Not only am I a bike junky, I am a reformed motorhead. My first “street legal” car was when at 17 years old in 1979, I owned a 1969 Plymouth Sport Satellite with a large enough V-8 motor with 3 sets of carburetors to generate power enough to now supply electricity to a small town for ever and ever. That car today, if still around, is worth a small fortune. I sold the car to pay college bills to get my degree in Environmental Science - there might be something to this? Since my MOPAR days (or daze) it has been VW's, bicycles, and small foot-print vehicles. Those days, a 20-gallon tank of high octane gasoline and a can of octane booster was $20.00 - yeh, like in the late 1970’s I had that much money to burn....., and as I recall, it wasn’t all that fun.
$44.10 today. A year ago $25.00. What will it be next month to fill up the minivan? I see $5.00 per gallon of regular on the horizon. When we get to $5.00 per gallon, I see us all on the edge of a socio-environmental revolution/evolution. Change is good. Pinching the pocketbook is bad. But seeing that I am very rich, yet perpetually poor, higher energy costs are just an added layer of expense to which I can borrow from the future to pay for today - good system, right? If for years deficit spending has been O.K. and working well for the government, it should work for me, right?...... [Note: The minivan has an 18 gallon fuel tank. It takes me about 4 weeks to burn through 3/4 of a tank. The vehicle gets used about every other day to move 4 or more people to here to there around town, and it is used on road trips which aren't being considered here. The VW Beatle (@31+ MPG) is used for moving groups of 4 or less around town, and many times a day on really nice sunny days - this is a convertible New Beatle, wouldn't you indulge a little here?]
I own (vehicle No. 3) a Ford F150 pickup truck. "The best selling vehicle in America!", or something like that according to one of those over paid consulting firms that benchmarks statistics of consumer over consumption. Also, with the amount of recall notices I have received from FORD, perhaps "best" is a term better left in the eye of the beholder/owner. Yes, there are a lot of F150's out there, and I suggest there are too many, especially the elevated, painted, testosterone inject behemoths that burst the boundary of utilitarianism by miles, if not light years. Usually, I drive mine when (1) I am saving the world and responding to environmental incidents and I need to carry Hazmat equipment, or when (2) my home business has a need to move large volumes of material, that it does often. Because my truck only has a V-6 engine (note: an engine smaller than most minivans), it is amazingly fuel thrifty. I drive the truck once, usually twice a week for load carrying missions, and when I feel like it, a third time on dates with my wife or when I want to feel competitive with SUV drivers. On the highway, with a 1,000 pound load, I get an honest 25 MPG – but I consider this is appropriate use of a motor vehicle (what do you think?). Here, I clearly do not have a single occupant vehicle on a daily commute. My F150 is a workhorse, and it is for sale - $14,000.00, 2002 F150 Supercab (4-door, 2-regular front and 2-small rear suicide), V-6, Automatic w/overdrive, A/C, cruise, AM/FM/CD, sprayed-on epoxy bed liner. I last filled up with gasoline in August costing $1.98 per gallon. I am still at 1/3 tank. This truck is awesome.
Regarding beer runs, this is work only for a bicycle. The bicycle applied for transportation beer is appropriate for many reasons, but mainly for the fact you can’t drink too much beer and then ride a bicycle – it just doesn’t work. This isn’t rocket scientist work, just recognition that too much coordination and sense of your surroundings are required to move a bicycle forward without falling over. Once coordination (3 or 5 beers later) is lost, the bicycle doesn’t go too far, the rider ends up upside down a few feet from the start point, and well, you paint that picture from here…..
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
September 20 - It's over!!!! (my rotation at work)
What a great ride home! Traffic at 6:30 PM in the suburbs of "Mega Metropolis Land" is so great! Bountiful is the warming exhaust of bus traffic, beautiful is the all too present sight of solo motorist wrapped in 7,000+ pounds of mind numbing steel, sweet is the odor of burnt hydrocarbons lingering at every intersection where jackrabbit starts are the norm. I only wish more humans would see and understand this absurdity.
Today, the ride to work was "so bad". The moon was full and provided more than ample light to justify a 3:45 AM wake-up. I had to be sure I was on the road by 4:30 AM to be at work on time. [Note: Night Sun, et.al., natural area lighting is the best, please work on “moon lighting”. Also note: All riders need to be real! Ride with a helmet, and front and rear lighting – it’s cheap, use it!] Going to work, I felt challenged to draft the one car that actually tried hard to pass me (foolishly, they stopped for every red light – At 4:45 in the morning, what were they thinking? Ooops, should I have done a track stand for 2-minutes when no one passed across my path?). Over a distance of 4 miles, I beat the car before they turned onto the highway and drove off to wherever their destination was. Besides the afore mentioned, when I passed the local Dunkin Donuts with all that gusto to draft that car, it was a bummer to see all the Police cruisers from the surrounding towns in that parking lot. Like, enforcement?
Bottom line, I need a few daze(s) to recover from the shift work. Today I just finished a 6-week rotation at work: 7-12-hour days 7-12 hour nights; a straight 40 hours thrown in to confuse the mix; well, my mind is mush.
Please be safe. Plan and ride for the worst, and enjoy all the moments that aren’t bad. I wish you all more good times than bad. Most important. Please keep peddling. Thanks.
Today, the ride to work was "so bad". The moon was full and provided more than ample light to justify a 3:45 AM wake-up. I had to be sure I was on the road by 4:30 AM to be at work on time. [Note: Night Sun, et.al., natural area lighting is the best, please work on “moon lighting”. Also note: All riders need to be real! Ride with a helmet, and front and rear lighting – it’s cheap, use it!] Going to work, I felt challenged to draft the one car that actually tried hard to pass me (foolishly, they stopped for every red light – At 4:45 in the morning, what were they thinking? Ooops, should I have done a track stand for 2-minutes when no one passed across my path?). Over a distance of 4 miles, I beat the car before they turned onto the highway and drove off to wherever their destination was. Besides the afore mentioned, when I passed the local Dunkin Donuts with all that gusto to draft that car, it was a bummer to see all the Police cruisers from the surrounding towns in that parking lot. Like, enforcement?
Bottom line, I need a few daze(s) to recover from the shift work. Today I just finished a 6-week rotation at work: 7-12-hour days 7-12 hour nights; a straight 40 hours thrown in to confuse the mix; well, my mind is mush.
Please be safe. Plan and ride for the worst, and enjoy all the moments that aren’t bad. I wish you all more good times than bad. Most important. Please keep peddling. Thanks.
Monday, September 19, 2005
September 19th - Dark ride.
3:45 AM actually turned out to be 4:15 AM - that snooze button is very dangerous. I was out of the house by 4:33 AM, at the coffee shop (for tea) at 5:00 AM, and I rolled up to the office at 5:15. By the time I took a baby-wipe bath and dressed in my "business attire", it was 5:35. I was well early for the start of my my 6:00 AM shift.
I believe the moon was full, or at least pretty full last night because it was still shining just before sunrise. The moon did a great job illuminating the road, but I still riode a little slower in the dark. After 3 months I know the road pretty well, but there are always some surprises (skunks, tree branches, McDonald bags, etc.).
The ride home was energizing, or at least enough so that now at 9:00 PM I am still awake enough to blog. On the ride home I passed one of my crews. I guess they are not use to seeing this big guy on a mountain bike with panniers barrelling down a hill, I took them by surprise. They are good guys, but they weren't wearing their proper safety equipment - not good.
Also not good was how I was riding in traffic - I have to watch myself. At traffic stops I found myself weaving through stopped traffic to get in front of the line. I probably shouldn't do that. For the traffic stops where I did stop at the side of the road, or in line with traffic, my ride definately slowed down a lot. So in heavy traffic tonight my ride was 45 minutes, it is usually 30. If I drove today, it probably would have taken the same amount of time to get home, but by riding I saved the gas, energy, and left a small foot-print.
I did something interesting over last weekend. Google News lets you subscribe to news alerts using search terms you define. I signed up for a daily digest of links to internet news articles that contain the word "bicycle" in their titles. It is rather interesting to see all the news about bicycles, there are a lot of fatalities listed, but some political, and activist stuff too. For example, today there was an article from an Austin Texas newspaper about one of their editors test riding a Tide Force 750x - there were quite a few references to Lance in that article. I subscribed to the same type of service about 15 years ago when I used CompuServe. I recomend doing it if you have the interest, time, and resources to read daily news involving bicycles, it is simple and dosen't cost anything.
Well, here I am 9:13 PM. Bed time. Tuesday is my last early wake up for 5 days. I have to make the best of it. Chow!
I believe the moon was full, or at least pretty full last night because it was still shining just before sunrise. The moon did a great job illuminating the road, but I still riode a little slower in the dark. After 3 months I know the road pretty well, but there are always some surprises (skunks, tree branches, McDonald bags, etc.).
The ride home was energizing, or at least enough so that now at 9:00 PM I am still awake enough to blog. On the ride home I passed one of my crews. I guess they are not use to seeing this big guy on a mountain bike with panniers barrelling down a hill, I took them by surprise. They are good guys, but they weren't wearing their proper safety equipment - not good.
Also not good was how I was riding in traffic - I have to watch myself. At traffic stops I found myself weaving through stopped traffic to get in front of the line. I probably shouldn't do that. For the traffic stops where I did stop at the side of the road, or in line with traffic, my ride definately slowed down a lot. So in heavy traffic tonight my ride was 45 minutes, it is usually 30. If I drove today, it probably would have taken the same amount of time to get home, but by riding I saved the gas, energy, and left a small foot-print.
I did something interesting over last weekend. Google News lets you subscribe to news alerts using search terms you define. I signed up for a daily digest of links to internet news articles that contain the word "bicycle" in their titles. It is rather interesting to see all the news about bicycles, there are a lot of fatalities listed, but some political, and activist stuff too. For example, today there was an article from an Austin Texas newspaper about one of their editors test riding a Tide Force 750x - there were quite a few references to Lance in that article. I subscribed to the same type of service about 15 years ago when I used CompuServe. I recomend doing it if you have the interest, time, and resources to read daily news involving bicycles, it is simple and dosen't cost anything.
Well, here I am 9:13 PM. Bed time. Tuesday is my last early wake up for 5 days. I have to make the best of it. Chow!
September 18th - Drove, top down....
There was so much rain, and the puddles were so deep last night on the ride home that my drailers got super gunked up with road grime, so much so that my derailers stopped working - not good.
With not enough time to work on the bike before work Sunday (another12-hour shift), I took the VW Beatle. I went top down - I think convertibles are as close as a car will ever get to being a bicycle.
I got home and wrenched around the bike for about an hour, lubed lubable parts, added air in airable parts, and polished (yes it now shines) the frame - there was way too much road grime. I could go on for hours about road grime - just don't get it on your work clothers - it never comes out.
Monday, it's tie day at work. My "dress" clothes are laid out and they'll go into the panniers.
3:45 is looking pretty early for a wake-up, but well worth it.
With not enough time to work on the bike before work Sunday (another12-hour shift), I took the VW Beatle. I went top down - I think convertibles are as close as a car will ever get to being a bicycle.
I got home and wrenched around the bike for about an hour, lubed lubable parts, added air in airable parts, and polished (yes it now shines) the frame - there was way too much road grime. I could go on for hours about road grime - just don't get it on your work clothers - it never comes out.
Monday, it's tie day at work. My "dress" clothes are laid out and they'll go into the panniers.
3:45 is looking pretty early for a wake-up, but well worth it.
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