Brews you can use

Well, it was heading up to 40 °F today, nice and warm. I dressed like it was summer, except with a long-sleeved shirt. And drove in to work. If anyone thought I might be crazy for biking in at -10 °F, riding the car at 30-ish should remove all doubt.

Somehow, biking just didn’t seem worthwhile. The ice-cold commute at least gets your daily “Damn, that was stupid!” moment out of the way early in the day. Pleasant weather? Working bike? Where’s the adventure in that?

I’ve once again disassembled the Schwinn. This time, to pay some attention to the two (four?) bearings I missed earlier, in the hubs. The axles weren’t spinning that smoothly, either. The rear hub grease had assumed the consistency of rubber cement, and the front had turned sandy and gray from worn metal. It needs new cones.

Once that’s done, I’ll finally know for sure whether it’s the bike or the rider who’s out of shape. I think I know the answer…

…

And as for that other hobby, this hop shortage can end any time now. I’m plotting my next brew: my brewery is set up to use leaf hops, and I can only find a couple varieties of those for sale anymore. Even my backup hop sources are completely out. If I retool my brewery for pellet hops (which gets interesting, since I need to keep too much of the pellet gunk from going through the chiller) I could get a few more varieties.

I almost never did the American ale styles. Now the hops available will essentially force me into that for the next few years of brewing.

This will be tough….

This is getting to be addictive — I’m not sure which I enjoy more: riding bikes or tinkering with them.

Yesterday evening, I “rode” a short hop over to Bill‘s place for a wheel-hacking session on his new truing stand. I respaced and redished the wheel in a couple hours, and mostly trued the wheel while I was at it. For a first attempt, it turned out better than I expected^*, and was quite fun. The chainline’s about perfect now, and I’m itching for a real ride to see if it makes a difference.

I chickened out for three reasons today:

1. The horizontal steam/smoke from the neighbors’ flues. Cold? Not a problem. Wind? Problem.
2. The number of ice patches on the (very short) way home made the two blocks thrilling enough, 6 miles of that would have been hell, and required a trials-caliber sense of balance.
3. A severely bent rear axle that had somehow gone unnoticed. I had probably been riding on it for a while, but … <shudder> I wasn’t comfortable riding that. I was surprised it turned smoothly at all. I’m pretty hard on bikes, I guess :-/

On my lunch break today, I headed down to Varsity for a replacement axle, and picked up a fixed cog while I was at it. I just finished replacing the axle, and am waiting for a good time to do the fixed switch. I’m not sure winter is it, although I was tempted to bring the conversion “kit” (freewheel remover, giant crescent wrench, and cog) into the new luggage, bring it to work, do the switch there, and ride home fixed.

^* Of course, what I expected was to trip some odd pattern of stresses in the >30 year old wheel and taco it on the stand. And yet I proceeded

After the last bike post, I took the Schwinn in to work like I wanted to. That worked OK. At some point on the way home, I hit a wall, and had to walk up even some embarrassingly gentle inclines. Then I noticed one of the pedals had bent about 10°, and switched into “limp home” mode, since I could not confidently stand and pedal anymore. Even taking it easy, I arrived exhausted, and sweated through three layers of clothing. I put the singlespeed away, and rode the Raleigh on Saturday, and then to work on Monday.

Wednesday was nice and productive: I finally racked the IPA I brewed on 12/31, cleaned up the Raleigh and lubricated its chain, and replaced the Schwinn pedals with some inexpensive BMX platforms. I noticed the old pedal spindles were very hard to turn, so replacing them removed quite a bit of resistance. The lube wasn’t making the Raleigh run smoothly, so I took the Schwinn to work again the next morning.

I was still exhausted. I asked a single-speed-riding coworker to test ride the Schwinn, to see if there was anything mechanical working against me, or if it was just me. It was just me. Other than the notable weight of the bike, it was all nice and smooth. However, once I knew it was just me, I found the ride home went much better than the ride in. Either it was just all in my head, or I’m learning how to pace myself, and psychologically handle rides where you can’t shift down on hills. I didn’t walk the bike at all this time, not even up the “corkscrew of death”^(*) approach to the bike/pedestrian bridge by Hamline and Pierce Butler. That had been a big milestone for me on the geared bike.

This morning, though, I had the urge to get out, try out the Schwinn, catch a photo tag, and maybe get a picture or two of the bike. The weather channel said -11F, but with no wind chill and lots of sun. It was a decent ride, 12 miles in all, only one indoor stop for bagels and water. I only needed to pull down the balaclava to pant a few times, and had feeling in my toes for 75% of the time. This was the first time my toes had been any problem, actually.

But anyhow, the pictures… I don’t have any “before” pictures, showing the flip+chop handlebars, complete with original burrs and the brake levers mounted backwards. That was the first thing I replaced, with moustache bars, Tektro brake levers, and my first handlebar tape job (looks much more beginner in person, trust me):

I like this handlebar style. There’s a lot of hand positions: I’ve held on to all of the taped areas for various purposes. Best of all, the hand positions all give you roughly the same height, so moving around for wrist comfort doesn’t require you to change torso position.

As for the rest of the bike, I had to replace brake cables, and (partly for looks) replaced the pie plate + 5-speed freewheel with a 16 tooth BMX freewheel:

This, combined with the 39 tooth chainring gives me nominally a 65 inch gear. Tires are still originals, as are the steel rims. Steel is real (heavy). It’s good training, if nothing else

^(*) This actually isn’t that great of an exaggeration in the winter, where the hairpin turns are prone to icing up. Then being covered with powdery, slippery snow. Ouch.

I’m being mercilessly held down by this:

so I might as well blog, even though I have only one arm free, on the opposite side of me from the computer. Pqrdin tge typods.

We got a new kitten today, and of course a few cuter pictures than the above. She still doesn’t have a name. We’re kind of trying to get Grace to name her, but she’s not interested. Kitten looks a little like our cat Max, and the math geek in me wants to name her Minimax (or Minnie for short). The computer geek thinks max should have a corresponding Min. The part of me who shut out exactly the wrong parts of the 80s also contributed “Number 5“… (That part of me has resigned to spend more time with its family and pursue other humor opportunities in the future.)

Need more input…. <bang> <bang> urrrgghhhle… <thud>

IMDB has rumors of a remake. God help us all, and damn the perpetrators…

Ah, she awakes! Freedom is at hand!

Oh, false alarm…

The project bike has been sitting in the basement for several weeks waiting for minor tweaks. I swapped out the handlebars a couple weeks ago, and finally got around to re-running the brake cables and wrapping the handlebars (I think I managed about a quarter-assed tape job, but it’s my first try). It’s about where I wanted it, minus:

• re-dishing the rear wheel for perfect chainline (this gets the job done, though it’s about 5mm off)
• putting on a track cog to give fixed gear riding a shot
• getting me in good enough shape to ride single speed.

Now I want to take it on my commute tomorrow.

I’ve only taken the bike to work once so far. That’s frustrating, especially since I haven’t been taking advantage of the beautiful biking weather we’ve had the last couple days (30s, 40s? Toss on a sweater, keep pedaling, and it’s quite pleasant). I did manage a nice mid-20s 20 mile recreational ride on Saturday, though. That was nice. I need to do more rides that don’t begin or end with work :-/

In other news, I think I’m losing my mind:

Exhibit A: It took me almost an hour to send out an already-written word document as an attachment to some people I work with. About 15 minutes to draft a quick two sentence commentary, then 45 minutes of scouring the document, making sure it was the right version, that the previous version had been expunged from change tracking, that no included versions contained disparaging comments, profanity, or said “I made a doody“, and that the word document had not been magically replaced by a pornographic image between the last time I checked it and when I hit “attach”.

I’m seriously in the wrong line of work to be this fscking nervous around computers.

Exhibit B: I’ve been having odd dreams about being dead. Not disturbing, scary, or even really profound dreams, but actually amusing dreams about death. I’m basically going about my day, with everything normal until I eventually figure out that I’m a ghost. I try to pick things up. I think I succeed — the thing is in my hands, but not on the table — but eventually it evaporates from my hand and slowly fades back in at its original location. Aha!, I think, this explains the “ghost paradox” (the effect where ghosts in movies can walk through walls but never fall through the floor).

My brain never tells me how this explains it. I wake up before that part is revealed.

I got a late Christmas present today. Well, not so much a late Christmas present, but a quarter century delayed inheritance.

My Grandpa died almost 25 years ago, and left some nice wristwatches for me and my cousin. I was a kid then, and my cousin was less than a year old, so it’s probably for the best that they took this long to get to us. Mine’s easily the nicest watch I’ve owned, and probably ever will own. I usually go for the sturdy yet disposable inexpensive digital watches, but this is a beautiful mechanical wristwatch made in Switzerland by one of the older Swiss watchmakers. I’ve been wearing it since this morning, listening to its rapid ticking, marveling at the fine mechanisms strapped to my wrist, and thinking of Grandpa.

…

I brewed yesterday, but nothing as odd as I thought I’d need to do. I had the hops to make a decent American IPA, and picked up a few more ingredients to complete the recipe. My last few beers have wound up underhopped, but I don’t think I made that mistake this time — my hops stash is gone now

I also finally got my bike out of the car, assembled, and installed fenders. The weather forecast calls for sub-10°F temps tomorrow, which knocked me out of my bike commuting routine last time. This time around, though, I have a fleece balaclava and a better base layer for the rest of me. I could wait for the higher temps later this week, but I’m itching to get back on the bike…