel somewhere, or work becomes the order of the day, I catch a cold, whatever. But this time, I’ve lately been riding poorly. If it means anything in the great cosmic scheme of bike riding, who knows. Probably not much, which may mean it matters a great deal.

Ehh, it’s supposed to rain the next few days, anyway. And I have a half-dozen indoor projects I’m looking forward to working on. So there’s plenty to do.

And so I went home, and continued slow-walking a project toward completion. On Friday I screwed two shelves together. It’s an MDF corner piece I bought second-hand. Two shelves, probably from the original owner’s kitchen or bathroom. It’s going in our garage, in a corner of the punch out. And it’ll hold bike helmets and shoes.

I decided to make French cleats to mount the shelves on two sides in that otherwise unused cabinet. Today, I made the cleats.

This involved pulling out the saw, running some extension cords and digging out the ol’ safety glasses. Then I had to choose the appropriate lumber, rip it to develop braces, and then crank the blade to 45 degrees.

I’ve never made French cleats before. They’re super simple. But, still, they’re new. Also, my table saw is an old rickety and cheap thing. But it did the job. I made one long cleat and then cut the pine down to size.

The odd thing about the garage is that the studs are about 2.4 miles apart from one another, and so I’ll make super long wall mounts. It turns out that I had just enough of the same wood for the project.

Now I just need wood screws that are the correct size. And since I am slow-walking this project, I’ll go pick those up later this week.

But, now, since I have done this radical thing of writing this in the middle of the day (it feels weird, and also good) and I have all of those other indoor projects, maybe I’ll go get started on one of those now.

cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
26
May 25

There’s still something in the dryer

Just a perfectly peaceful weekend around here. I read a lot. I washed, I think, every item of clothing and other fabric we own. At least it feels that way. My normal two loads of laundry turned into six. Some of those were towels, which the cats have since commandeered for their coziness, and sheets. I started all this Saturday and finally finished it today. The whole of the weekend will be remembered as being in the laundry room or reading in the backyard.

Also this. I had a short bike ride on Saturday. Short because I broke my bicycle. More specifically, I messed up my wheel. Most accurately, I destroyed the hub on my rear wheel. Here is the hub. You can see what exploded.

This is what happened: we set out for a ride and I was instantly left behind by my flying wife. She broke out her tri-bike, plus the wind was gusting to 29 miles per hour and my legs felt dead all day. None of those things are recipes for success. Then I sat at a red light for a good solid five minutes. (I have the data to prove this is not hyperbole.

Finally, I got out of the wind and was riding basically OK, and then I heard a great solid POP! The rear end of my bike immediately went wobbly.

It wasn’t a flat. Not quite a spoke. In fact, two or three spokes that belong in that area.

Without spokes your wheel is not in round. And that meant it was rubbing the frame and that’s why it got wobbly. My ride was done.

I was nine miles from the house.

So I summoned my flying wife, who, after setting an incredible record on a Strava segment near the house, came to get me.

Tomorrow, I’ll take my wheel to the bike shop. Maybe I’ll get it repaired quickly, and it won’t cost a million dollars. But it is a bike shop thing, and you never know about bike shop things.

What we do know is I can’t ride that bike until it is fixed.

Other than that, and the laundry, we spent a beautiful weekend sitting in lounge chairs under an umbrella, reading. I got through a book-and-a-half, which will give me something to write about a bit later in the week. But, for now, just look at this view.

That plane is going to Naples, by the way. And in the original, when I zoomed in, it looked like there was a low light/shutter speed problem. The plan had four blurry wings instead of two. Maybe that’s how it gets all the way to Italy.

I was sent to the grocery store last night before dinner to get cupcake wrappers. We were making muffins, and ran out of them. Did you know there are two different sizes? And did you also know that the scale of everything in the grocery is disorienting enough to make you think that the small ones are too small? And so you must need the JUMBO ones. Plus, the brand for the JUMBO wrappers shared the name of our blueberry muffin-maker’s hometown. So I got those.

As I was making this decision, a woman came down the aisle with a smile big enough to light up the right side of the store. From a great distance she looked like a colleague. So I smiled back. As she got closer, her eyes moved away from me, in the center of the aisle, to something over my shoulder, or beyond me. And at the same moment, all of this happened quickly, I realized she was not one of our colleagues, or anyone I knew from elsewhere, and she started talking. On her phone.

That smile was for someone else, which is great, but really.

Those headphone mics are no better than Bluetooth headsets for creating awkward interactions.

There’s a small fireworks display in the grocery store’s foyer. (Sure, this is awfully early for the Fourth, but somewhere nearby some … overzealous person … is lighting fireworks on Memorial Day.) I didn’t notice this at the time, because I was trying to hurry back for dinner, but is there a fireworks sword on the market now? And what does it do?

I’ll have to go back and check that out to be sure.

Anyway, I got the wrong cupcake wrappers and felt awfully bad about that. But the blueberry muffins are good, nevertheless. Also, the laundry is done.

cycling / Friday / photo — Comments Off
23
May 25

I put screws into something and called it a day

Some days are productive in the smallest ways. Maybe those are the best days. My alarm went off promptly, I ignored it for a moment, and then read my way through the morning, had a bite to eat, typed up a few things. Normal stuff. And then I worked on a shelving solution.

We need a place to put bike stuff, and so I picked up a second-hand shelf that will fit in a corner. It’s a two-piece deal, a cheap little MDF fixture that probably belongs in a bathroom. It’s going to hang in a corner in the garage. The first step was today, joining the two shelves together. I think they were designed to just sit on the floor, but one little wooden dowel isn’t going to hold it all together. So I added a second dowel. And then I joined them the old fashioned way, by screwing it all together.

The shelves are rounded, so this took ingenuity; I was immediately out of my league. But, eventually I did it. Two cheap little shelves have been joined into one piece. They’ll hold the weight of shows and elements and things.

And right about here you’re wondering if I’ll go self-deprecating or literary next. The truth is, I’m wondering, too.

To hang the shelf on the wall, I’ll make a french cleat. But I didn’t do that today, because I have the whole weekend ahead of me.

This is where I realized this wonderful little problem. How can I accurately that on two walls simultaneously. And then another, how to do it for the top and bottom shelves, as a little added security. I think I have it all figured out. It doesn’t require ingenuity, not really, but it does require some simple carpentry problem solving where I’m really deficient.

Let’s assume my solutions work. It shouldn’t take too long to make it happen. Then it’ll be on to all of my other little projects. And there are a lot of them. I’m eager to get to them. Well, most of them.

Late in the afternoon, or early this evening, or both, I set out for a little bike ride. I was thinking about how I could find new roads, and this is what I settled on. I did the reverse of one of our regular routes, the first regular route we established here, in fact. It’s a simple rectangle to the southwest. But, instead of turning right to head back home, I decided to find out what would happen if I just kept going.

What happens is you ride in the wind the whole day. Also, I pedaled my way through three-plus miles of empty roads and fields. I slid through an old neighborhood, and then crossed the interstate, which was when I realized where this road wound up. There are two truck stops and a hotel on the outskirts of a little town, and I didn’t want to be around of that today, so I doubled back. There was another promising road to check out.

So instead of turning left on the road that I knew, I turned left on a different road. It took me through four-and-a-half miles of views like this one.

Finally, it dumped me onto a road I knew, and so I took an indirect way home. It was a good ride, except for the wind. It was slow, because of the wind and also my legs. But it was pleasant. The weather was right, the traffic was non-existent, and there was a lot to see.

It was a nice, casual 34-mile ride that I finished with a smile. As I got home there was a car in the drive. Who had come to visit? We weren’t expecting company. As I got closer I realized, it was my lovely bride’s ride. She’d left it out of the garage as I worked on those shelves. So we had company, and it was us. This was a thing I said as a kid, when there was a car in the drive at my grandparents’ home, when the car belonged to us. “We’ve got company.”

Rides take you places. They bring you places. Sometimes the kid-in-you-ride takes back.

I wonder where tomorrow’s ride, and the 29 mph wind forecast, will take me.

So it was a literary allusion, in the smallest way, after all. Who could have seen that coming?