an endorphin day

Four of us for the saunter. I took the Xtra ’cause I just don’t know the “Gazellephant” (Richard McCLary’s term, and accurate considering her heft and color).

Borderline brutal winds, but we took the bike path out of town on Windsor which was somewhat sheltered. Turned North on Rising Road and then went one more brutal mile before turning back and sailing on home.

Just enough effort to feel CHARGED.

Meijer’s is coming to the corner of Windsor and PHilo. Could be a golden opportunity for low-hanging fruit. More to come.

Fend For Yourself: How to build fenders out of old campaign signs (kindly wait ’til after the election).

Rode in the rain, damp and thrilling; in the right clothes, not too chilling!
Not a childlike, abandoned exuberance; a mature, mellow joy of harmonious engineering and highly pleasant sloppiness kept in its place. I didn’t have anything to wring out, though things are damp around the edges. Putting them near the computer should boost our humidity and dry ‘em out

Breathtaking Gazelle
Delicious engineering
elegant smooth ride

integrated love
deepest joy in pedalling
no need to attach

just to enjoy

(That’s for all those blogs I found the other day with poems about their bicycles!)

I’m accustomed to seeing the debris from fender-crundhers in the intersections, but I have to say this is the first time I”ve seen a bicycle chain. I do hope it wasn’t accident debris.

Bigsmallall gathering today at the assembly hall. Last time I was there was singing with Kenny Rogers – when one of our group fell off the stage … and has, amazingly, fully recovered (4 cracked vertebrate, 78 years old… some people are truly unstoppable!!). Much less eventful day Lots of discussion of goals and objectives. Next step is trying to encourage implementation… welp, we’ll see. Our facilitator at our table was great (very down-to-earth and receptive to what we were saying) and left knowing that it’s bike routes, not paths

Leaving to get my gazelle within the hour… might ride it tomorrow, since it will be all kinds of rainy. Pictures will come…

Weather channel has a lovely autumn scene of a cyclist cruising down a path full of leaves.

I drove Sunday to the concert, because Cindy needed a ride. It’s been a week and a half, after all.

It’s chilly today but there were at least a dozen cycles on the way here. Guess they found their gear!! Keep on commuting!

Tomorrow is bigsmallall so I’m taking the day off. I’m also picking up the gazelle – more car miles

Link of the day: http://www.msdewey.com – I’m not sure how far this “sultry librarian” search engine goes into the PG-13 range but it *is* a real search engine. It’s just got a librarian who has a fairly deep repertoire of comebacks. At one point she said “you give good search” and took out a riding crop… and there are responses to specific search terms, such as those that include “music” or “shop.” Enjoy! (Or not… but you’ve been warned!)

In for a tube, out with a gazelle

Looks like I will soon be the proud owner of a 2003 Gazelle. I went in to shoot the breeze and by a tube… and this fellow had come in for advice about selling his bike before he went back home… and the advice had been “it just needs to find the right person.” I’ve drooled over Gazelles since somebody parked one outside the Bread Company one Friday night. I even went online to see if I could get one. Not likely.
It isn’t a *really* good fit, though I can do a fair amount of adjusting. And maybe it will be the right bike for Pete, not me, though I think the step-through frame might not suit him. It weighs 50 pounds and it’s just sweet

Multi-use clash

The saunter crashed today on the last stretch of path in front of Meadowbrook Park – some fun-loving girls who were paying absolutely no attention to anything but whatever game they were playing that was using the path as a playground made it impossible to get by. I had approached and almost hit one who was running forward and weaving around while looking backwards at her friends, and had hollered at her to watch where she was going… but the adult in the group was not able to get their attention. THey did seem chastened… but I hope it was real, and these aren’t a whole herd of future cell phone users. Grrrr…. I know, we should have been on the street

I’d almost brought the group down with my calm, analytical automataci response to a gnat getting in my eye while driving near construction with traffic passing us… I said “stopping, I have dsomething in my eye,” but it wasn’t in anything *like* that voice I used on the girl on the path, so nobody heard it as such and almost ran me over…

Yellow is good!
I was going out of the college via Duncan, but remembered I had to go to the bank, and turned around. I upped my caution meter because I was going differently than I usually do – and backwards (tho’ I suppose evening class people might have been going in; most people were leaving) and at the three-way stop I remember thinking “she’s first… no, I was here first, I should go,” and then realizing that she was going anyway, and giving her room before accelerating through as she waved to me… and I recognized her and thought, “I didn’t think she was a bicycle disser!”
She met me in the parking lot this a.m. to apologize – seems her rear-view mirror created a blind spot about the size of a bicycle, and that only the yellow rendered me visible, which freaked her out.
I explained to her that it wasn’t nearly as close as she thought because I could tell she hadn’t seen me (it’s interesting that my brain processed it as “she was there first, because she’s driving that way”). And her caution meter has gone up five-fold. My caution meter has been notified that if I *think* somebody was first, I should prob’ly act as if they were, because I’m probably thinking that because they’re going to go anyway. Or something like that.

Oh, and I have not been buried too deeply in anything not to have noticed the news. I reckon I don’t have enough keywords for google to mark me as a terrorist, but http://anabaptist418.blogspot.com/ just might. I figure the Powers that Be are going to permit some dis*senting blogs in the name of appearances of freedom… even this one with some really cute bumper stickers. Gotta love the upside down elephants1

Audio file of Ed Barsotti’s hour on WILL:
http://www.will.uiuc.edu/willmp3/focus061018a.mp3
(Go there! At least click on it… maybe WILL will realize how many cyclists are listeners when it gets a lot of hits … or it’ll make their “archives” list that they re-run on holidays) I’m about to go renew my membership…