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.