Studly Do Right

Our northern winter this year has been a mixture of freezing and thawing cycles (no pun intended) that have created an icy situation that necessitates me having to re-stud my winter bike tires.

A little excessive?

Since I had carelessly allowed my two cordless drill batteries to go dead, it was necessary to screw in each stud by hand.

Maybe I should have waited for the batteries to charge instead of wrenching my wrists trying to install hundreds of screws into each tire.

Porcupines would be jealous

My son who is into chainmail and studs would appreciate the end result of my efforts although I would have to warn him not to get too close to the tire since the studs are wickedly sharp.

Hehe

Another option to consider is to start riding the bike south in the fall before Halloween since we always seem to have deep snow before that hallowed eve.

Boo! Hoo

I'm not suggesting that a person ride too far south - eventually you'd hit snow in the southern hemisphere!





Keith

4Pm
BikeWorks North
F4, 60/sec
ISO 400


Sitting astride the bike that he skillfully made into a cargo bike, Keith really does look like his nickname "The Raving Bike Fiend".

His army surplus saddlebags cost him a measly two dollars (US each) at a store in Seattle.  They hold an incredible amount of gack hence his need for a cargo bike.

Valentine's Ride

Michael over at Earth's General Store is sponsoring a bike ride this Valentine's Day (Friday).  It looks like the plan is to ride along Whyte Avenue and stop at many businesses along the way.

The long range forecast looks promising as well - temperatures in the plus range which means more people will come and join  the ride.

My own Valentine is in Washington, D.C., not that she would join me on the ride.  Too bad since we do have a red tandem that would appropriate for Valentine's bike riding.

When the ride was originally planned, it looked like we were going to stop at Narayanni's Indian restaurant where we could enjoy an all-you-can-eat vegetarian buffet.  My hope was to wash down their tantalizing offerings with a Singha beer.

Of course, I'd only have one and then wait an hour before getting on my bike - wouldn't want to be pissed on Valentine's Day!

The Valentine's Day bike Ride is expected to end up at Mike's Bikes - a new bike shop on the other side of the Mill Creek Ravine but still on the southside of the river.

We start off at a pizza place and I hope they have the heart - shaped pizzas.  A chain of pizza restaurants across Canada offer heart - shaped pizzas on Valentine's Day and they will sell 20,000 of them tomorrow night!

That Was the Year That Was

Every year comes with its highs and lows.  And 2013 was no exception. One low was meeting Wolfgang in Beaverdell.  The backslapping, joking fool who ended up spraying us with gravel and dust when he passed us in his car while we were riding our bikes on the Kettle Valley Railway.

While nearly everything I do on a bike is enjoyable, being able to rent a bike in Portugal and visit the historic sites like the old fort pictured above, was most definitely a cycling high.

2013 brought the news that the landlord of our community bike shop wanted our space to themselves which meant moving BikeWorks South to a new location.  My reaction to this change was one of optimism - here was an opportunity to make an even better bike shop and use some of the lessons learned from building BikeWorks North a year or two ago.

It was with great luck that when my cycling friend Roy and I cycled up to the Biker's Rest Stop in Rhone, British Columbia while on our "Best Of" Tour, that we met with Paul Lautard, a legendary cyclist of the Kettle Valley Railway.  The year before, my daughter and I had stopped in at the Rest Stop but Paul was nowhere to be found and it made our visit rather lonely.

It would be an exaggeration to say that I struck it rich in 2013, but while panning for gold in the North Saskatchewan River after a pleasant bike ride, I did find some gold dust in the bottom of my pan.  Almost enough to pay for the cost of the gold pan itself but priceless in memories.

Grocery Shopping

Since one can never do enough cycling during the winter here in the frigid north, it was an easy decision to go to the organic grocery store and pick up a few things for my daughter.  When I say a few things, there were three items she needed.  Carrots, apples and lemons.

Perhaps riding over to the south side of our city on the one bike I had in front of me with its slick tires was not the best choice.  I see couriers riding around on skinny road tires and my slicks are at least twice as wide...so with my broad wheels, I should have no trouble negotiating the snow.

Recently, we've had as much snow in a day than we usually receive in a month and our wide streets have become narrow snow encrusted lanes.  I knew I was in trouble within a block of my departure point.  The bike was bucking and slipping on the road so I opted out for the sidewalk which meant my short ride to the store was going to be lengthened considerably.

You get the idea

 When she asked for carrots, I imagined one of those bunches you see in the vegetable aisle.

It wasn't until I got to the store that I re-listened to her phone message and realised that when she said she wanted carrots, she was talking about a twenty five pound bag of that orange vegetable.



The lemons filled a small bag and the apples I stuffed into two more bags and they would all fit in my two saddlebags.  But twelve and a half kilos of orange produce?  Was I going to end up like one of those pictures you see every now and then of an overloaded bike?

My father used to say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and I've been meaning for over a year to make a cobra-knotted lanyard for my bike for just an emergency like this.

It would be with little effort to unthread the paracord and voila!, I'd have enough rope to safely tie that heavy package to my rear pannier rack.  As it turned out, she changed her mind and I was saved the experience of having to improvise a rope.  I was a little sorry that I didn't get to have the twenty five pounds of traction that that weight would have given me for my ride back to the north side of the river.





He's a Winner!

With today being December 1st, that means that NaNoWriMo is over.  NaNoWriMo?  WTH?  The acronym stands for National Novel Writing Month and the idea was to write 50,000 words in one month.  That is why loyal readers, there haven't been the insightful and humourous blogs in November that you have come to rely on for your internet entertainment.

 
 My skills at math - even very basic math are not what they could be.  My father always wanted my brother and I to be engineers but I knew from a very young age that vocation was not for me.  My brother on the other hand always pretended to have an interest in our father's profession and that's why he became a stage manager.

I woke up Friday morning and ran to the computer to tabulate the number of words I had written all month. There was a certain amount of pressure involved since my wife had uploaded her 50,000 word novel the night before. It was with confidence that I sat down at the laptop sure that the only thing I had to do that day was to transcribe a few thousand words and presto!  I'd be done.  After adding up the columns of numbers, I discovered that I only had written 43,000.  Three times I added and got the same result.  What's the definition of insanity?  Doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result!

 Fourteen hours later, a writing/transcribing session peppered with every excuse not to write ended.  I had to make more coffee.  Step outside to see if the city had plowed our street.  Had a nap. Make a pot of slow cooker soup.  Iron a shirt.  Have two showers to loosen up the neck muscles.  All told, I probably spent less than half of those 14 hours actually working.

When all the typed pages were uploaded to the NaNoWriMo site and run through their word counter, it was with dismay that I discovered that there were over 57,000 words written.  While I should have been elated at such productivity, I was too worn out to feel like celebrating.  Maybe I had so much difficulty writing all day because my subconscious was trying to tell me that I'd already completed what I had set out to do on November 1st.


Over did it a bit

The month of November was the most unusual month in that we found ourselves writing in places like Denny's or in a public library.  Most of the Saturday mornings would find us feverishly scribbling at a corner table for hours on end at a nearby Starbucks.  My favourite place to write was a an east end bookshop that we'd only recently discovered.  Being surrounded by books and having ample window light to write by made the experience an enjoyable one and not the agonizing marathon that was Friday, November 29th.

Na No Wri Mo (Huh?)

Na No Wri Mo stands for National Novel Writing Month and yours truly is attempting to write a 50,000 word novel during this month of November.

What this means is that Bikewriter'sblog will most likely not be updated this month with the funny and interesting stories about cycling that you have come to expect and enjoy.

I'll be back soon to entertain you and I thank you for your loyalty!!