Your friend up in the sky

 Fully into glare season now, our definition of a good riding day changes from our hopes for spring and summer.

In short: your best friend when the sun slants in from the south (or north in that other hemisphere) is a high, dry overcast.

I do love the late autumn and winter sun, but not when I'm sharing the road with motor vehicles. I don't like it when I'm trying to ride a trail with it blinding me and casting deep shadows among the rocks and folds of a challenging off-road course either, but I really don't do that anymore. I would rather enjoy the stabbing glare from a beach or a mountaintop, on foot. Either that or a nice window letting that brilliance and warmth slant across the cup of coffee and some baked treat on the table beside me.

If your schedule allows it, ride your glare season rides during what passes for the middle of the day. The sun will still come in low, but not as low. A cloudy day will expand your safer window by blocking the direct blaze. I have nearly hit pedestrians several times when riding in glare. Blinded drivers are even more likely to hook a turn in front of you when they can't see you at all, as opposed to simply ignoring you.

You can dress for most weather, including a cold autumn rain. Build yourself a fixed gear for those crappy days when you don't want to expose your good bike and its many moving parts to the water and grit. Riding fixed also keeps your legs moving, which is great for generating warmth and developing a very smooth, efficient pedal stroke. It limits your speed on the downhills and makes you exert as the cranks force your feet around. You might resist the pedaling force or simply try to keep up.

Purists consider a brake to be cheating. They can kiss my ass. Slap a front brake on there to help you out when you need it. And fenders. There's no great virtue in slathering yourself with grime while a cold, wet spray saturates you from below as well as above.

Outdoor riding is always more fun than abusing yourself and your bike on a trainer. Cold weather riding is the hardest activity to dress for, but it's worth the trouble just to get out there and log some actual miles. You will redefine "comfort," but at your worst you will still not be as grody as Fridtjof Nansen and Fredrik Johansen were after more than a year in the same underwear. So get out there.

More e-bike support shenanigans

 You're pedaling along on your e-bike, going to work or coming home, when the pedal assistance just quits. Now you have to power that tank with only your tired legs.

A customer of ours had this happen, along with the plug connection between the handlebar display and the rest of the wiring harness spontaneously disconnecting, and the display unit failing to recognize a charged battery. He bought the bike in April of this year. He's a restaurant worker who has commuted by bike for years.

In simpler times, back last century, bike companies typically offered a lifetime warranty on their (mostly steel) frames, and a year on the parts. The mountain bike era ended that, as more riders beat on their bikes, destroying them rapidly, and the industry moved into aluminum and carbon fiber. Also, with suspension parts like shocks and forks provided by third party companies, the company whose name is on the bike will always hand you off to the suspension manufacturer for warranty through them.

Now, with smokeless mopeds the dominant form of two-wheeled, semi-human-powered vehicle, bike and moped companies fall back on the warranty offered by the specific electric component suppliers as well. This is true whether they are legacy bike companies or a new, moped-only company.

Investigating our customer's options, I read in the booklet provided with his owner's manual that Bafang warrants the motors they make for 30 months, and the other components like controllers for 18 months from the date they leave Bafang's factory. Who knows how long the interval is between that date and the date the bike was assembled, let alone sold to the customer. What a sleazy move. It puts them behind two firewalls: the bike manufacturer's own warranty obstacle course, plus the record keeping between the bike company and Bafang regarding OEM parts deliveries. The consumer's clock starts running out long before they even know they're going to buy the bike.

Fuji customer service initially quoted us a price for replacement, then redirected me to their third-party warranty page when I asked about that. Bafang isn't even listed anymore. When I explained what I had found in the manual from Bafang, the Fuji warranty rep immediately said that they would send the part no charge. So that's nice.

My life, my fortune, and what shreds of honor I possess

 It's No Kings Day 2.0 today. I had planned to trot down the street on my lunch break, like I did during the  summer edition, but we had at least one more person working here that day, and my wife was attending. The whole town was busier, because it's a summer resort.

I will guarantee that my employer thinks that the little gathering up there at Pickering Corner is silly and pointless. It's just the local hippies playing in imitation of the (hopefully) huge rallies in major cities. Like most conservatives, he wouldn't stick his neck out for anything when he can just vote for hatchet men to chop the necks that other people have stuck out on behalf of the disadvantaged. It's conservative gospel that there are no such people as the disadvantaged, only the lazy. Don't have money? They're always looking for ditch diggers. You should have gone to trade school. Lots of jobs out there. This might not reflect his personal thinking, but it's the broth in which he has simmered for his entire life.

I'm pretty cynical. I could easily rationalize skipping public protest entirely. Such spectacles do turn off some people, even as they inspire others. Nothing in the world inspires a unanimous response, positive or negative. The only time numbers really count is on election day. We've all seen how that turns out. Everything else is just recruiting.

Having built my life around ideals that have definitely cost me thousands of dollars in income never sought, that covers my sacrifice of life and fortune. As an occasional -- and in a certain phase more than occasional -- scumbag, I can't claim much in the way of honor, but my life is driven by ideals, nonetheless. However, if I cut out now, I don't just take a pay cut for myself, I impact my employer's fortune against his own priorities. If he lost business because of my idealistic choice that would be on me for assigning him as collateral damage for the sake of my gesture. It's a matter of consent.

I hope that the action around the country lives up to the hopes of the promoters in the weeks leading up to it. They set a high bar, calling it the biggest single day of protest in US history before it even happened. I hope it doesn't turn out to be a crashing disappointment like the 2024 election was.

As I look out the shop windows I get no sense of abnormality. There aren't a lot of people around since the foliage is past peak. The beer joint beloved of the local mountain bike crowd scheduled a booze cruise on the M/S Mount Washington conflicting with the pro-democracy protest. They obviously consider saving democracy to be an eccentric hobby for a few mostly older people who don't ride with them anyway. The few shoppers who drift through here also reflect no political urgency. It's just a sunny October Saturday.

I did see a few people with signs walking toward the protest venue just before noon. They were already headed back this way not long after 1:00 p.m. I didn't get a chance to step out and even look that way to see whether the center of town was particularly busy. Road traffic isn't. As public visibility goes, Wolfeboro's crowd will barely show up. It's still worth doing, and I'm glad that someone did.

The day isn't over yet. Things could get ugly where opposition is more energetic. Around here, most of the conservatives have learned to just ignore the hippies and keep outvoting them. If you want to understand why so many Democrats keep disappointing their most progressive party members and allies, live in a place like New Hampshire for a while and see what it takes to get elected at all. The messaging -- the education -- has to start a lot earlier and run a lot deeper than just campaign ads to voting age adults. And the information needs to be as factual as predictive philosophy can be. Conservatives hate to experiment. A group can only march as fast as its slowest member if they're going to arrive together. A time trial team hasn't finished until every rider has crossed the line.