My new old bike

This is my circa 2003 hardtail, rebuilt and ready to rock. I never rode this bike very often, favoring my singlespeed for all but the longest or most-technical rides. It last saw dirt on New Year's Eve, 2004, and I rode it one last time the following May during Bike to Work Week. Later that year, I stole the bottom bracket and crankarms from this bike to build a new singlespeed. I eventually picked up some replacement crankarms at a bike swap and mail-ordered a new BB, but I was never motivated to get the old gearie running again. It handled O.K., but never as well as well as either of my singles, and I just didn't really miss the ability to shift.

I've been kinda-sorta' looking for a new bicycle for the past month or so. One week I want a 5 by 5 trail bike, the next week it's a hardtail 29er. Or should I be a pioneer and get a bike with 650B wheels and alternative handlebars? While the searching has been fun, I've not yet felt like pulling the trigger on anything. Decent rides are damned expensive and more than once, I've bought bikes that eventually turned out to be wrong for me. There's also the possibility that I'll still want to ride my SS all of the time.

I decided that scratching the new bike itch could be accomplished pretty readily by getting the old hardtail rolling again. I cleaned the frame of over 4 years of accumulated dust, cobwebs, and woodrat urine - yes, that's what I said - and installed the replacement drivetrain parts. The suspension fork I had on it originally was painfully low end and lacked any sort of quick adjustability, so I upgraded to something nicer. I swapped out a few cockpit parts in hopes of curing the handling issues, bolted up some other bits that were floating around in the great component gyre in my workshop and voila, I'm back in the geared-bike business.

I'll probably ride it to work a day or two this week. Weather permitting, I may even take it through the regional park on the way home so I can dial my suspension settings. I would not be surprised if the tires, cable housings, brake pads, or other non-metallic parts spontaneously disintegrate from the years of exposure and disuse. If I hear any truly strange sounds, I'll pull the seatpost and release whatever critters may have taken up residence in the frame tubes as the BB shell sat open for all that time.

It's definitely a mongrel, component-wise, but I think I'm going to like riding it for the first time. Again.

Hey, June.

No sooner had I said that Tucson might miss out on the ole' June inferno than the thermometer got stuck at 101° three afternoons in a row earlier this week. Despite having a perfectly serviceable motorcycle on standby for just this eventuality, I went ahead and bike commuted right through it, and into the sultry pre-monsoonal days that followed. You see, I've once again pledged my unwavering loyalty to my commuting statistics.

I keep saying I won't do this, that I'll back off and chillax a bit. I vow to trade the pushbike for the motorbike during the week so I can pedal harder on the weekends. I never do. I've come to the conclusion that I more or less enjoy biking back and forth to work. The rides serve as an airlock of sorts; the morning trip helping me mentally prepare for another day trapped in an office and the ride home - a climby one at that - helping me decompress a bit. Any residual job stress gets worked out on the weight bench. I've also met BeanSS for lunch several times over the past few weeks, and that's been real nice, too.

I really need to get off of the bitching about the warmth and work. There's actually a certain soul-cleansing aspect to riding in the summer afternoon heat, and it helps acclimatize me for those times when I don't manage to hit the trail before dawn or my rides run long due to a puncture or mechanical. Besides, as happened today, riding a motorcycle leaves me drenched in sweat to almost the same extent as bicycling. Sure, there's no hammering away at the pedals and more speed is just a twist of the wrist away, but straddling a scalding hot engine, pipe, and radiators while wearing long pants, boots, an armored jacket, long gloves and a full-face helmet - all with the sun beating down - isn't exactly like sitting in a tub of ice water.

New topic.

My late-onset pinkeye is behind me but my most-recent teen malady was having experienced an inexplicable bout of acne last week. WTF? Again, I am 38 years old, and this is not what I envision when I think of having a second childhood. I also journeyed back to my college (and early married) years by drinking everything in the house last Friday. It served the purpose of getting rid of a sixer of a brew I didn't quite like anyway but on the other hand, I can't say I'm dying to immediately replenish the household beer supply. I'll make the briefest mention of the 2010 Arizona Singlespeed USA event - venue TBD - and hope I have my drinking legs back in time.

Another new topic.

I've had the Yeah Yeah Yeahs Show Your Bones album and their Is Is EP playing in another window as I've typed up this post. I'd run through the album at a listening station when it came out three years ago and nothing really grabbed me. I'd never even heard about the EP. I bought copies of both at Zia Records a few weeks ago and holy smokes, there are some great tracks in there. Considered with the older and newer parts of their catalog, it's enough to get the Yeah Yeah Yeahs into a permanent position on my Desert Island Ten Best Most Favorite Bands List. And as long as I'm on the subject, here's the list as it stands today, in no particular order, and with my ill-informed one-liners tacked on.

1. Midnight Oil (excluding their final two, after-the-shark-jump albums)
2. The Pixies (still hearing their influence everywhere, even now)
3. Pop Will Eat Itself (aka PWEI, RIP in either case)
4. Sheep on Drugs (effed-up apocalyptic dance music)
5. Adorable (out-of-print but there's a recent greatest hits comp)
6. Interpol (liking them more with each album)
7. Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Karen OMFG)

Numbers 8 through 10 remain in constant flux. Catherine Wheel and U2 are strong candidates for numbers 8 and 9. New Order, the Stone Roses, Curve, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Kings of Leon rotate in and out of the 10-slot depending on my listening preferences at the moment. Strangely, while U2 and the Chili Peppers have expansive catalogs and are still recording, the Stone Roses made the list on the strength of a single epic album (the early, self-titled full-length effort, not their absolutely unlistenable Second Coming). I'd like to have a ska or reggae outfit in there but my tastes range too widely to pick a single artist. There's no punk rock in there and that's not right, either - maybe the Hives or PIL. A new band could show up tomorrow and change everything.

Well, as much as I'd like to blog about bikes, beer, and Music I Like, BeanSS is back from work. Having brought home the bacon, she now wants to trade it for some Mexican food.

Later Schraeder.

Weather. Or not.

I cannot believe what great weather we've had this month. June is usually when it starts getting pinned at 100° or more. It may get into triple digits yet, but for several weeks now, Tucson really hasn't gone much past the mid-90s. Better yet, the early mornings have been in the mid-60s - cool nights usually end in June, too. With the Mexican Monsoon projected to arrive early and with plenty of rain, the Old Pueblo may be able to avoid the century mark for an appreciable part of the early summer.

All this nice weather has somewhat tempered the onset of cabin fever (desert dwellers get it in summer, not winter) and as a result, I've still not made it out of town for anything adventurous. Nevertheless, I still feel a pretty strong desire to get out of here eventually, and the fact that BeanSS and I are finally in a position to get a second car will help with that. And oh, but I do need the help.

A while back, I vowed to focus more on having fun in life. Later, I blogged about how I needed to dwell less on my frustrations with my job. It's been just over two years since that first post and I feel like I've largely failed on both accounts. So once again, I am stating for the record that I will restore my work-life balance, I will get the fuck out my job rut, and I will search continually for joyful distractions from it all. Oh, and here's a new one: I will endeavor to stop complaining about having a job that is conveniently close to home and with full benefits while much of the Nation's economy is in a shambles. The list of unflattering terms that describe me (i.e. curmudgeon, biocrat, singlespeeder, etc.) is already long enough with adding ingrate to it.