Photographic Evidence the Blogger has Ridden a Bike in the Past Ten Years

This was taken at the local Bike Club Century last month but there is nothing in it that would indicate it wasn't ten years ago. Not the bike, the clothes or the goofy expression.

That guy could sure use to lay off the whoopie pies and boy could he use a new bike.

Both of which he is working on. Stay tuned.

Six Years Ago

Six years and a month ago M was big. Very big. She was bulbous, spherical, taut with the twins crammed inside her and she had lost that pregnant ‘glow’; it had been replaced by an ever-present film of perspiration since every movement, every action took so much effort. She was big and pink and shiny and she was at the point where she grunted, pursed her lips and sighed a lot, but never a deep sigh because she had no way to take a deep breath with all those babies filling her diaphragm.

Then one rainy day, six years and a couple of weeks ago, she got that blank look on her face, that inward stare that meant she was joining thousands of years of women in that sacred primal birth space. And I saw that look and knew it was time for me to start pacing, boiling water and chain-smoking, even though I didn’t smoke. It was also time to call her parents to come up and stay with Older Boy who was exactly 20 months and one day old.

This is what Older Boy looked like around then.

M seems to be glaring in all the pictures she is in and none of them are electronic but here is a picture of what her parents car looked like at that time.Once M’s parents arrived things had gotten far enough along that the doula thought we should head over to the hospital. When we got there they took M away through some doors and I paced and chain-smoked and then we took the babies home.

OK, not really.

We settled into one of the birthing rooms that had soft lighting and lots of wood and a window that looked out over the parking deck. I unpacked the music that we never listened to and the snacks that we never ate. And then, for the next 24 hours or so M worked and worked and grunted and squatted and breathed and did everything possible, while I held her hand and mouthed “what is going on??” and “what do I do now?” to the doula.

At some point, I’m not sure when, things got surreal and numbers began to change and monitors began to beep and brows began to furrow and the Doctor bustled in and everyone began to murmur and it was agreed that these kids were not coming out without a struggle and M didn’t have the struggle left in her, so they moved us to the surgical area and everybody scrubbed and gowned and got ready.

When we moved from the birthing room to the operating theatre it reminded me of when we were in New York City with some friends. We had finished a wonderful dinner and probably a little too much wine and we were tired out but we set out on an adventure another friend had told us about. We went to the Essex House hotel on Central Park, took the elevator as far as it went, 40 floors or so, then found the stairs and went as far as they went, to a big thrumming mechanical room, and then found a door that put us out onto the lower roof of the building and we walked around the roof, following the outside wall of the mechanical room until we found a rusty iron ladder which took us all the way up to the very top of the hotel, right under the giant “Essex House” sign.

It may have been 11 at night and there were huge floodlights focused on the sign and everything up there was bright and buzzing. But the view was breathtaking. Like this, but try to imagine it at night:

But it was absolutely terrifying and I had no idea how we would ever get back to our regular lives again and what if something went wrong, what would we do? How did we get there? I mean, I know what sequence of events transpired to get us right there right then but really, how did we get there?

The operating room was also bright and buzzing and was crammed with people: me, M, the doula, the anesthesiologist, and because M was carrying twins they had two of everyone else: two Doctors, two surgical nurses, two newborn nurses and two other nurses whose jobs appeared to be to root around in the back of everyone elses gowns and check all the buzzing pagers, let the pager wearer know what it said and then call from the OR to say “the Dr. is a little tied up at the moment but she advises you to go to the hospital and she’ll see you sometime after you get here.”

And then they were there, alive and out.

It was the next morning before everyone was where they were supposed to be in the hospital and I finally called home to tell M’s parents the great news. After the congratulations and inquiries as to statistics and health, we all agreed that it would make sense for M’s parents to take Older Boy home with them for a few days until we were home with the twins. At that point, M’s dad ventured, quietly, “well, there is one thing…”

“Somebody stole our car from in front of your house last night.”

So the twins birthday will always be paired, in family lore, with the night Grandma and Grandpa’s car got stolen from in front of our old house.

The car was found, eventually, and M’s parents drove for a long time after that before trading it in on something newer. And the twins, well, we won’t be trading them in any time soon.
Happy 6th, you two. It is so nice to have you here in our family.

More Ways to Tell You are Visiting a Plumber

A water fountain,

a work sink,

a bathroom that is nicer than any in our house, and

all of these are in the garage.

The following smiles are brought to you by Back to School

Nobody does family like M's family does family

One of the events on our summer calendar was a reunion of M’s mom’s side of the family, held in the Tidy Farm Town where M’s mom’s family is from and where M spent some of her formative years, into her moody adolescence. They don’t have these reunions often - the last one was when M was pregnant with the twins, who will turn 6 this fall. And considering the amount of work that goes into them it is amazing they have them at all. But they do the work: months of emailing until every meal is accounted for, figuring out who will bring what, put the food out and clean up. Activities are planned and tents are rented. Fields are mowed, tires inflated, wood chopped, balloons are hung. And then all sixty-something of us arrive. Although there are a lot of activities there is also ample time and space to sit and talk, catch up on lives, gawk at kids growth and ponder the aging of the aunts, uncles and ourselves. The age range this time was two to 101.

Now don’t misunderstand – I love my family and cherish the opportunity to get together with them, which happens much less often than M’s family does. We’ve never had a reunion with cousins and aunts and uncles. But M’s family is different. Consider the first time I met M’s family:

M decided to introduce me to her family at the weekend of celebrations for her dad’s retirement. He had been a pastor at the same church for 15 years or so and his retirement was a pretty big deal. Four of M’s five siblings came, with spouses and kids. The church had special services and a giant potluck. Someone loaned M’s family a large house where we could share meals and play ping-pong.

I am not the church-going type, or to put it another way, I’m Jewish. So when I found myself dressed up and sitting in a pew with all of M’s family except her dad, who was of course up front, I thought it was kind of novel. My extremely limited church experience had never included a Mennonite service so it was interesting to see the lack of ornamentation in the church. It was amazing when they sang and the entire congregation sang in strong four part harmony. And then the special presentations for M’s dad began, with skits and rememberances and it was all very new and quite moving. And then I looked down the pew at M’s family. And they were all sobbing. Every last one of them including the in-laws. A tissue box kept going from lap to lap, up and down the row.

I had known M about four months at that point, which means we were two months from engagement and nine from marriage. And this kind of open display of emotion was not something my family ever engaged in. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I did nothing but sit there and keep listening, figuring this would be over soon and all the sobbing would end.

After the service and lunch we gathered at the ping-pong house and the whole family sat down and one by one talked about what they were doing these days and how that was and what they were feeling and, sure enough, everybody was gushing all over again. This level of unabashed emotion was absolutely not something I had ever experienced in my own family and as I sat there with my future in-laws I was elated and terrified. I’m still not completely used to this aspect of being with them.

And of course, there was no beer. So as noted above, very different from my family.

So there we were heading off to see M’s extended family. Things started well, leaving the house only about a half hour later than we planned. The mountains start about twenty minutes from our driveway, which is where M’s lead-foot began to fight with her thriftiness and the thriftiness won, aided by the $4 a gallon gas. This meant that M (who does most of the driving on our trips) drove uncharacteristically slowly through the mountains. This also meant the risk of carsickness was dramatically reduced, and we made it through the mountains with some groaning and complaining (from both car and children) but no puking or blown hoses.

At our first stop to let the kids out and pee, I also got a cup of coffee at a fast-food joint. Walking back to the van I was about to ask M if she had brought much cash when she asked me, slightly panicked, if I’d seen her purse:
“Yes,” I said, “in the hat and glove boxes by the front door before we left.”
“Did you put it in the car?” she asked.
“Um, should I have?”
“Well, did YOU bring any money or a cell phone?”
At that moment I realized I had just spent 33% of the cash we had with us on a small cup of weak coffee.
“Don’t worry, I brought the checkbook” which I fished out of my backpack to find it had - one – check left in it. We also had one credit card with us so we weren’t really any worse off than our parents were in all the family trips we’d ever been on when we were kids. But since we are way too cheap to actually get a cash advance from our credit card we opted to sponge off family whenever we needed cash. Which in these modern times is seldom.

We got there eventually. The first night M’s family stayed at a motel together which gave us an opportunity to – yes – sit around and share again, as a big group. The kids also got to swim in the pool. The next morning we moved to M’s Uncle C and Aunt G’s house. Uncle C is a retired plumber. When they first retired they did what a lot of formerly hard-working retirees do, which is they bought a giant motor-home and drove it around with a car flopping along behind it. But they got tired of this pretty quickly and decided that retirement was for the birds so they went to their church and asked for something to do and were promptly sent to a small village in Guatemala to build schools and dorms and they’ve been doing that, eight or ten months a year, for years now. I look forward to retirement to putter and ride my bike but I guess they aren’t putterers.

That weekend in the Tidy Farm Town the Amish and Old-Order Mennonites were having a big flea market and sale for charity so we got to see a lot of those folks walking around and enjoying the weather and company. They don't like to have their pictures taken but their horses don't seem to mind.

Nor do their buggies.

Back at Uncle C and Aunt G's place;

Camp is being set up (no that's not our Westy, but it is our tent in the foreground and some of our clothes on the line), and;

Catch is being played, and;

Uncle C has started cooking on his elevated fire, which is something he learned in Guatemala. Under the fire, in the box, is wet dirt. This way he can cook over an open fire without having to bend over. Some of us were sure this contraption would burn to the ground before the weekend was over.

It was working fine when we left.

Of course, there were two more fires. The firepit is in the back, for recreational purposes, and the steaming cauldron in the front for hot water. And if you are wondering what we did with the water from the steaming cauldron, we mixed it with the cold running water from the sink mounted on a fence.

Have I mentioned Uncle C is a retired plumber?

This is where the recalcitrant blogger apologizes...

... but does not promise this won't happen again. He shamelessly throws in some cute pictures of his kids having fun......on one of the many trips and adventures (some of which he even remembered to bring the camera to) they have had this summer. I am sorry. I will try to do better.

But now I have to go back to sleep.

Why We Live Here - #3

Strawberries.

And not just that they grow around here but that they grow 21 steps from our front door.

And not just that they grow 21 steps from our door but that M's mom planted them.

And not just that M's mom planted them but she comes over and picks and prepares them (M helps too) so we can eat them at all hours and in all forms.

Oh and don't forget the peas, too. Mmmm.

Weekend Wrap-up

Weekends around here are always a bit chaotic. But it’s a familiar chaos that we’ve grown to, if not love, at least appreciate. But this past weekend was more. Chaotic. Than usual.

First, I thought I’d check out the surplus sale that one of our local universities has every year. I figured I’d get there 15 or so minutes early to be ahead of the crowd, which actually put me about halfway in the eventual ½ mile line waiting to get in. I was hoping to pick up some bikes cheap but by the time I found the bikes someone had already swooped in and picked up everything interesting. Oh well, I only had about 20 minutes there anyways because then it was on to….

Soccer Fest. We survived it. Barely. Older Boy had 3 games, each about 25 minutes long, at 8:30, 11:00 and 11:30. I brought all the kids with me so for most of the time they sweated, got sunburned, whined and waited in lines to get in or on the huge inflatable slides and bouncy rooms that were set up in strategic places around the edges of the soccer fields. I also lost the Girl, too, when she, apparently, got out of one of the bouncy rooms about 5 feet from where I was standing (and had been for hours) and inexplicably wandered off in the wrong direction. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, which was probably part of the problem. I didn’t see her wander off, of course; it probably happened when I was trying to find the boys who were off either waiting in line for or in other bouncy rooms. So I’m craning my neck to see which of the zillions of kids in their gaudy polyester soccer jerseys is mine, and by the way, what color t-shirt did Younger Boy have on and where is that Girl? By the time I concluded that the Girl was really lost the boys were both in their bouncy rooms so I couldn’t set off to find her until they emerged. They weren’t impressed with me or the situation.
“Boys, your sister is lost and we’ve got to look for her.”
Older Boy – “Is it time for my next game?”
“No, its time for us to try to find your sister.”
OB – “I don’t want to go look for her.”
Younger Boy – “Yeah, the lines are really short here, you go look Daddy.”
“No, we are ALL going to stay together and shout your sister’s name until we find her or we collapse from heat exhaustion.”
OB – “It’s not FAIR! We didn’t lose her, you did!”
YB – “Can I have a hotdog?”
We found her, eventually. She saw us from a distance, squinted, came back towards us until she was about 10 feet from us and then, of course, burst into tears. When she finally calmed down enough to sob out some words she asked,
“Daddy, why did you get lost? I was trying to find you!”
Then we ate hotdogs and later….

I went to the mega home center to get a new screen door to replace the one the kids tore off the hinges by going in and out, singly, NEVER together, one billion times. Taking it out of the van and wrestling into the garage I noticed that the bad smell in the garage that I’d been denying for some time could no longer be denied….

So I traced it back to one corner and concluded it must be coming from the old sewing machine I got at a thrift store last year that had never smelled before. I opened it up and it sure smelled bad but maybe it wasn’t the machine itself but one of the garbage bags of clothes underneath and around it that I was supposed to have put up in the loft, um, ages ago. Yep, one of those bags was pretty smelly. As I gingerly pushed aside some clothes in the bag I saw fur, so I screamed and ran to find M of course.
“M, I think I found the source of the smell in the garage. There’s FUR in one of the bags of clothes”
“Fur?”
“Yeah, like some animal crawled in there and died or something. Come and take a look.”
“What kind of animal? What did you do with it?”
“A DEAD animal and I didn’t do anything with it. I don’t want to touch it.”
“ “
“ “
“Well at least drag the bag out of the garage so it doesn’t stink it up anymore. Which bag was it?”
“I think it said Girl 6-7.”
“Aw man, those were GOOD hand-me-downs.”
So I dragged it out to the driveway and left it because it was getting late and I’d already spent too much time obsessing over ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ that day.

The next morning when M went out to get the paper she confirmed that there was something dead in there alright and now there were flies. And she was preaching in a couple of hours so what were we going to do with it? The kids weren’t up and we hadn’t had coffee yet so we figured, what the heck, lets get this over with. We went outside in our pajamas and I dug a hole and then dumped the bag of clothes into a pile on the ground. I gingerly pulled clothes off the pile until M reported seeing the fur.
“So what do I do now?”
“BURY IT!”
Some people set aside special clothes to be buried in but this little possum was buried with girls size 7 pants and two shirts. R.I.P. stinky little fellow. And speaking of stinky little fellows….

Younger Boy has finally shed his training wheels and can ride a two wheeler. In the rain. With no shirt on.

Happy Airplane Day

On the Wednesday before Memorial Day 2001 we got a call from the agency we were working with to adopt a baby from Korea. We had done all the paperwork, background checks, inspections and notarizing and were expecting our boy to travel in July or August. They called to tell us he had passed his physical and was cleared to travel earlier then expected. This was great news! When might he arrive? Saturday. Umm, like in 3 days? We were not quite prepared, emotionally or otherwise. But we got the room painted, the crib assembled, house cleaned and got a friend to drive us to and from Dulles airport for the delivery. On Saturday morning, 7 years ago today we got our ride to the airport where 20 or so friends and family met us, along with another expectant family, someone from the adoption agency, all the other people who had reason to meet the Korean Air flight from Seoul and the other 10,000 people who are flowing in and out of Dulles at any moment. We waited, dazed, tired, excited for the arrival to be called and then the first people to come through the doors. When he left Korea the day before he was 4 months old to the day. The family that brought him over were some of the last people to come through immigration and customs that morning. But there, amid the “white zone is for loading and unloading…” and “unattended baggage will be confiscated and subject to…” announcements and all the rest of the airport hubbub we became parents. And this guy became our son. Happy airplane day 2008.

(Note cashmere romper. That is about as sensible a baby gift as a Porsche or a crackpipe. He wore it twice, for a total of 180 minutes. Thanks Heather!)

Yell and Spell

Hollered between the living room and the kitchen:

"What does a-u-r-r-y mean?"
"Aurry?"
"No! H-u-r-r-y"
"Oh, hurry, like what we always say to you when we're trying to go somewhere."
"What does L-a-u-r-a mean?"
"Laura, like Nesha's mommy."
"What does c-a-u-g-h-t mean?"
"Caught."
"No! C-a-u-G-h-t!"
"Right, caught, like 'I caught your cold'."
"Well that doesn't make much sense."
Welcome to the English language, sweetheart.

Cheap, Lazy & Neurotic - Part 2

I hadn't planned on going to the Live Wax Museum because this was Good Friday and for some reason I had the day off but the kids had school, so I was supposed to, you know, tile the bathroom floor that day. But I was feeling pretty darn great because I'd a)dismantled one of the most important rooms in our house and b)returned from an errand on time so I figured I could give myself an hour off to see what this Live Wax Museum was all about. Although the last time I was in a wax museum was on our family trip to California when I was 6 and it gave me the serious heeby jeebies I figured a bunch of 1st graders wouldn't be too scary.

Turns out, every kid in Older Boy's class was a different historical figure like Ben Franklin or Sacagewea or the Statue of Liberty (historical figurine?) and they had all painted backdrops that had a big white button glued to them. Here is OB, guess if you can tell who he is portraying:

OK I gave you a little hint. His backdrop is war, I think. Unfortunately his button was 'broken' so when a museum visitor pressed it George just stood there. After a few more concerted pressings George would cheerfully volunteer to kick the wall as the button was out of order and then he would swing into action:

which went something like this:

[Note: you may need to turn the internet to 11 to hear this but there is something loud at the very end - beware!] The kids all did their spiels in the lunchroom with all the other 1st grade classes and the kindergartners roaming around pressing all the buttons so there was no way to hear what any of the wax museum figures were actually saying.

This seemed like a worthwhile outing and soon we were on our way home and I was planning the next step of the project. I figured I had another hour or so to work since M always took the boys with her when she took the Girl to her dance class. I was rather surprised when, after everyone had snacked up, she and the Girl got in the car and left - by themselves. Seems the boys only went with M because, on all the other Fridays, I was at work and since Daddy was clearly NOT at work today and in fact was messing around doing really cool things ["no you may NOT use the toilet that is sitting in the bathtub. Get out! GET OUT!"] there was no way they were going to boring old dance class.

No problem, I think, we'll all go to the hardware store to get the nails I forgot on my earlier trip to the lumber yard. The boys weren't going for that, either, and now I was seeing my confidence head on down to the poolhall with my wallet in its pocket. Did I mention that its Good Friday and M, being a pastor, has to go to work at 6:00 tonight? Do you hear that bang and the tinkling of broken glass? That was my window of opportunity slamming shut.

Why We Live Here - Second Reason

When I come back from a work errand and forget to bring my bike into my office and it sits outside, in plain view, leaning against the front of our building on one of the busiest streets in town for hours and does not get stolen. It helps to have a really really ugly bike.

Miracle

"You put a picture of one of your kids sleeping on the internet? That just seems wrong somehow, dude."

" "

"So you go into your kid's room in the middle of the night, turn on all the lights and throw off his covers???"

"So I go into his room late in the evening to cram his clean laundry back into his dresser and I turn around and there, in the glow of the nightlight, he is, in exactly that position."

"So you're all like 'dude, I've gotta get my camera'?"

"I'm standing there thinking: 'this beautiful boy came thousands of miles, over mountains of paperwork, through two hulking bureaucracies to a place he didn't know or choose, and instantly changed us from a couple to a family. He has no clue what he has done for us, and I owe him a debt I can only try, and fail, to repay every single day until I die."

" "

"And then I'm all like 'dude, I've gotta get my camera!'"

Cheap, Lazy and Neurotic – Part 1

The people we bought our house from raised three daughters in it. That they had no boys is the only explanation I can imagine for the wall-to-wall in the bathrooms not being worse than it was. But then we moved in with three kids, two of them boys. As long as the little pishers were in diapers we figured we were ok, but as soon as the boys started to be like daddy and stand up to pee we knew the carpet had to go. So, being cheap, I decided I would do it myself, and by the way, why don’t we get rid of the carpet in the hall that all the creatures under 4 feet tall in the house had puked on. And the steps, too, that carpet had to go. So we went out and bought materials – lots and lots of bamboo flooring that sort of matched the kitchen and dining room floors that we paid someone (the horror!) to install before we moved in. We also ordered tile for the bathroom. That was last fall.

So now I had a concept and materials and a worried wife because M has been here before and is trying to gently tread the dental floss thin line between gentle encouragement and desperate pleading. How long does the bamboo have to take up half the family room floor ‘acclimating’ to our house’s temperature and humidity?

Months.

I have a process for figuring out how to do these home repair projects that I know nothing about. First I obsess for a while and allow the fact that I don’t know what I’m doing to create incredible disaster fantasies. Could I put a nail through the water main when laying floor in the upstairs hall? Not only could I but I most likely will! Once I’ve gotten past that and what little confidence I had is on its way to the liquor store I then start talking to people who know less than I do (hi guys from work!) Next I talk to the Old Guy Carpenters who do know what they’re doing and talk to me like I do too so I only understand about half of what they’re saying. They load me up with tools that I am either afraid of or don’t know how to use. Then I get serious and go talk to the guys at the hardware store. They convince me that any idiot could do what I’m trying to do, and somehow I believe it. Finally, I read the two paragraphs that have anything to do with my project in my Time-Life Book of How to Fix Anything in Any Home with Introduction by Bob Vila. A few ten more cups of coffee and I’m ready.

I’m feeling pretty confident about getting the bamboo down in the hall and on the steps before our Thanksgiving guests arrive so I get started the first week of December. M continues to walk her very fine line as she contemplates her entire family arriving for Christmas. She knows if she kills me I’ll REALLY never finish the project.

My Old Guy Carpenter friend Cliff is amazingly helpful and patient and thanks to him I get all the important pieces of the wood floors down prior to guest arrivals but the vinyl tiles for the bathroom continue to ‘acclimate’ in the garage, on the kitchen peninsula, in the laundry room, wherever. And the kids bathroom isn’t smelling any better, let me assure you.

As always with these projects, I radically underestimate the amount of time and trouble. I boldly swear to M that I WILL get this done by, oh, lets say the end of March, definitely. So here’s the way things look on Friday morning March 21:

Yup, lots of carpet still there.

But wait, things are beginning to happen. Later that morning the toilet magically jumps into the bathtub! Thank whatever entity you choose to thank that you aren’t getting on your hands and knees in the small space back there where the toilet used to be and where gallons of pee have marinated the carpet, pad and underlayment. The underlayment, by the way, is about the consistency of shredded wheat and will need to be replaced. I sort of anticipated that might be the case but only in a vague, theoretical way, not in an “I have a clue what to do next” kind of way. Luckily the combination of the rotten wood and the fact that our house was so cheaply constructed means that there are only nine nails holding the underlayment down in that side of the bathroom, so, using my handy cordless Sawzall knock-off (overgrown electric steak knife) and a crowbar it comes up without a problem. I love demolition!

Now I find that I have 40 minutes to go to another Old Guy Carpenter’s house to get an essential and scary tool AND go to the lumberyard to get the new wood for the underlayment, before M needs the van to go to school to pick up the kids. Oh, and Older Boy is George Washington in the first grade’s live wax museum this afternoon too.

I tear out of the driveway concentrating on – what the heck is a live wax museum?

Somehow I get the tool and the wood and get back in time. I’m feeling pretty good right about now.

“So,” M asks, “want to go see the live wax museum?”

Heed the Sign!

Having 3 healthy growing children who eat a lot of roughage sharing a bathroom can be very hard on the plumbing. Thoughtfully, Older Boy prepared this sign and taped it to the bathroom door, during one period of plumbing distress:

Note detail:

Sheldon Brown Sprints to the Finish

Sheldon Brown died a few weeks back, of a heart attack. He was 63.

I never met Sheldon. I’m sure I passed him in the aisles of Interbike, I read a number of articles he wrote and spent some quality time poking through the LARGE amount of web-content he created, and I had a very brief email exchange with him last year in which I asked him if he knew where I might find a no-longer-manufactured part that is essential to the function of our tandem or if he thought an audacious Frankensteinian modification that would eliminate the need for that part would be possible. In his friendly way, his answers were no, and no. When Sheldon Brown said something bike related wouldn’t work, it wasn’t worth putting any more time into it.

He was married to Harriet Fell, a mathematician and computer scientist and their two grown kids are both working on doctorates in mathematics. Sheldon was born, lived and died in Massachusetts. He was a webmaster for a bike shop and had been since before most bike shops had computers. He was also a camera repairman, music lover, Savoyard, and was interested in Star Trek, bad poetry and hats. He spoke French and listened to the radio a lot.

Here is one of the more interesting bikes I’ve ever seen. Sheldon had the rare ability to both conceive of and execute wacky ideas that actually worked.

He was, right up to his end, an eternal optimist. Over the last few years he had begun to experience nerve deterioration in his legs which was eventually diagnosed as a form of multiple sclerosis. He created another page on his website titled The Bright Side of MS.

As I said, I did not know him. But he and other unique, brilliant characters that seem to pop up in the bicycle world from time to time are a very large part of why I love the bicycle world so much.

Sheldon, you are missed. I’m sorry you didn’t get to stay around longer.

http://sheldonbrown.com/home.html

Why We Live Here – First Reason

We used to live in a big bad city (of which I will later write,) and we loved it, much of the time. But it was a place where we had to keep a certain level of awareness, of caution, about us all the time, more so after dark. It was not a place to ride a bike at night while stargazing.

When we first moved here and I started to ride my bike to work and errands and for general transportation again I realized how much I missed the sensation of riding so casually and regularly. It’s a different feeling, for me, to jump on a bike in street clothes and zip downtown than it is to kit up, pump tires, fill bottles and head out for a ride.

A few nights ago I got out of a meeting around 9:30. It was 20 or so degrees and one of the other meet-ers pointed out the lunar eclipse that was in full swing. As I pedaled towards home under the cold sky with lots of stars I was able to stare at the eclipse while occasionally glancing forward to correct my heading and also to watch tiny comets of snow passing through my headlight beam. I saw few moving cars. Mostly I passed quiet houses with the shifting blue light of the TVs leaking out around the edges of their curtains. I got home, hung the bike in the garage and warmed up by the woodstove.

All those years living in the city I hardly realized I missed evenings like that. But now that I have them again I can feel how good they are for my heart and soul.

What do we do with our new bamboo???

Bowling!

The twins enjoy the new floor.

The Predator Among Us

I finally caught pneumonia finished Older Boy’s birthday bike. He got it Friday before school and he and I both were quite pleased with it.
But as I was freezing my ass off finishing it in the garage on Thursday night I actually looked at it and saw what the model name is: the Recoil.
Now what were the good folks who designed this bike FOR 7 AND 8 YEAR OLDS thinking when they decided on that name? Maybe motion or movement? OK, not so bad. Resiliency? Carom, richochet? Those last two are perfectly appropriate considering the skill and self-preservation levels of the rider. Here are my favorites: cringe, flinch, funk, quail, wince, shrink, squinch. The Diamond Back Flinch or Wince. What kid wouldn’t want one?

So I took a look around the garage and found that model names fall into some general categories:
- There are the unabashed, arrogant, superiority complex bikes, like the Paragon, Paramount and yes, even the Superior that Schwinn made for a while.
- There is a nice selection of bikes named after places, preferably exotic: Poprad (starting point of the Tatra Electric Railway in Northern Slovakia [HUH?]), Tassajara, Zurich, Moab and Malibu.
- And the aforementioned vaguely phallic and creepy Recoil, Predator (another fine Schwinn offering), Blast Off (wait a minute, how did I end up with two of these?), Speed Blaster and I think I’ll include in this category the Bushbike. All of these except the last one are bikes for little boys. The last is for bigger boys.
- Residing in the There’ll-always-be-an-England category are the Sprite and the Twenty. If that was an Amurican bike it would be the 20. The Sprite started out as a 3-speed and was called the Sprite 3, which makes sense. I’ve got the 5-speed version called the Sprite 5 (and, hmmm, I seem to have two of them) and then came the Sprite 10 which I’m sure you can figure out. But when the Sprite 27 arrived it certainly did not have 27 speeds. Way to keep things consistent!
- Weather! The Mistral and Twister, and Schwinn used to make a Typhoon but I don’t have one.
- Those earnest Japanese gave us the Express and, in addition to the aforementioned Malibu (sub-titled Star Struck), the bikes-for-girls category includes the Amethyst, Shimmer, Tiara and, of course, Barbie.
- Last are the names that don’t mean anything, at least in the context of bikes: Outlook, Double Track, Pro Cruiser, Suburban (oh man I’ve got two of these too! If bikes are going to reproduce in my garage I wish it would be the better bikes. Mate the Poprad and the Zurich and call it, maybe Vienna?) and my personal favorite name of all, the Rad Cat.

Frozen Ungents

I worked on Older Boy's birthday bike this weekend but ran into some problems. The biggest problem was that it was about 16 degrees all day, according to the thermometer outside our dining room doors. This means that in my obsessively cluttered spacious but unheated workshop it was 16 degrees. The car came and went once and it must have generated some heat in there so, say, 18 degrees. At that temperature all my oils and polishes and ungents and salves were not themselves, nor were my fingers. I worked as long as I could in this pattern:
-work on bike
-look for part or tool I dropped
-tell kids “no, I’m really busy and can’t help you with_____ right now (rotate ‘snow fort’, ‘digging in yard’, ‘breaking new raingauge’, ‘trying to regain feeling in extremities’ in space provided)
-work on bike
-look for part or tool I dropped
-bleed
-go inside for coffee
repeat until coffee is gone.

Older Boy's birthday is just around the corner...

and chances are it will ride on the lawn, cut through the flower bed, and run over the rain guage for the second third time when it gets here. Time to transform this thrift store rust into something cool and rideable.


This is B1's birthday bike. He doesn't know that yet.


Yes, some bikes sleep upside down like bats.






Others hang like sides of beef,

and some perch in the rafters like birds.





And then there is the heap of bikes on the floor that grumble "You picked us off the curb or out of the thrift store for this?" or so they might if they were not inanimate objects which I must keep reminding myself.

Hi! This is me. Or, to be more precise, this was me in the fall of 1981. I chose this as the first post to illustrate that bicycles are a big deal to me and have been for a long time. I still have that bike and ride it to and from work almost every day. Thankfully I no longer have the tube- socks or hairstyle.

This picture is also important as it reflects the level of quality I am aiming for in this blog. I used all my high-tech equipment to scan this image. Which means I took a picture of it with a digital camera and uploaded it to my computer. If this doesn't work for you I completely understand. Now scram.