Kiwi fruit.

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Cold storage.

So last night we came home and the cat was chasing a wee wire coil around. It shot into the bike room and under a set of shelves. Attached to which there are one or 2 bikes i'm quite partial to. I noticed that the shelving was leaning over at a pretty messy angle. Ooops.

Seems as though my old ikea shelves are overloaded and it is time to research some better storage options. Fortunately, it seems to be a pretty good time to buy old warehouse stock...

Sprinter cut.

For those of us with LEGS.

Standing start.

Watch it.

Muso.

So, yes, them crooked vultures album is out. It is good, but its a grower...


Then there is radio moscow who have a new album out - brain cycles. All good. Will be in europe feb ish?

And more...

Things to ponder...

From our Albert "If something worth living for is worth dying for, what about something not worth dying for?"

And Jean Paul "How do you really act in private?"

Not forgetting Franz "Without love, without people, what is a person?"

Do not go gentle into that good night.

What Dylan said.

It is about that time to make some sort of plan. Drifting aimlessly is only good for the none-sentient.

I've already mentioned my thoughts of doing something different on bikes. Those idyll dreams are beginning to coalesce. Saab Salomon Avalanche.

I have also had some thoughts on a bike to use. I'm blaming 2004 ssec champ Dan Darwood squarely, if not fairly for that. More on this soon.

What else? Apart from drowning in H1N1, anyway?

Cross racing is always hard. Perhaps one of the joys of it in Scotland has been the variety of the courses. The last race in Inverkeithing was for me a watershed. I'm going to have a break.

The course was very euro. Essentially an 80% grass, waterlogged loop, with 3 staircases thrown in for good measure. All corners were off camber. The bikes packed up remarkably fast (apart from those that fit fatties fine). With so many derailleurs hanging off i wondered if there would be a rush on singlespeed cross bikes, but with the pain in my arms from dragging my bike around in foot deep mud i doubt that will be the case.

This is all well and good if there is the resource and desire for second bikes and pit crews but for me it forms an impasse. No more for the moment. I'll have a week or 2 off and then re-assess.

And so much for that. Maybe i am weak, but i will not choose to be weak *and* unhappy.

The world continues to steam-roll towards doom, with china trying all sorts to block free speech and the mess in the middle east . Pathetic, isn't it?

Maybe it is truly time to throw my arms up in the air and go hide in the highlands. Who knows?



Meanwhile, it's a case of continuing to claw and scrape my way through the day to day, all the while remembering that which the existentialists held so dear: the challenge is to choose to live.

Kinda diggin' this now...

So: the new wheels dropped some weight. taking off one or 2 extraneous parts dropped a bit more. Then changing the Gore cables to nokon (due to the tight bends forced in the crook of the drops because they are both short reach and compact) improved the feel and dropped some more weight.



20.9 lb. But i guess the real story is that nothing is 'light' and it has bb7 discs. Rumours of bb9s abound, but whether there will be a road version or not is impossible to say. The cane creek short pull, scr 5(compact) levers are great - wide paddles, and the compact reach means a lot less bother in the drops. Better yet, the hoods are fatter and less drooped than the dia compe 987's so the comfort factor is better all around.



The cable routing worked out really tight. Smooth lines i can thank IF for. The steel conduit is carefully bent in 3 dimensions and all the joins are sealed with shrink wrap. Smooth.

It won't challenge for lightest cross bike, but i love it.

Not the way to go...

More on this shortly.

750g from 900g.

So, after a flurry of wheel building, i now have dropped 150 g from the front wheel on the cross bike, and 135g from the rear. stan's 355 29 rims (thanks raoul), to dt revo with alloy nips stuck in place with loctite, and a dt 340 front hub (centrelock) and a 240 ss rear.

Sweet. Rimstrips are Ritchey.

They were hard to build so that the tension average wasn't exceeded (80kgf with less than 10% variation)...i always tend to build to a much higher tension than that....We'll see how they last.

Vicious doldrums.

Here we are adrift in the doldrums of november, december and january. The weather has closed in, just as the light has faded. People are snarling at each other: using cars, or body language to assert their importance just as surely as it demonstrates their inhumanity.

The mast has broken off the vessel, just as much as the community spirit is being worn away by hard effort in the absence of reward, satisfaction or happiness. $10 million may, in time, become cheap at the price.

So we hunker down - holding on to whatever rock exists in our lives - waiting for that precious moment when the wind rises, direction returns and life has, once again, both point and serenity.

A verse from the rime of the ancient mariner:

"All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion ;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean."

(image pinched from here: see all the illustrations by gustave dore for the rime.)