Take Me Back

The long, 11 year road home. It looks like we will be headed "home", well, to a new home in Northern California. I grew up in southern Cali, and we left 11-12 years ago to come to Colorado. My Career is now taking us back, it's an opportunity too good to pass up at this point in my life, and the chance of greatness for both of us is too good. Recently we had both felt a calling back to our home state, tired of being cold, waiting through 7-8 months of winter to get back on a bicycle, so It's going to be an awesome move. More to follow..

End of a short era

As of this past weekend, GE's 72 beetle is gone. Purchased by a guy from Albuquerque. I'm sad that it's gone, but we will always have the memories and experience. He was replaced by a sturdy 1990 subaru, as yet to be named.

This is the end

Of 2013! Without hesitation, I can say this has been the worst, and best year of my life. Near death, great gains, great losses in all facets. I do not have resolutions, and do not believe in them. Do or do not, this is what 2014, and the future is about. With that, get out there and create, ride, and live. I'm not waiting for a "new" year to do this, it's happening now.

Best of luck my man, I know you never looked backward : )

A Return, of Sorts...

I'm back. So much to say, so little skill. While the winter is upon us, and my bike training is less frequent, I have returned to pottery. I have acquired a new wheel (after selling my industrial one with the intent of moving), and I have acquired a new technique, RAKU. I also came to my senses, and purchased a pyrometer, so no more cones, or guessing. Here are the latest, Raku and other.

This is just a small sample, but what I consider the best. I think Raku is my new "thing", along with single speed mountain biking (more on that later). Coming soon: How to burn your face off in a kiln. Hot stuff is hot. I dislike the extreme cold. Dressing for Cold weather riding, for Idiots like me. -Maybe I will stick with the blog this time.

Bikes, what I have learned as a "mechanic" and the LT100

For the better part of 3-4 years now, my better half and I have been deeply obsessed with bicycles of all kinds. In turn, I have become somewhat of a "mechanic", fix expert, know it all about bikes, of all kinds. DISCLAIMER: I mostly work in a basement or dinning room.

Evolution: We started with mountain bikes, that we did not ride in the mountains. Like most SoCal imports, we used our bikes for everything. Why can't I just ride my flatbar fully suspended mountain bike everywhere, on 50 mile rides, and to a coffee shop? The answer, you can, but it will suck! This lead us, over the course of 3 years (our formidable biking years), to adopt 3 bikes each, mostly. One road bike, one "city bike", and one mountain. This is not all inclusive, not perfect, and sometimes there are crossovers.

Today: All 3 of my bikes are esentially custom built, a fast sub 20lb road bike, a 29er franken-mountain bike 1x9 with no suspension, and a 1994 Specialized Crossroads commuter/cross bike that i converted to drop bars. Gen (Master Blaster), has a Riv Sam Hillborne for inbetween stuff (Long slow rides), a Riv A. Homer Hilsen for faster "road" rides, a Public C7 city bike for tooling around, and a 1994 Bridgestone MB6 for the mountains (someday).

All of our bikes are steel, with the exception of my 29er, witch is aluminum with a steel fork. We both like the feedback of steel better, I just went with Alu on the mountain bike to save weight.

What I have learned as a rider and mechanic:

1. Being short is difficult, but you adapt. (In life and with bikes)
-The world is made for Men who are around 6 feet tall, and women who are about 6 inches shorter, I can search craigslist, ebay, and walk into a bike shop, and both of us will have the same problem, our bikes have to be ordered, or custom made. We never get to test ride the "rite size".

2. Bike maintenance is a continual learning process:
-I know 10x more today about derailleurs, than I did even 1 year ago, it's all about cable tension.

-Don't discount good tires, patching sucks.
-SRAM chains with the "master link" are the best thing ever, I can remove the chain to clean it.
-build or buy a chain "whip", you will need this, cassettes get changed.
-Bar tape get's worn out quick, not from use, but from swapping bars!
-Furniture polish cleans/protects amazingly well.
-Buy ferrules (cable ends) in bulk.
-Double tighten/check everything (some bike shops don't do this)
-Noisy usually means DIRTY.
-10k other things.......

3. EXPENSE: Don't get me started, and don't walk me into a bike shop, some bikes are great, some suck, and most bike shop employees are confused (Apologies to the ones who are not). An expensive shiny bike, may not be for you. You must go by feel, with a close 2nd in aesthetics.

-Sometimes it's not worth it to source/build you own bike, and vice versa. There's no hard rules for this. You will learn the HARD way, it's a law of nature.

4. Clothing: I tried to fight it for a long time, but what the masses sell, work. Lycra and wool wick sweat, and tend to stink less. Cotton sucks and hurts, it's great for sitting here, or even going to the Gym, but smooth light things are excellent on a bike.

-Underwear is not your friend. Spandex and/or chamois are. -Old Jerseys from unknown rides are cool.

NEXT: We are both doing larger rides, Master blaster is doing the Venus ride in the next couple of weeks, probably fretting about it right now : ). I'm going to attempt to qualify for the Leadville 100 by racing in the Apine Odyssey 100k on September 15th. I have never ridden over 53 miles on any bike, and I have never ridden that far on a Mountain bike, so this should be interesting. As a supplement to training/stress releif, i'm carpooling to work, and riding home. Ole blue is sitting with me today, being dirty:

What is the point of this post? I'm not sure, maybe so I could type it out, and Imagine the other things I need to do also, Like a FIRING of my pottery, or building a set of stairs for our house!

I swear the next post will be about a firing, and photos of said disaster!

Colorado is burning, and so are my lungs.

Since my last visit, the state has become engulfed in flames, my leg has healed greatly, and it's HOT. That's right, currently Colorado has more than 8 major fires burning in the state, one of witch cropped up just a short distance from us yesterday. There is almost no chance the flames will reach us, but smoke certainly has. It's not helping that the temperature has topped 100 all week (106 on Tuesday, tying a record from 1878). It's brutal, the smoke in the air takes me back to my youth, when you would take a deep breath of that southern California air, and feel that pain! We will be taking an extended trip to the homeland for the next couple of weeks, and hopefully it will be enough time for the fires to be extinguished, for me to age another year, and hopefully to pull some riding time in California.

Image courtesy of the Daily Camera/MARK Leffingwell

I think my favorite part of the last couple of weeks was a TV interview with an evacuee, she was somewhere in the range of 75-90 years old, and proclaimed that the fire was horrible, but it's "all going to burn eventually". YAY! I'll leave you with that one....

Why?

Why do I take so long to post again? I'm not sure, I guess it's an internal question, but needless to say, our lives have been busy, and I have been busy reading other blogs! Yard work, biking, working, and life have kept me busy. I recently started going to a kickboxing glass with G, and have found myself "overly competitive", witch leads me to my current partially torn calf muscle! I'm okay, but I certainly won't be running for a bit (No complaints here), so the bike is going to see a lot of road time. Speaking of bikes, I think we decided that neither of us cares how many we have. G has been talking about a track/single speed style bike (maybe fixed...!), and I think it will be fun. A few years ago I commuted on a "bikes direct" style single speed roadie, and it was one of the best rides I had, I just loved the simplicity. Pottery, ahhh, It's been over 1 year since my last firing, so my plan is to roll one up in the next 2 weeks, I have plenty of material. I guess I have been waiting because I had planned to setup a small fire pit in the yard (maybe it will happen this weekend), and do a traditional pit firing. We will see. Pics next time.