Twenty Ten

Gone are the aughts, and the new year is as yet unremarkable. I made no real resolutions other than to continue with the house cleaning so as to get to the point where we own our stuff rather than having the stuff own us. But on to more important matters, such as those that involve bicycles.

I rode home from work one afternoon last week to find that BeanSS had filled the kitchen, living room, and foyer with her bicycles. Geared/rigid mountain, geared full-suss mountain, hardtail singlespeed, and road bikes - all indoors, just as they were during our past lives as apartment dwellers. She'd already cleaned them up but a few needed a bit of a tune-up thrown on them.

The Rapidfire shifters on one bike had inexplicably crapped out, a mechanical snafu that reminded me of why I always end up back on a singlespeed. I opened the pods up and noted that no tiny springs, sheared-off little gear teeth or cable wire fragments fell out. Not broken. It turned out they just needed a few drops of oil on a couple of the two-dozen moving parts. Maybe gears aren't such a pain after all.

BeanSS's VooDoo Nzumbi, the most hella cool* pearl-white steel singlespeed there has ever been, got parked a while back when its old Marzocchi Z2 Bam fork started weeping from a bad seal. Nevermind that my own late-model Magura Odur fork weeps about as much oil as the failed 'Zoke does on purpose. Anyway, the Marzocchi is at the shop now getting overhauled with a fresh set of Enduro seals and more-viscous-than-stock 7.5wt fork oil. I have to appreciate that a 10+ year-old suspension fork can still be maintained with readily-available parts. And yes, I'm paying someone to do this not because I can't (well, maybe a little because I can't) but because I have no place clean enough to do it. If I opened that fork up in my workshop right now, there's a very good chance it would get reassembled with a teaspoon full of sand, a Presta valve cap, a ball bearing, a rusty water bottle cage bolt and few dozen woodrat shits, if not the rats themselves, inside it.

With the bikes coming on line steadily, BeanSS has gone for a few solo rides and a few more husband-and-wife excursions are on tap. This is going to be a good year.

And as usual, my down time has been occupied with birding in the front yard. There's been a flock of western bluebirds hanging around for a few weeks. It's a treat to see these mid-elevation woodland birds down here in the desert but it also means drought conditions have left insufficient food in their usual habitat. They're here because they're starving. Also, they're competing with the resident phainopeplas and northern mockingbirds for mistletoe berries. That's life in the wild, I suppose.

Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a full pot of coffee calling my name.

* Use of the NorCal term "hella cool" is authorized by the fact that the bicycle in question was acquired and initially ridden in Sacramento, California.