The departure of winter weather has brought in the first bike repair of the season.
New England has always had five seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter, and "none of the above," but now they're more jumbled up than ever. We're definitely in none of the above right now. It can get as warm as it likes, and we still won't see growing plants for another month and a half. Still, if we don't get appreciable snow in that time, more cyclists will emerge. Or we could get slammed. Water-soaked ground won't refreeze, so a bunch of snow won't reinvigorate winter fun.
Of course this first patient is a dedicated roadie. He told me he took this bike out for 53 miles a couple of days ago. That right there is a dedicated roadie thing to say. We know how far we went. It's not an approximate 50-55. It's fifty-three. Sometimes it's 53.7 or 52.89.
He told the tech who checked the bike in that the bottom bracket is noisy. Also, as a rider who has experienced fraying shift cables inside a brifter, he wanted those checked as well.
The bottom bracket is fine. He's just ridden the bearings out of his plastic-bodied Look Keo pedals. And his chain was worn out.
How do you know if the chain on your road bike is worn out? Answer a couple of simple questions:
Does your bike have 10 or more cogs in the rear gear set?
Has it been a month since your last new chain?
If you answered yes to those, you need a chain.
The cable for the right shifter had started to break, so I replaced that. The cable for the left shifter had a weird little kink in it, close to the swaged end inside the brifter, so I changed that one, too. We should be good to go, right?
When I ran the bike through the gears, I had to dial in a little more cable tension to get it to carry the chain up cog hill to the lowest gear. This is normal. I'd had the housings out, and they had to reseat. I started shifting back down to the high gears. First click: one cog. Second click: four cogs. Third click: chain chatter and finally a shift. The chain moved reluctantly the rest of the way.
Sometimes the cable has gotten hung up somewhere so it didn't get proper tension. I disconnected it, checked the lead, and hooked it back up. No improvement. I popped the housings out of their stops to confirm that linear wires weren't pushing through any of the ferrules. With the derailleur disconnected, I held the cable while operating the shifter. The ratchet was definitely releasing too much on a couple of those intermediate clicks.
I flooded the brifter with spray lube and let it sit overnight. This morning it might have been slightly better on the first run through, but not on the second or third or any that followed. I doused it a couple more times. You can't do much else to Shimano brifters.
The maddening part is that he had no complaints about the shifting when he brought the bike in. I didn't do anything to it. You can't really. You might graunch on a shift really hard and jam the unit, but that's more common with certain front shifters than with rear ones.
Earwax -- the congealed factory lube that creates the illusion that a shifter is worn out -- will affect the shifting up and down. Clicks disappear. The lever just whiffs, catching nothing. That isn't the case with this unit. The ratchet engages too positively, and dumps several positions at once before the pawls click into place. I've seen it on other Shimano-equipped bikes. But why did I have to be standing there when it decided to happen to this one?
Because the rider has had more than one frayed cable since he bought the bike, there could be one or more tiny fragments of old wire that have finally migrated into position to jam things up. Or some hair-fine spring or little ratchet tooth could have broken off. The bike dates back to about 2012. In modern bike years, that makes it an old piece of junk.
Sophisticated mechanisms stand between you and your personal experience of riding. Mysterious, unfixable controls make shifting easier until they make it impossible. They act as intermediaries in your personal relationship with cogs. As with so many human complexities, we could choose to refuse, but the majority simply accepts that this is advanced, improved technology. The sleek, the expensive, the excruciatingly engineered, they're here to help us. It's part of the price you pay.
I imagine that riders said grumpy things about the newfangled derailleurs in all their wacky permutations as that technology was emerging. The thing is, all that stuff was outside the bike. There were internally geared hubs. There were hidden mysteries. But anything could be opened with the right tools. Someone could fix it. You yourself might learn. It's not brain surgery. It would deepen your personal experience, if you chose. And most minor malfunctions, such as they were, could be treated by the roadside. Minor. I said minor.
As soon as you have to pay someone to fix your stuff, you have to pay that person enough to stay alive and available. There have been bike shops for years, and those shops have had mechanics. But on simpler machinery, a mechanic could handle more jobs in less time for less money per job, compared to now, when the parts themselves take a good chunk out of the wallet, and the technician might have to deal with internal cable routing, hydraulics, exotic materials, electronics, a new tire size every year, and still shovel through a pile of box-store bikes and path cruisers to clear the repair docket. Parts are more and more expensive for shops to stock. Mechanics need to be smart enough to figure out all the different machinery, dumb enough to work for bike mechanic money, and loyal -- or trapped -- enough to stick around.
The simpler your bike is, the more you can do for yourself, and the less will go wrong in the first place. The friction shifters on my bikes will handle eight or nine speeds. I might even be able to swing ten, but I refuse to start using tinfoil chains. The index-dependent systems lock you into a manufacturer's offerings. Ten speed used to be top shelf. Now it's lower middle class. Parts are wearing out? Buy a new bike. You know you want to.
I can't do it. Forget the money. If I'd scored bestselling novel with movie rights money, I still couldn't do it. It's wasteful and it's enslavement. The personal is political. The personal is commercial. The personal is downright industrial. But you can still limit the intrusion to preserve as much of your direct relationship with the world as possible. The bike was a perfect machine for transforming human effort into forward motion. Backward motion, too, if you're really adept on your fixed-gear. Multiple speeds increased its versatility without terribly degrading its essential simplicity. Only when innovators turned it into a semi-automatic weapon did things start to go wrong.
It's hard to find a high quality bike without complicated shifting. You can still find some with barcons as original equipment. The industry is so committed to other things that no other point of view can get much economic leverage. We're being dragged in another direction: tubeless tires, hydraulics, electrical things,... If you want something different, you have to hunt it down, and maybe build it up yourself.
Friday, March 02, 2018
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Reclamation
That's the nice thing about the fixie. About all you have to do is pump up the tires. Then I just had to pump myself up to go find out just how much I had deteriorated since my last park 'n' ride commute in early December.
In the theme of reclamation, I talked to my father, age 90, on the phone last night. Last year he got his hip replaced. He receives regular injections in his eyeballs to hold off the effects of macular degeneration. He's determined to keep living as well as he can. He was never a big exerciser just for its own sake. He needed a goal or a standard imposed from outside. But he's joined a 24-hour fitness center. He told me I had been an inspiration to him. So I figured I should start acting like one again. I salute anyone who can consistently go to a fitness center and keep to a routine. But then that's his strength.
High clouds filtered the sun ahead of some unsettled weather drifting toward us for the middle of the week. A little of this, a little of that, none of it supposed to leave piles of anything, it does not alter the trend toward days solidly above freezing. Since the big climate news is open water in the Arctic right now, with temperatures above freezing, our own mild temperatures aren't astounding.
Years ago I learned that New England is at the approximate latitude of the French Riviera. The fact that we had legendary winters at all reinforces the saying that location is everything. Where we sit relative to our continent, the nearest major water body, and the former routine meanderings of the jet stream, combined to make us feel more kinship to the Arctic than to any place famous for rich and famous people in sunglasses. But then we do get a smattering of those, as well. They keep manufacturing new ones... and they have to go somewhere.
Speaking of location, I live near some of the only relatively flat roads in the area. The route I picked took full advantage of that, and the light wind, and generous shoulders on Route 25. I'm not reshaping muscles adapted to vigorous use in cross-country skiing. I got nothin', or nearly nothin'.
Gratifyingly, I seemed to warm up and settle in after 20 minutes of pedaling. I have no depth, but at least I got around the route and finished feeling better than when I started. The twinges of atrophy and anxiety abated. Exercise is good for your mental and emotional health. It also takes longer than drugs or other shortcuts, which explains the continued popularity of those. Quick and easy and back to the rat race. Hell, time budgeting was why I quit working out in the first place. I wanted to work on other things. Something had to go, and work and sleep couldn't be reduced.
The bike commute is based on time budgeting. It provides physical benefits greater than the cost of the extra time in transit. It has more advantages than disadvantages. This would be true for anyone who only needs to transport their own self and some fairly compact cargo. I wouldn't expect someone to throw a $10,000 cello onto a BOB trailer and tool off for a day of teaching. But for a person whose main equipment for a day of work is simply their presence, it offers a lot.
Last year I was starting to lay base miles around this time, and we got shut down in mid March. One never knows. But no two winters seem to be exactly alike, so maybe this underachiever will go ahead and fade away, so we can get on to the next thing.
Monday, February 26, 2018
The Evolution of Cross-Training
In ancient times, when I felt free to play, winter was a time to explore as widely as time and money would allow. I did it all -- or mostly all --: I climbed ice, I trudged up above treeline in what you could call mountaineering, I skied cross-country and some Telemark, I hiked. The cross-country skiing was mostly exploratory, on ungroomed terrain, but working in the business put me close to groomed trails. Learning more about the equipment and technique became a professional necessity and an enjoyable addiction for a time.
Mind you, I never intended to get into the gear business or the recreation industry. These happened by accident in search of basic income. Having put my eggs in the "creative" basket, I had little to offer the world of office jobs or practical trades. What I know I have learned by doing. Being a bike mechanic still seems like a worthwhile skill set, made less enjoyable by the consumerist avalanche that buried the industry and the pedaling world in the 1990s. The industry dumps more debris on the pile every year, rather than showing any inclination to dig some away and focus on simple pleasures. So it goes.
Wrenching has not been a gold mine. And the creative eggs are either spoiling in the basket or are easily overlooked in the tall grass and the jumble of other people's more brilliant output. So I guard my resources and spend nothing on journeys long or short that I do not need to take.
Ice climbing was easy to quit. The tools are expensive and the problems don't entice me. As a subset of mountaineering, ice and rock climbing made sense, within my conservative comfort zone. No longer mountaineering, I no longer think much about the supportive skills.
Achievers need mountains to climb. Artists just need mountains to appreciate. I don't need to be clinging to a couple of microscopic rough patches above a deadly drop to have a nice day out on the crags. I'm not keeping a score card of peaks bagged and waiting to be bagged. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's a matter of personality.
Two elderly men I know provide a perfect example of the pros and cons of each approach. The achiever now spends most of his time sitting in a recliner, watching cable news and analyzing situations over which he no longer has much influence. He spent his entire adult life in organizations: government service, sailing clubs, yachting associations. He has plaques, certificates, medals, trophies, attesting to his performance in various hierarchical settings. He has memories of when life was fun, even though his performance focus made it very hard to tell that he was having fun at the time. The artist bought himself a Kevlar solo canoe a couple of years ago, and still goes out paddling, even after a heart attack and the usual pain and stiffness of an aging body. He's in his 80s. He will stop when he is no longer physically capable of going.
Some competitive types manage to remain competitive in their age group until they drop. Some tourist types probably stop and rot sooner than they need to. There are millions of people I've never met, so I can't say for sure. I do observe that the artistic appreciative types, and the achievers with something of the artist about them, seem to remain alive until they're dead, compared to people who need to be at or reaching for the top of a given activity, who stagnate when they realize that big glory is now out of reach.
I'm just trying to stay strong enough to continue my self-propelled lifestyle.
As winter has deteriorated over the years, opportunities to charge right out the door onto usable surfaces have diminished. At the same time, the odds of finding something worth the trip at the end of a self-indulgent drive have diminished as well. I can take a slog in the slush from my own back door more easily that I can take one miles away. From a pure fitness standpoint, the slog from home is more enjoyable than any indoor training, and just as effective as a slog for which I had to burn gasoline.
Winter riding seems less inviting now than it did. Are the roads less clear, or is it just my dwindling testosterone? Can't tell you. I know that the slop storms we get seem to inspire the road crews to slather way more salt than they used to, and the glop impinges on the travel way a lot. Micro-climates also affect riding conditions on most routes around here. Areas that don't get as much sun remain colder, with persistent snowdrifts and ice. Increased population puts more drivers on the roads. Decreased bike use among young people means that more and more of those drivers have not had much -- if any -- experience as riders. Most mean well, but they lack the empathy born of personal knowledge. And some lack empathy entirely.
Then there are simple logistics. In my care-free years, my house was tiny and easy to care for. When it grew into a music school (now closed), the building itself became permanently larger. I would not get a refund if I removed part of the structure. The money is spent. The building is here. And the driveway doesn't clear itself. I gave up on plow guys, because they never live up to the promises. So, every snowstorm, I have to be out there with the snow thrower. You learn a lot you might not already have noticed when you have to move all of your own snow. Moisture, density, depth, can make the difference between a one-hour job and a three-hour job.
At least in this crappy snow year I have not had to go up and shovel the roof. Even though that is the only technical climbing I do anymore, I can live without it. The roof is the quicker part. Moving the avalanche piles afterward is when the real work begins. And none of it was easy.
All that home maintenance stuff does count as exercise. So does splitting and stacking wood. But it's not complete and balanced exercise. For that you need to get out and find something you can do for more than an hour, arms and legs, like cross-country skiing. And not much else is like cross-country skiing, in the way it incorporates the entire body and mind. Metaphorically, things are similar, but they don't provide the conditioning benefits.
In desperation a couple of weeks ago, I dug out the old Nordic Track machine, intending to flog myself through at least a half-hour on it before letting myself have supper. It's not much like actual skiing, but it does use arms and legs in a similar motion. Because you are working hard, but going absolutely nowhere, with no swoop and glide, it is absolutely the most tedious, miserable toil, unrelieved for me by any musical or video distraction. I just want it to be over. As it happened that evening, the cellist called when I was 17 minutes into it. After we finished talking, it was that much later, I was that much hungrier, and I couldn't get myself to start again. And, the next day, I felt like total crap. Joints hurt, I had none of the feeling of cleansing and residual endorphins that usually follow a good workout. So screw that. I'm back to trying to get out and wander around at any opportunity.
Right now I have to go move 3 inches of slush that fell yesterday, in case daytime highs in the 40s to 50 don't get rid of enough of it. Cross training, man. March is a wild card when it comes to winter weather around here. I may be out riding soon, or we might get shut down until mid April. The second half of winter is like another whole season. Animals are fighting it until the end, trying to get to the easier feeding of the growing season. Hut-bound humans atrophy every day, right up to the very day that they manage to break out and start moving around again.
Mind you, I never intended to get into the gear business or the recreation industry. These happened by accident in search of basic income. Having put my eggs in the "creative" basket, I had little to offer the world of office jobs or practical trades. What I know I have learned by doing. Being a bike mechanic still seems like a worthwhile skill set, made less enjoyable by the consumerist avalanche that buried the industry and the pedaling world in the 1990s. The industry dumps more debris on the pile every year, rather than showing any inclination to dig some away and focus on simple pleasures. So it goes.
Wrenching has not been a gold mine. And the creative eggs are either spoiling in the basket or are easily overlooked in the tall grass and the jumble of other people's more brilliant output. So I guard my resources and spend nothing on journeys long or short that I do not need to take.
Ice climbing was easy to quit. The tools are expensive and the problems don't entice me. As a subset of mountaineering, ice and rock climbing made sense, within my conservative comfort zone. No longer mountaineering, I no longer think much about the supportive skills.
Achievers need mountains to climb. Artists just need mountains to appreciate. I don't need to be clinging to a couple of microscopic rough patches above a deadly drop to have a nice day out on the crags. I'm not keeping a score card of peaks bagged and waiting to be bagged. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's a matter of personality.
Two elderly men I know provide a perfect example of the pros and cons of each approach. The achiever now spends most of his time sitting in a recliner, watching cable news and analyzing situations over which he no longer has much influence. He spent his entire adult life in organizations: government service, sailing clubs, yachting associations. He has plaques, certificates, medals, trophies, attesting to his performance in various hierarchical settings. He has memories of when life was fun, even though his performance focus made it very hard to tell that he was having fun at the time. The artist bought himself a Kevlar solo canoe a couple of years ago, and still goes out paddling, even after a heart attack and the usual pain and stiffness of an aging body. He's in his 80s. He will stop when he is no longer physically capable of going.
Some competitive types manage to remain competitive in their age group until they drop. Some tourist types probably stop and rot sooner than they need to. There are millions of people I've never met, so I can't say for sure. I do observe that the artistic appreciative types, and the achievers with something of the artist about them, seem to remain alive until they're dead, compared to people who need to be at or reaching for the top of a given activity, who stagnate when they realize that big glory is now out of reach.
I'm just trying to stay strong enough to continue my self-propelled lifestyle.
As winter has deteriorated over the years, opportunities to charge right out the door onto usable surfaces have diminished. At the same time, the odds of finding something worth the trip at the end of a self-indulgent drive have diminished as well. I can take a slog in the slush from my own back door more easily that I can take one miles away. From a pure fitness standpoint, the slog from home is more enjoyable than any indoor training, and just as effective as a slog for which I had to burn gasoline.
Winter riding seems less inviting now than it did. Are the roads less clear, or is it just my dwindling testosterone? Can't tell you. I know that the slop storms we get seem to inspire the road crews to slather way more salt than they used to, and the glop impinges on the travel way a lot. Micro-climates also affect riding conditions on most routes around here. Areas that don't get as much sun remain colder, with persistent snowdrifts and ice. Increased population puts more drivers on the roads. Decreased bike use among young people means that more and more of those drivers have not had much -- if any -- experience as riders. Most mean well, but they lack the empathy born of personal knowledge. And some lack empathy entirely.
Then there are simple logistics. In my care-free years, my house was tiny and easy to care for. When it grew into a music school (now closed), the building itself became permanently larger. I would not get a refund if I removed part of the structure. The money is spent. The building is here. And the driveway doesn't clear itself. I gave up on plow guys, because they never live up to the promises. So, every snowstorm, I have to be out there with the snow thrower. You learn a lot you might not already have noticed when you have to move all of your own snow. Moisture, density, depth, can make the difference between a one-hour job and a three-hour job.
At least in this crappy snow year I have not had to go up and shovel the roof. Even though that is the only technical climbing I do anymore, I can live without it. The roof is the quicker part. Moving the avalanche piles afterward is when the real work begins. And none of it was easy.
All that home maintenance stuff does count as exercise. So does splitting and stacking wood. But it's not complete and balanced exercise. For that you need to get out and find something you can do for more than an hour, arms and legs, like cross-country skiing. And not much else is like cross-country skiing, in the way it incorporates the entire body and mind. Metaphorically, things are similar, but they don't provide the conditioning benefits.
In desperation a couple of weeks ago, I dug out the old Nordic Track machine, intending to flog myself through at least a half-hour on it before letting myself have supper. It's not much like actual skiing, but it does use arms and legs in a similar motion. Because you are working hard, but going absolutely nowhere, with no swoop and glide, it is absolutely the most tedious, miserable toil, unrelieved for me by any musical or video distraction. I just want it to be over. As it happened that evening, the cellist called when I was 17 minutes into it. After we finished talking, it was that much later, I was that much hungrier, and I couldn't get myself to start again. And, the next day, I felt like total crap. Joints hurt, I had none of the feeling of cleansing and residual endorphins that usually follow a good workout. So screw that. I'm back to trying to get out and wander around at any opportunity.
Right now I have to go move 3 inches of slush that fell yesterday, in case daytime highs in the 40s to 50 don't get rid of enough of it. Cross training, man. March is a wild card when it comes to winter weather around here. I may be out riding soon, or we might get shut down until mid April. The second half of winter is like another whole season. Animals are fighting it until the end, trying to get to the easier feeding of the growing season. Hut-bound humans atrophy every day, right up to the very day that they manage to break out and start moving around again.
Thursday, February 22, 2018
Coming Soon: Moped Monthly Magazine!
Someone dropped off a pile of back issues of Bicycling. One of them included a special section devoted to ebikes.
Check out the Buyer's Guide to Sidewalk Motorcycles, and articles like "Hate to Pedal? Who Doesn't?" Read reviews of selected accessories, like helmets, gloves, and weightlifting belts. Find out why your smokeless moped must have electronic shifting and computer controlled suspension.
I don't mind if people want to invent labor saving devices. But I don't recall the Bicycling Magazine of the 1970s reviewing mopeds. The fact that the power is provided by an electric motor seems to blind people to the fact that this is not a bicycle, except in the sense that the original term for motorcycle was motor-bicycle. Yes, it has pedals and uses a lot of the same componentry. That in itself is a problem, when a 50- to 75-pound vehicle is using a suspension fork and brake system designed for something that weighs 25- to 35 pounds. Wheels and tires are gradually mutating to reflect the actual loads involved. This leads to other problems when the motorcyclesque tire for a given smokeless moped gets dropped from production. I ran into this working on a couple of massively heavy models from A2B. The only tire available to fit the rims is definitely not for a 75-pound behemoth. The rubber will melt away.
The bike industry, desperate for cash after they destroyed the mountain bike boom, is grasping at every straw, including electric wires. I suggest attaching those to the genitals.
You can't stop progress. You also can't stop diarrhea.
Electric vehicles are great. They are a separate thing and need to be considered as such. Quit dumping every whacked piece of crap with pedals onto hardworking little bike shops. Improvement is one thing. Over-sophistication is something else. The minority thrilled by space age, temperamental componentry is vastly outweighed by the people who want a relief from that crap, who were perfectly satisfied with simpler mechanisms, well made, and ask only for safe riding conditions.
It's still winter here, but a pretty crappy winter, so I have too much time to think about the next season and the technological marvels that are imposed on us in a deeper and deeper pile every year. Tool up! Study up! One or two people might need something annoying and expensive worked on! Meanwhile, all the older stuff still needs its routine attention.
The industry's ideal is to make bikes that are addictively attractive, that can't be serviced. Customers will buy them, ride them into the ground, and replace them eagerly, because we all have that kind of money. What happens to the carcasses of the dead? Who cares? Maybe someone will develop a feel-good, token recycling program to salvage the 10 percent of the content that can be. And environmental groups will start reporting on how the remaining detritus has been pulled from the gullets of the last few whales, or something.
I don't mind if people want to invent labor saving devices. But I don't recall the Bicycling Magazine of the 1970s reviewing mopeds. The fact that the power is provided by an electric motor seems to blind people to the fact that this is not a bicycle, except in the sense that the original term for motorcycle was motor-bicycle. Yes, it has pedals and uses a lot of the same componentry. That in itself is a problem, when a 50- to 75-pound vehicle is using a suspension fork and brake system designed for something that weighs 25- to 35 pounds. Wheels and tires are gradually mutating to reflect the actual loads involved. This leads to other problems when the motorcyclesque tire for a given smokeless moped gets dropped from production. I ran into this working on a couple of massively heavy models from A2B. The only tire available to fit the rims is definitely not for a 75-pound behemoth. The rubber will melt away.
The bike industry, desperate for cash after they destroyed the mountain bike boom, is grasping at every straw, including electric wires. I suggest attaching those to the genitals.
You can't stop progress. You also can't stop diarrhea.
Electric vehicles are great. They are a separate thing and need to be considered as such. Quit dumping every whacked piece of crap with pedals onto hardworking little bike shops. Improvement is one thing. Over-sophistication is something else. The minority thrilled by space age, temperamental componentry is vastly outweighed by the people who want a relief from that crap, who were perfectly satisfied with simpler mechanisms, well made, and ask only for safe riding conditions.
It's still winter here, but a pretty crappy winter, so I have too much time to think about the next season and the technological marvels that are imposed on us in a deeper and deeper pile every year. Tool up! Study up! One or two people might need something annoying and expensive worked on! Meanwhile, all the older stuff still needs its routine attention.
The industry's ideal is to make bikes that are addictively attractive, that can't be serviced. Customers will buy them, ride them into the ground, and replace them eagerly, because we all have that kind of money. What happens to the carcasses of the dead? Who cares? Maybe someone will develop a feel-good, token recycling program to salvage the 10 percent of the content that can be. And environmental groups will start reporting on how the remaining detritus has been pulled from the gullets of the last few whales, or something.
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
There was fun to be had
At the end of the 1970s, the threats to human existence were clearly caused by humans themselves. War and pollution headed the list. To a peaceful person who had embraced the bicycle for transportation, the remedy seemed clear. Ratchet down the aggression. Slow down on the industrialized consumption. Use technology to improve life worldwide. Walk and ride.
Too simple, I know. Relaxation cannot be imposed, and will not be accepted. We have come too far on human sacrifice and grinding toil. It's the prison we know, into which we bear our children. It's normal.
As a hopeful idiot commuting by bike, I thought people would see me threading traffic and having a good time and say, "Hey! I could do that!" Instead, as we all have experienced, they say, "I hate that guy! What a slacker!" I acknowledge that many people will not be able to use human powered vehicles to do things that would remain necessary even in a world devoted to human happiness. But a society truly devoted to human happiness would make sure that everyone got a chance to relax and get outside. And our transportation systems would allow those who could use human power to be able to do so, for the good of everyone.
There was fun to be had. But we're suspicious of fun. It has to be wrong.
It may change some day. Right now we are clearly headed in the opposite direction, cranking up the hatred and arguing about whether people need lethal weapons in hand at all times. On the road, motorists threaten cyclists with injury or death as a matter of routine. Cyclists learn to deal with it in the criterium of life, or they give up and let the terrorists win.
What was true in the 1970s is still true. Ratchet down the aggression. Slow down on the industrialized consumption. Use technology to improve life worldwide. Walk and ride. Be more appreciative of simple comforts we take for granted. There is fun to be had, and it is not at the expense of others.
I know better than to keep believing it will happen. But I still believe in the principle. I will never stop believing in the principle.
Monday, February 12, 2018
The metaphorically dead, the nearly dead, and the actually dead
The crappy snow conditions have killed most of the shop's income. The days are "dead" in the sense that hours can pass between customers and mere lookers popping in. Thus, financially, the business itself is on that crumbling edge so sadly familiar to brick and mortar retail in general, and small retail in particular.
With plenty of time on my hands, when the boss said he wanted some piled-up repair records filed away, I decided to revamp the filing system completely.
Back in the 1990s, we started keeping detailed records of all the work we did, because the mountain bike boom was exposing us to lots of warranty claims and attempts to get something for nothing. A customer would come in saying, "You just worked on my bike and then (insert catastrophe here) happened." Because of the huge repair volume in general, and the fact that we had as many as five people doing mechanical work during peak periods, we might remember someone's face, but not the details of our previous service to them. Even if we did remember, a written record is much more convincing in the quasi-courtroom atmosphere that often developed just outside the workshop doorway.
"You just worked on my bike and then my shifting went out!"
"Yes, well, according to our records here, we fixed a flat tire for you, and you specifically told us to do nothing else."
"Oh. Can you fix my gears?"
"Absolutely!"
These documents pile up. We cull them every ten years or so, saving only the most interesting. For instance, back in the mid 1990s, we did some work for Roff Smith before his tour around Australia in 1996. His parents lived in Tamworth, NH, at the time, so we got to see him both before and after that epic journey. And I like to keep the records from any interesting bike I build.
Typically, we would file the records alphabetically, but boxed together in one- or two-year groupings. This can be a pain in the ass when a customer has a question about prior work -- reproducing componentry spec on a bike no longer with us, for instance, or checking on the full history of a subsystem -- because none of us might remember for sure when the work took place. For years I had wanted to file alphabetically only, with each customer's records chronologically arranged within their section.
I've made it to the letter P in just over a week.
After 28 years in the same shop, I see pieces of life stories, and even know how some of them have ended. Several have fallen to the terrifying, implacable scourge of cancer, which Americans face alone, battling not only the disease, but also the profit-driven corporations that control both treatment and access to treatment. And the names include two murdered women, written in their own handwriting, in each case a year or less from the date of those still-unsolved murders. Both were divorced. One was shot execution-style on Halloween, in 2010, in the home she had recently purchased in another town. The other was brutally butchered with a knife on Mothers Day, 2009. As usual with violence against women, the problem is not too few suspects, but too many.
I try to remember their faces, bits of conversation we might have had. No one deserves to die that way. The rage and contempt indicate murderers who felt entitled. There have been no remorseful suicides in the suspect pool. As far as we can tell, the killers are happily getting away with it.
The living go on living. Those of us inclined to fix things try to keep things running. The forces of destruction oppose us. The record will be alphabetized until someone knocks over the boxes.
With plenty of time on my hands, when the boss said he wanted some piled-up repair records filed away, I decided to revamp the filing system completely.
Back in the 1990s, we started keeping detailed records of all the work we did, because the mountain bike boom was exposing us to lots of warranty claims and attempts to get something for nothing. A customer would come in saying, "You just worked on my bike and then (insert catastrophe here) happened." Because of the huge repair volume in general, and the fact that we had as many as five people doing mechanical work during peak periods, we might remember someone's face, but not the details of our previous service to them. Even if we did remember, a written record is much more convincing in the quasi-courtroom atmosphere that often developed just outside the workshop doorway.
"You just worked on my bike and then my shifting went out!"
"Yes, well, according to our records here, we fixed a flat tire for you, and you specifically told us to do nothing else."
"Oh. Can you fix my gears?"
"Absolutely!"
These documents pile up. We cull them every ten years or so, saving only the most interesting. For instance, back in the mid 1990s, we did some work for Roff Smith before his tour around Australia in 1996. His parents lived in Tamworth, NH, at the time, so we got to see him both before and after that epic journey. And I like to keep the records from any interesting bike I build.
Typically, we would file the records alphabetically, but boxed together in one- or two-year groupings. This can be a pain in the ass when a customer has a question about prior work -- reproducing componentry spec on a bike no longer with us, for instance, or checking on the full history of a subsystem -- because none of us might remember for sure when the work took place. For years I had wanted to file alphabetically only, with each customer's records chronologically arranged within their section.
I've made it to the letter P in just over a week.
After 28 years in the same shop, I see pieces of life stories, and even know how some of them have ended. Several have fallen to the terrifying, implacable scourge of cancer, which Americans face alone, battling not only the disease, but also the profit-driven corporations that control both treatment and access to treatment. And the names include two murdered women, written in their own handwriting, in each case a year or less from the date of those still-unsolved murders. Both were divorced. One was shot execution-style on Halloween, in 2010, in the home she had recently purchased in another town. The other was brutally butchered with a knife on Mothers Day, 2009. As usual with violence against women, the problem is not too few suspects, but too many.
I try to remember their faces, bits of conversation we might have had. No one deserves to die that way. The rage and contempt indicate murderers who felt entitled. There have been no remorseful suicides in the suspect pool. As far as we can tell, the killers are happily getting away with it.
The living go on living. Those of us inclined to fix things try to keep things running. The forces of destruction oppose us. The record will be alphabetized until someone knocks over the boxes.
Friday, January 19, 2018
Winterwise, all bets are off
Apparently, the combination of La Nina, the volcano in Bali about which we hear nothing anymore, and climate change in general, has brought us wild fluctuations that defy routine.
Christmas brought snow, followed by subzero nights and days where the temperature stayed below 10F for the most part. I recorded nighttime lows of -14F, -15F, and -10F before leaving for Baltimore to copilot the cellist back to her school-year employment in the Baltimore area.
Baltimore was as cold as a slightly below normal New Hampshire January. Water mains were bursting all over the city. There were more than 50 of them while I was there. And, of course, the plight of Baltimore city schools has made national news.
I was snowbound in Baltimore when barely an inch of it fell during the "Bomb Cyclone." Helplessly I watched the storm swirl over my home, while was stuck 500 miles away. My train to Connecticut kept getting canceled. While my part of New Hampshire got less than 10 inches, It was followed by a frigid wave with lows down around -20F, and relentless winds.
After just enough time for me to clear the driveway, porches and decks, and rake the roof edges, the temperature mounted steadily above freezing before vaulting into the 50s, with heavy rain. Nearly all of the snow disappeared. The fog was like trying to see through a sheep.
After another little dip toward zero, the temperature settled at an unspectacular but still frozen level. The four or five inches of snow we got on Wednesday made the roads slippery, but did nearly nothing to reopen the cross-country ski trails.
My prediction, based on the pessimism born of 31 years living in New England, is that the next shot of bitterly cold air will arrive around the third week of March, followed by large storms of heavy, wet snow. Spring snow is horrible for spring skiing, because it is always clumpy, and never manages to firm up. You need a decaying snowpack that has consolidated over a couple of months to get the legendary best conditions. My forecast is based on the idea that I will be jonesing hard for the bike commute by then, so what can nature do to make that highly inadvisable. Last winter went a bit like that. I had started riding base miles in February and early March when winter came stumbling back with a series of storms that ended with a 10-inch snowfall on April 1. It was mid April before I started a somewhat regular schedule of riding.
Whatever happens, we'll creep in this petty pace from day to day. Time to creep off to work now.
Christmas brought snow, followed by subzero nights and days where the temperature stayed below 10F for the most part. I recorded nighttime lows of -14F, -15F, and -10F before leaving for Baltimore to copilot the cellist back to her school-year employment in the Baltimore area.
Baltimore was as cold as a slightly below normal New Hampshire January. Water mains were bursting all over the city. There were more than 50 of them while I was there. And, of course, the plight of Baltimore city schools has made national news.
I was snowbound in Baltimore when barely an inch of it fell during the "Bomb Cyclone." Helplessly I watched the storm swirl over my home, while was stuck 500 miles away. My train to Connecticut kept getting canceled. While my part of New Hampshire got less than 10 inches, It was followed by a frigid wave with lows down around -20F, and relentless winds.
After just enough time for me to clear the driveway, porches and decks, and rake the roof edges, the temperature mounted steadily above freezing before vaulting into the 50s, with heavy rain. Nearly all of the snow disappeared. The fog was like trying to see through a sheep.
After another little dip toward zero, the temperature settled at an unspectacular but still frozen level. The four or five inches of snow we got on Wednesday made the roads slippery, but did nearly nothing to reopen the cross-country ski trails.
My prediction, based on the pessimism born of 31 years living in New England, is that the next shot of bitterly cold air will arrive around the third week of March, followed by large storms of heavy, wet snow. Spring snow is horrible for spring skiing, because it is always clumpy, and never manages to firm up. You need a decaying snowpack that has consolidated over a couple of months to get the legendary best conditions. My forecast is based on the idea that I will be jonesing hard for the bike commute by then, so what can nature do to make that highly inadvisable. Last winter went a bit like that. I had started riding base miles in February and early March when winter came stumbling back with a series of storms that ended with a 10-inch snowfall on April 1. It was mid April before I started a somewhat regular schedule of riding.
Whatever happens, we'll creep in this petty pace from day to day. Time to creep off to work now.
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