Where'd Everyone Go?

The streets and bike paths are definitely less populated! I really like riding this time of year, the anticipation of the cold air is worse than the actual experience of riding in cold weather.

Valerie arrived last night and announced that she had been hit by a car on her way to class. She has a few bruises and I needed to true the rear wheel of her Bianchi, but otherwise she and bike are both fine. The driver actually stopped, which always surprises me. Valerie declined to file a report with the policeman who stopped - I think that is always a mistake - but she felt sure she was okay. ALWAYS FILE A REPORT AND/OR GET THE NAME & PLATE OF THE PERSON WHO HITS YOU! Really. Even if you think you are okay!






Roscoe got a new prototype track bike from his friends at Rocky Mountain Bicycles. The thing looks great - TIG welded steel frame, great looking paint, they sent the bike with a carbon road fork - my understanding is that the production fork will be different. Roscoe did a nice job with the build - I hope the folks at RM take a close look. I got to ride it around the block in the East Village last night - even though it is about 5 sizes too small, riding a new bike is always fun!

I noticed on the way home that not much had changed on the Williamsburg Bridge graffiti battle. Graffiti artists are still ahead!

Work, Etc.

Bike Kill 2006 is almost here!

We had a staff meeting this morning at work - my boss, Deborah Berke, looked at my bike (which was leaning against my desk in plain view) and asked whether I planned to keep riding my bike every day no matter how cold it gets. I told her that WAS my plan, but I would have to see how cold it gets. Deborah and the firm have been the most incredibly accomodating employers you could imagine. They encourage me to leave my bikes out where clients can see them and they built me a shower when the office relocated. Several times a week, clients stop to look at whatever bike I rode that day and ask questions about commuting, fixed gear bikes, racing, whatever. It is a nice diversion, so far nobody has asked to try out a fixed gear in the office. If they ask they can try it!



The red pursuit bike got a flat last night on the way home - dammit! Some inconsiderate construction worker left a big hole all the way across the road on Flushing Avenue - pinch flat. This drives me crazy - the flat is easy enough to deal with, but people can crash badly in a hole that deep and it is difficult to spot them in the dark. On the upside - home was only a few blocks away and it wasn't raining!



A small group of guys got together at the Lakeside Lounge last night to have a quick drink and shoot the breeze. I had a great short talk with a guy who is thinking about starting architecture school. It seems as though everyone who is contemplating architecture school hears a lot of awful things about the profession from practicing architects, I am happy to be one of the positive voices.

C-C-COLD

A sure sign of the coming winter is the enormous gaps in the expansion joints of all the bridge bicycle paths. They are narrow, little slits all summer long and gradually stretch out to gaping ravines as the weather chills. This was the first weekend that I wanted long finger gloves - it is all downhill from now until March. No luck finding gloves in my size...again. XL just doesn't mean what it should when it comes to cycling gloves.

I have no idea what happened to the taxi in this picture, I saw it while riding in a cab to a meeting on the Upper East Side, I hope there isn't a bicycle under that thing.

There was a set of white wheels sitting around my apartment - they were built up for a bike that was vandalized (more on that later, I am waiting for the dust to settle in court). I put them on my Gan Well Pro keirin bike - I am still not sure I like them (don't let the sexy yellow background in this picture fool you). They look good but maybe not quite as nice as the silver rims I had on there before.



Taliah Lempert was set up at the DUMBO Arts Festival today. Seeing her made me happy, I ran into her last night as I was riding to Manhattan and she had been chased off by some bitchy organizer who claimed Taliah didn't have the right to sell her art on the street. An arts fair that doesn't want artists on the streets. Genius. Taliah did some research and discovered that it was, in fact, perfectly legal for her to be out there earning a living with her art as she has always done. I love it when people stand up for themselves like that! I bought this totally bitchin' tee shirt from her.



Roscoe and I took some pictures today, they are to accompany a review of cycling specific knickers I wrote for the Fixed Gear Gallery. We had a good time out in the alley shooting pics and riding each other's bikes, but it was a pain to email all those big photos - even zipped the files were quite large. I am wearing the wool cycling jersey that a group of us NYC riders custom ordered. Sashae, a friend of ours organized the whole order, collected the money and is now taking care of distributing all the jerseys. Thanks Sashae!

Another Wet One

I got soaked again on the ride home tonight (I am cheating and the above picture is from a rainy day earlier in the year!). Riding in the rain is so fun! There are fewer people out and it feels like you get the bike paths and side streets all to yourself; I think there was one other person on the Williamsburg Bridge last night. The people who are out tend to be a little stupid - they run out into the street with their umbrellas pulled low on their heads, and they do this without looking for oncoming traffic.

Bill Scanga from the City Reliquary Museum came rolling up next to me on a beautiful orange Johnny Coast bike as I slopped through Williamsburg. He had been hit by a car earlier in the day, but was okay. He told me that the owner of The Museum of Jurassic Technology had been into his museum and had sent a letter saying how much he liked it and encouraged them to keep building the collection. It was fun to talk to Bill for a few blocks - we met earlier this year at a show the City Reliquary Museum hosted for Amy Bolger.



I put on dry clothes and had a quick dinner before heading over to Kristen and Josephine's house. We had another night of working on Kristen's bike and watching Project Runway. The new bike has an old style brake mounting hole in the fork, not big enough to receive the recessed mounting nut on the modern brake. We drilled out the back hole to allow the recess mount. Kristen didn't have any safety goggles, so her motorcycle helmet had to do double duty. Jo taught us a new word, swarf, which are the shavings and bits of waste produced by metalwork.

The Big Weekend

Wow - lots of riding and bike stuff the last few days:

Valerie came over for dinner on Friday night she decided to do some back exercises with my Swiss ball while I was cooking. Note the glass of wine on the floor next to her.




I got up at 4:00am on Saturday morning to meet my neighbor Christian and drive out to the T-Town fall bicycle flea market. I had loaded up all kinds of stuff that was cluttering up my apartment and was ready to sell! I took the first load down figuring that I would come back up for my cell phone and the rest of the junk for sale. Big mistake. I waited outside in the cold and light rain for Christian - I wanted to call but I kept thinking that it would be a big pain in the ass to lug everything back upstairs and get the phone then haul it all back down. About half an hour later I gave up on Christian and went up to get my phone. Sure enough - he overslept.




The flea market was a big success - I sold almost everything I brought with me and then unloaded the last few things on eBay over the weekend. Greg Lemond was at the flea market and I got to meet him, I also met Bobby Julich (charming guy!) and had a picture taken with him. The sky was overcast and grey - combine the grey sky and my grey hair and it looks like my head is disolving into the clouds. Vanity prevents me from posting this picture uncropped, but trust me, those are Bobby's eyes on the right.

Monday I decided to take a day off from work and do some riding and thinking. I took a trip to Nyack and had breakfast at the Runcible Spoon, a cyclist hangout in upstate NY. I ran into a new friend, Mary-Lynne, who races for the Champion System team, nice to have a lunch break that involved conversation! It was about 75 miles of riding all said and done - it felt great to get out and spin away some miles. In the interest of thinking the day was declared (in my head) "small ring day". My chain only saw the big ring twice - when I was going downhill at 32mph and couldn't spin any more speed out of the bike. A few seconds in the big ring got me up over 35mph - that speed slipped away into the blacktop as I went up the next hill, comfortably back in my small chainring. You can see my route, one way here. (Hint, click and drag to pan the map, Google Ped doesn't zoom so well right now - the map comes up at the midpoint of my ride, in Nyack.)



Sunday evening I hooked up with Roscoe and we did a little work on his KHS pursuit bike. Roscoe wanted to drill a hole in the BB to allow water to run out. This is a crackpot theorey, but what the hell. That orange bike of Roscoe's is one of my favorite bikes ever - he owns two of my favorite bikes, in fact - here is the other one.

Time vs. Distance

An article in Bicycling Magazine a few weeks ago mentioned some of the hazards of commuting by bike - one of them was pedestrians. The article noted that people's natural instinct when they see something approaching quickly is to freeze for a second and then scurry forward in the direction that they were originally going. Watch for this it really is true, and interesting to look for.

I try to be considerate of pedestrians when I am riding. Lately, I have noticed that they seem easily startled when I go through a crosswalk full of people - even when it feels to me that I have missed them by a hugely safe margin...so today I was thinking: pedestrians judge near misses by actual physical distance, on my bike I judge a near miss by time. How close I am to hitting something has more to do with the time required for one of the bodies in question to cross a given distance - when a pedestrian is traveling relatively perpendicular to my line, a distance of 3' could take them several seconds to cross, a big margin of safety from my point of view since I might travel 20 times that distance in the same amount of time. Something to think about.




Thursday was beautiful in New York - I took my usual route to the office and then got to ride to a meeting at 78th and Park, then got to ride back downtown to the West Village for lunch and then, finally, back to the office. It always feels great to get in an afternoon ride.



I become a greedy rider at this time of year. Each day makes me more aware that the comfortable cycling days are dwindling away and I take every opportunity to wring the last drops of pleasant salty sweat out of the pavement. I met up with a friend in the Village and got to hang out on the piers during the sunset. There was a new pier open - the pier is actually old, but it is usually locked up. Cool.

Soaked!

Jo, Kristen, and I worked on Kristen's new fixie commuter conversion last night. She bought an old Fuji 10 speed from Hal at Bicycle Habitat - it is going to be a great bike! I got to J* & X10's place and realized I had forgotten my bottom bracket tool at home - so I had to ride from Williamsburg back to the Navy Yard in light rain. We got the old BB out, put the new BB in, ate dinner, and watched Project Runway. (The above picture is J&K on a small bike adventure we had last summer - water taxi from Astoria to DUMBO.)

By the time the show ended it was pouring outside and I got thoroughly soaked riding home. The truth is, I love riding in the rain. It is so much better a game! You can stretch out skids for half a city block if you get some good speed going.




Nice morning riding - I took the scenic route to work: over the Brooklyn Bridge, up the west side bike path to Central Park, once around the park then down Broadway, through Times Square, to my office. Nice!

The Little Things

I love the little bicycle traffic lights on the west side bike path!

Work has slowed down a little bit and I was able to escape for a lunch time ride yesterday afternoon. I rode from my office to Joe's Pizza for lunch. Best slices in NYC! On the way there I saw my friend, Squid...riding the WRONG WAY up Fifth Ave. Squid gets a pass and can do no wrong. (But really, Kevin - shouldn't you be setting an example for all the young messengers out there...and for the KIDS!?)

Now and then you come up with a simple, obvious idea that makes life a little easier. I had the genius idea to start using the strap on my camera case - I leave the camera hanging around my neck and put the strap to my messenger bag over the camera bag straps to keep it from bouncing around while I ride. The big advantage is obvious - I can get to the camera much more quickly and don't have to fight it out of the messenger bag.



My new setup allowed me to get the shot above during a brief stop in my morning commute. I hit a red light at 23rd Street and 1st Avenue - it was early, so the streets don't look quite as crazy as usual.



I am excited about the upcoming weekend - the T-Town bicycle swapmeet is on Saturday and on Sunday there is an alleycat, Nyack to the Track, that promises to be great! I have to work out a trade for my Sunday work shift at the Park Slope Food Co-op so that I can do the race.

Shorter Days

The days are shrinking! My ride home is definitely darker - there are spooky blind areas where all I can think about is whether I am about to roll into a pothole. Time to find my handlebar light.

My morning commute involved a small scare on the Williamsburg bridge. Workers were blocking both lanes on the Manhattan side of the bridge. They had set up just around a corner where the bike lane shifts from the edge of the bridge to the center. The workers had not set up any cones to alert people that the lanes were blocked. When I pointed this out and let them know, the first guy I talked to just shrugged his shoulders and walked off - the next guy actually promised to set up warnings and seemed angry that it had been overlooked.


I rode home down the west side highway, over the Brooklyn Bridge and into DUMBO where I stopped to snap a few pictures. I found this old carousel in a building on Water Street. The pictures don't quite capture how beautiful it was.

A Gentle Weekend

I met up with some friends on Friday after work. We gathered at Chelsea piers to watch the sunset. My friends Chombo gave my KHS pursuit bike a test ride. Actually, he gave it a few test skids - the geometrey of this bike makes it easy to take weight off of back wheel and skid for long distances. After the sunset, I rode to the Brecht Forum to meet Valerie - a new friend of mine, Oscar Riquelme, had a few pieces in the "war and peace" show. I really like Oscar's paintings - you can see some of his work at the Russell Collection in Austin, TX.




Saturday was a pretty lazy day, in the afternoon Roscoe and I rode to the DUMBO section of Brooklyn to shoot some pictures. I am writing a review of cycling knickers for the Fixed Gear Gallery and we needed some beefcake photos to accompany the text. I will post a link to the review when it is published. Roscoe had a question - he had noticed some wooden enclosures that started springing up on back porches and balconies in the Hasidic neighborhoods. Mystery solved, thanks to wikipedia and some vague hints from Valerie. Here is a picture of one of the Sukkot enclosures.




Saturday evening I had dinner with some dear old friends, Rick and Carol. We walked to Hasaki restaurant from their East Village apartment and met Valerie for dinner. Yummy sushi! Valerie surprised us all by picking up the tab for the entire dinner, we were all grateful; sushi isn't cheap!

Valerie and I were both on bike (she had her monster Huffy) so we decided to ride back to Brooklyn together. That bike of hers serves a purpose, she can leave it locked up anywhere without fear of someone stealing it - and it doesn't matter if it gets rained on; it's good errand bike for NYC. But the damned thing squeaks a lot - in fact, I am going to post this entry and go lube her hubs and chain right now. This is her on the Williamsburg Bridge at night, leather jacket with zipper trim and go-go boots on a 50 pound Huffy. Hell yeah!