We’re ess aytch oh pee pee eye ehn gee
I bought a new bike on Thursday, so hopefully this means the last bike post for a little while. Now I can get back to complaining about how the Internet sucks so much. The last I heard about my camera was yesterday: it had supposedly been packed into a box ready to go for today. If everything goes according to plan, I’ll either be able to take pictures of the bike sometime next week, be shopping for a new camera, or be arrested as I find out that they included the beer I brought that it turned out no one drank.
As for the bike, I did end up buying it at Performance Bike on Ashford Dunwoody. I’m really not interested in taking curbs anymore, so the salespeople there led me towards a different compromise: a road bike with flat handlebars. The one I ended up buying is a Schwinn. In addition to the dozen or so simple machines strapped onto a metal frame, it has a carbon fiber fork for a smooth and mellow ride and, since the pedals are on so tight that I haven’t been able to replace them with the other pair yet, those clipless clip things should I decide to buy some shoes with cleats. So far I’ve been enjoying it. It’s about 10 pounds lighter than my old bike, so riding it feels a lot easier. Going uphill is still exhausting, though, which makes me suspect that I’m doing something wrong. The skinny tires inflate to 100 freaking psi (130 (freaking) max), giving me a bit of an upper body workout, too. I’m sticking with the paddle shifters for now, but they’re going to take a bit to get used to.
In local news, the Dunwoody invasion must be stopped. Dunwoody was originally the DeKalb counterpart to Sandy Springs, an unincorporated area with enough people that naming it makes it easy to talk about, and, legally, it’s a means of controlling development in the north metro area, but years of propaganda from the Dunwoody Homeowners Association has caused the boundaries to sneak across the county line, claiming the land in Fulton between the border and 400. This abuse of definition has sown only confusion, causing some business on Roswell Road to claim to be in some kind of Dunwoody. Maybe all you need for Dunwoody is to have a little in your heart. Anyhow, Sandy Springs citied up all of that part of Fulton, so Dunwoody is still nothing and now Fulton Dunwoody is even less. However, some people still have a little Dunwoody burning on, and I guess they’d like some recognition. The AJC has an article describing a recent fight with the city over the Homeowners Association vandalizing street signs with misleading bonus signs. I find the whole thing both stupid and hilarious.
In other city news, I’m trying to take part in the government process by asking my elected representative to consider adding a right on red restriction to that Glenridge intersection. It’s this one. Every spoke is different (the map doesn’t say it, but the north-south part of that triangle is actually Johnson Ferry, which continues as a sort of asphalt parasite to the north until it parts from the host road north of Hammond), so I’m not going to try to explain it with names. The southbound traffic is coming over a hill; traffic turning right on red from eastbound to southbound does so blindly. I think this is probably the sort of thing that a city can fix.