There are a good number of roads around here with bicycle lanes, but they tend to be pretty busy.  I usually avoid them because they don’t go where I want to go, and the Lance wannabes avoid them because they can’t get away with riding 15 abreast.  We both often end up on a road that goes mostly parallel to the railway, a relatively flat north-south street with light traffic.  I noticed that for some reason the carbon-fiber lycra brigade usually turns around at a particular point, and I have no idea why.  Maybe they all have their cycle computers set to a particular distantce.  I don’t know.  I decided to keep going.  I kept going until I ran out of road, and at the end of the road there was a bearded man wearing overalls and selling vegetables.  Then I went back.  At the other end of the road, just before the final turn toward home, there is a shop that sells strawberry ice cream and Orange Crush made with real sugar.  So today was pretty nice.

Gwinnett is filthy.  I don’t know why.  I’ve seen some prison cleanup crews here and there, but maybe they only deal with cigarette butts and trucker bombs.  One of the nice things about this area of Gwinnett is that it’s possible to cycle down busy roads out of the way of traffic, and one of the horrible things about this area of Gwinnett is that the sides of the roads are especially awful.  Sides of roads are pretty universally bad, since they lack the car traffic that keeps the road itself clear of debris, but there’s something extra-special going on in Suwanee.  This place is full of drunks.

Someone with more spare money than me should start some kind of a public service campaign: when you drink and drive, drink from a can.  One of the side-effects of open container legislation—or possibly of being a minor—is that if you’re enjoying a beer in a car, while driving it or not, that open bottle is bad news to you and everyone around you, so the best thing to do is drink it down and chuck it out a window where I can run over it later.  It took me a couple of weeks of running over these bottles, but I got a flat.  This is the first time I’ve been able to puncture the horrifically named Maxxis Detonator after a couple of years of rolling them through all kinds of junk.  It’s probably about time I got some new tires anyhow.

I decided to ask the internets about a good commuter tire.  One of the weird things about reading articles about tires is that it’s pretty easy to tell when the writer has no idea what they’re talking about.  For example, take this article from the New York Times.  After the obnoxious hipster photo at the top and a couple of paragraphs of fluff, there seems to be some short, more-or-less to-the-point reviews of a handful of tougher road tires, some of which are available in the 27″ size mentioned at the top.  But then there are statements such as, “The tiniest amount of tread [ensures] that if you are running over a piece of wet ground, you don’t have to worry about slipping.”  I don’t know if this is some great secret of cycling or a case of collective denial or what.  For narrow bicycle tires on hard, relatively smooth surfaces, like asphalt and concrete, treads are there for two reasons: they sometimes make the tire look prettier, and they make the tires easier to sell to people that are nervous about slick tires.  And if the tread pattern is deep enough they also pick up various sharp bits of road junk, increase rolling resistance and reduce grip.  It’s a shame that the representatives of a probably pretty alright bike nonprofit haven’t given very much thought to what keeps their bikes on the road.  Anyhow, in general, the narrow profile of a bicycle tire makes it desirable to have as much rubber on the ground as possible in all conditions; in practice, the little treads they put on road tires are so shallow and so far down on the sides that they don’t have any effect one way or the other, and though the entire thing ended up being sort-of annoying, the New York Times article did give me a couple of leads.

I had some spare tires to replace the gashed-up, worn-out Maxxis, but I’m a little leery about them for a couple of reasons.  For one, I’ve had some bad luck with the same type in the past, and for two, they’re a real pain in the thumbs to get on the rim.  My kevlar-beaded fling has spoiled me.  They were so light and zippy and comparatively easy to install.  So it doesn’t make any sense at all that I spent this month’s fun times budget on a pair of Continentals.  Continental has a reputation for making tires just a hair too small around, but these are also covered in kevlar, so hopefully I won’t need to mess with them too often.  Wish me luck.

I’m back on the bike.  I’ve been only two days commuting now, and I already have a wish-list a mile long.  My mid-weather full-finger gloves don’t really have fingers to speak of anymore, I need a brighter headlamp to offset Gwinnett’s lack of street lights, I wore out my pedals and the stock pair I switched back to don’t work as nicely with the toe clips, I could use some shoe covers and a helmet cover for the various kinds of weather, and some long underwear would be nice for these frigid mornings.  Maybe it’s finally time to take the plunge and switch to clipless pedals and fancy clicky cleated shoes.  I broke my 120dbB golf cart pitched horn during the great repair, but I don’t think I’ll miss that.  Much like the rear view mirror that I no longer miss, the horn was probably a crutch I can do without.  Shouted swears are just as effective and so much more satisfying.

I’m back on the bike.  It’s been pretty freaking cold lately, and I no longer have the advantage of a drafty apartment to help me guess outside temperature based on inside discomfort.  I’m getting there; I don’t have to worry about staying warm at bus stops anymore, and as I’m figuring out how warmly I need to dress I’m able to shed some of the weight of the various spare clothings I’ve been packing.  That ridiculous looking high-vis yellow jacket I bought a while back turns out to be pretty effective in the cold as long as I’m moving, even though it doesn’t have any lining.  It’s basically as effective as that mangled blue thing I used to wear all the time, except it can breathe a little so I don’t drown in my own sweat.  If I just get something for below the waist I’d be riding pretty comfortably.

I’m back on the bike.  It’s only been two days commuting so far, and I feel fantastic.

The location blows.  I knew that going in, but I’m still getting used to all the quirks of the locale and learning where everything is.  So far, in true awful yuppie style, the thing I miss most is the Whole Foods.  There’s one about ten miles away in one of those ridiculous new cities in north Fulton, and that’s a lot farther than a quick huff and puff up the Sandy Springs death hill.  There’s a Fresh Market just down the street, but it’s a pretty poor substitute.  I can’t go there for my local, organic milk delicately extracted from the teats of happy cows, or my hemp-based hippie soap, or that scratchy butt wipe tissue made from recycled sawdust collected from the shop floor of a crying Indian carpenter or whatever.  I can go there for the satisfaction of paying more for groceries, but that’s about it.  On the other hand, there’s a Publix within walking distance for all of my normal food purchases, whereas in the Springs the WF was the nearest market of any sort.  And the Publix-brand recyled paper asswipe is actually pleasant and way cheaper.  So I guess that’s a toss-up.

I do like the new kitchen layout.  Square footage-wise it’s probably smaller than the Calibre, but it’s not all walled in.  The kitchen consists of a wall on one side with the stove and the fridge and all that, and the sink is on an island sort of thing, leaving the other sides open.  Maybe it’s just some trick of the layout, but the counterspace feels wonderfully open and vast compared to other apartment kitchens I’ve used.  Even though I still haven’t figured out where everything goes, leaving a lot of glass strewn about everywhere, I haven’t broken a single thing yet.  I would be drinking out of old vitamin water bottles and eating straight out of the pan by now if I had tried this at Calibre, but I still have glasses and dishes and all kinds of fragile cookware to get civilized with instead; it’s pretty sweet.  The sink probably has a lot to do with it.  I have a double-sink now, instead of the unisink, which means I was finally able to throw out that nasty dishrack and get a proper one that fits in the spare sink part.  One the one hand, it’s really nice to have the rinse half and the little sprayer nozzle thing and all the things that a kitchen sink is supposed to have, but on the other hand I do miss being able to fit a baking pan all the way into the dishwater.  But only a little bit; winner: new place.

I don’t know yet what to think of the electric range.  I was worried at first that it wouldn’t put out the same volume of heat as the old gas range, which would have annoyed me terribly whenever I try to make coffee or spaghetti or tea, but it seems like this one goes up to 11 and actually boils water faster than the gas at Calibre, so that’s pretty neat.  It can’t make the quick shifts in power that I’m used to, but it is a lot easier to set an electric burner on low without having to worry about the flame going out.  Also, the first month’s electric bill was almost half of my usual electric+gas charge.  I don’t know if all electric will end up bugging me or not.

Everything turns the wrong way.  The door lock turns the other way since the bolt just happens to be on the other side, and the mailbox key turns the other way for no good reason at all.  I guess I’ll get used to it eventually.

Everything has too many wires.  The first challenge was the dryer.  The old apartment had a three-prong 240V outlet for the dryer, but apparently new buildings have fancy things like ground wires, so that was an extra little expense.  The thermostat was a lot more fun.  I like to replace the cheap analog mercury switch thing with my fancy programmable digital thermostat, and I had always figured that there’s a whole mess of holes on the digital one, therefore it ought to work with anything I encounter.  Well, this was the first time I had encountered two-stage heat.  I could figure out what to do with four of the wires, but there was an extra wire for the extra heat that I didn’t have anywhere to attach, plus two more added on just to mess with me.  I got a new thermostat and I hope I never have to do that again.  This thing is finally futuristic enough to figure out whether to make the apartment hotter or colder based on whether it’s currently cold or hot without having to flip a dumb switch, and it even comes with a little radio-transmitter remote so I can adjust the temperature from the next room.  Woo, the future.

I’ve decided that I need to get a laptop.  At Calibre I was finally able to move past that old dorm habit of falling asleep to the sound of whirring computer fans by putting the computer in another room.  The most logical place there to put a desk was in that sunroom off the living room, but in new place the most logical spot is in an alcove off the bedroom.  For a while I was getting in the habit of turning the computer off at night, but then I got back into dowloading quasi-illegal video files off the bittorrentz (dear whoever owns the rights to that old Batman TV show: I’d totally buy the DVDs if you’d just make them already), and I noticed that it was super annoying when this dumb rickety thing doesn’t turn back on again, which is pretty frequently.  I’d like to pitch this old and busted hoopty, get a new hotness laptop that I can just leave out on the couch at night and use the space where the keyboard and monitor now is for a writing desk or something.  Eventually.  That sounds like it’ll be expensive.

I picked a really sucky time to move.  I got sucked up into busyness at work and busyness with holidays and woke up after New Years with an apartment in complete disarray.  I still haven’t completely dug myself out, but I’m getting there.  One motivator for a while was the bike.  One of the reasons I moved to this place was so I can start biking again, but I have a bit of work to do before that.  My back brakes are completely gone, all the cables need some fiddling and tuning, and the whole thing’s just all around filthy.  I started to take the bike apart in order to putter around for a bit and put it all back together again, but I quickly found that I had no freaking clue where any of my tools were.  I started cleaning and organizing and going through the piles of casually deposited crap, and I’ve found everything I need with one exception.

The bike chain and everything that touches the chain is caked in gunk, so I wanted to take the chain off so I can clean everything right.  The tricky part about that is that I use a Shimano chain, and one of the fancy little things that Shimano does is make chain pins with flared ends so that there’s a little bit of extra strenghth between the links.  That also means removing or installing a pin will break the flared end, so they make replacement pins that have one normal end and one extra-long end that you snap off after it’s through, leaving flattened broken metal bits to fill the stead of the usual bits.  It’s a pretty neat little bit of engineering, but the little fuckers cost like five bucks for a package of two, and I know I have one or two around here somewhere.  I just don’t have a clue where.  But I did find the chain wear checking tool, and it looks like my chain is almost due to be replaced anyhow.  I guess I’ll just go ahead and buy a new one.  I’ll probably get back on the bike within another week or two, and that should be interesting.

The Calibre move-out has been going smoother than I expected so far.  A lot of people moved out in early December, and I remember that one of the apartments near mine had a sign up for a couple of days warning of the deadly ozone that was within.  I googled it, and it turns out that Calibre charges $100 to run one a Sharper Image fan or something for a couple of days if they think your place stinks.  This wouldn’t normally be a concern, but in the days leading up to my move whatever they were doing in the apartment downstairs started wafting upstairs, starting with a strong scent of paint fumes and ending with something that smelled like dead rat.  The lady who did my walkthrough didn’t mention anything, so I guess the ten bucks worth of Glade plugins did the trick.  In fact, she complimented me on having cleaned at all, which makes me glad that I don’t manage apartments for a living.  I don’t have the check yet, but they did mail an official looking initial estimate that basically says I didn’t leave any obvious chargeable problems, so unless the more thorough touch-up phase finds that gouge I left in the wall, or the place where the sticky hangers took off the paint, or that I broke the thermostat cover putting it back, I should get my whole deposit back.  But it also reminded me that the deposit was small enough that I don’t really care either way.  It would help buy that new chain, but it won’t offer much toward that laptop.

It’s exhilarating. There’s a real freedom and thrill in traveling out in the elements that a car just can’t capture. Biking was a lot harder than I remembered starting off, and the one leg is still a little skinnier than the other, but I think I’m back close enough to where I was before. There was a moment on Monday a week or two ago when, even though I’d awoken from too little sleep after my usual Sunday-night insomnia, groggy, a little nauseous, once I got on the bike I felt like I could go forever, I piloted the bicycle up severe inclines with unflagging speed, cooked Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes and performed all manner of other feats. For that little moment on a gloomy Monday, I felt alive, and that’s what really makes it worthwhile.

It’s terrifying. I got over my fears of the cars quicker than I thought, but I have a lingering uneasiness about the road itself, much like after that wreck back in January. Maybe it’s because I’m riding more at night. I’ve found that unless I want to fork over the cash for a light the size of a basketball, night riding is in part a matter of memorization, and there are a few types of roads that are especially frightening: the ones that I know suck and have potholes everywhere (e.g., Hammond between Peachtree-Dunwoody and the Dekalb border), the dark ones that I don’t know super well, and the clean roads that the city paved over this month. Sandy Springs recently repaved Glenridge between Roswell Road and the Cingular building (or AT&T building, I guess), and even though there aren’t any more surprise pieces of missing road (I’m pretty sure they make machines to pave roads that you can run behind the machines that tear up roads, but no one ever uses them. To be fair, though, the whole process was super quick for an Atlanta road project. They even had a sign about halfway through the washboardy part that appeared to depict someone on a Vespa riding over a zigzag, which I thought was kind of funny), it’s still an inky mystery to me when I ride it. The only bad spots I’ve found so far are a couple of blotches of extra asphalt west of that one road with the stop light. They’re not anything huge, but they’re kind of annoying, and I’d prefer to dodge them.

I’ve also noticed myself taking turns a little slower than I could. I can’t remember the last time I lost traction due to gravel or sand or any of the other stuff I look out for, but I guess some lessons stick with you. Maybe that’s good?

During the daytime a couple of weeks ago I was instructed by a police officer to “get out of the road.” I didn’t, since I was about 100 feet from the MARTA station and he was going the other way, but it upset me enough that I sent an email to my city officials and that guy who writes the “View from the cop” column in the AJC. The mayor assures me that it was a misunderstanding and that Sandy Springs supports bicycles as part of the solution to the ever increasing problem of traffic congestion, and Lt. Rose said he’d say something about bicycles and mentioned that Peachtree Dunwoody is kind of busy. The police officers doing traffic control in the evenings haven’t given me any dirty looks as far as I’ve noticed, so maybe I didn’t piss anyone off too much.

It’s cold. The weather has been kind of erratic lately, but it’s dropped back below freezing this week, so I wandered into my favorite bike shop today to see what I could do. My face is the only part left that’s not covered, so I figured I’d try to cover that up and then figure out what else needs work. There was an older dude at the shop (the owner? I can’t remember seeing him before) who had all kinds of suggestions for hats and jerseys and shoe coverings and chemical warmers, and he convinced me to buy a balaclava before biking off to lunch. That’s such a weird word. I always think it says “baklava,” which would be delicious but probably not keep me warm. Merriam Webster says it comes from the Crimean war, so I guess I can thank the British for not picking a better word. I haven’t worn it yet (it warmed up a good bit this evening), but tomorrow morning doesn’t look too promising, so I’ll probably try then to see if I can wear the thing without fogging up my glasses or making anything think I’m about to rob a bank.

I took on that stupid hill northward on Sandy Springs Circle on Sunday, and I made it up to the Kroger, about the ? point before just completely giving up and stopping for lunch at some new Italian place. Apparently it’s some local chain that started in Norcross. They have more pictures of celebrities riding Vespas than I have ever seen in one place. They also have two actual Vespas parked out front, though I don’t know what they plan to do with them. They make a pretty good calzone. The stretch of Roswell Road between my green valley and Glenridge isn’t that bad, but I still ended up using some gears I didn’t know that I had. Oddly enough endurance doesn’t seem like too big an issue?I wasn’t huffing and puffing nearly as bad as when I originally started this crazy habit, and I didn’t have to stop completely at the top of the hill like I used to—I just can’t push as hard. Not pissing off the traffic that I’m blocking behind me is a big concern when I’m riding, so falling short of my old speeds is a bit distressing. Also, I can’t keep as straight at lower speeds, so there’s the worry that I’ll veer off into someone’s fender. I hope that this gets better soon, but I seem to be pretty quickly becoming reacquainted with all of the old feelings. I’ve even started dragging my shoes to make up for my shitty brakes without even thinking about it. I really should have bought cheaper shoes.

The MARTA ride went off without any unusual bumps. The Breeze gates are still as crappy as ever. It took three taps in the morning to get into the station, and on the way home I helped tap someone through at North Springs whose gate didn’t open because he was standing in the way of the beam like you would think you’re supposed to. The buses have replaced the card readers, or at least the face plate on the card readers, with fancy looking blue things in the three or four months I’ve been gone. The new readers have a grey rectangle on either side of the card target, and I’m not sure if they’re buttons or if they’re just hiding bolts. It still took my card without me having to do anything extra, so I didn’t ask. I didn’t see anyone today without a Breeze card, so I guess the transition went pretty ok. I still think it’s dumb that you need a Breeze card to transfer to rail but can’t buy one on a bus. Someone pointed out on a mailing list that Amtrak, about the only way into the city that doesn’t have a MARTA rail station, is especially troublesome. I would say that no one uses Amtrak, but my own Amtrak experience seemed crowded enough. So everyone gets to pay an extra $2.25 as a reward for using an inconvenient means of transportation. I don’t really like the Breeze cards.

Dang these shoes were expensive. I guess I’m used to buying the cheapest pieces of worthless junk I can find as far shoes go, so a three-digit price was a bit of a surprise. Oh well, at least they feel pretty nice. They’re New Balance. They don’t have that curve that most shoes do, so they look very large. They are also very shiny. Besides the reflective surfaces, all of the white parts look like they could glow in the dark. I wonder how long that’ll last. The laces are kind of weird. They’re lumpy, which is supposed to help keep them tied by forcing the knot into the grooves. You can kind of see how they look in this picture. They also have those two straps going through the ‘N’ in the side logos that attach to the middle lace loops. They’re supposed to stabilize my foot or something, but after relacing them for bike riding and wearing them super-loose, I don’t think it’s going to do me any good. Wearing a shoe on my right foot is one of the stranger sensations I’ve ever felt, but it’s starting to go away. I think that if that stupid boot weren’t five pounds or so, it’d make a really comfortable shoe.

I rode the bike today from that Publix next to the Silver Comet to the Paulding county line. The normal trail part is about 13 miles through that segment, plus another three-quarters of a mile or so of that extension up to the Publix and a little more for where I kept going into Paulding county, looking for a bench where I could eat lunch, so in all it was a little under thirty miles round trip. It’s a lot harder than I remember. I figure I’ll try challenging that awful hill on Sandy Springs Circle tomorrow.

One of the more minor problems faced by bicyclers is how to keep pant legs and shoelaces out of the chain. Chain guards are decidedly uncool and have a non-zero mass, so without those everything’s just kind of swinging around down there right next to the drive train. For shoelaces I use one of the creative lacing methods at Ian’s Shoelace Site that leaves the bow on the outside of the shoes. It has the extra benefit of making the laces nearly impossible to trip over when untied, which is a frequent problem because I wear my laces too loose. It’s too bad that all the velcro shoes are either sized for kids or really ugly. For the pant legs there are several solutions. The simplest, the scene kid rollup, is simply rolling up one pant leg to keep it out of the chain. You can also tuck your pant leg into your sock, wear a rubber band, or even wear a fancy reflective strip specially designed for pants leg holding that you can find at a bike shop near you. Like so many things I do, my solution is the one that hardly anyone even remembers anymore.

My mom gave me a pair of clips when I started riding while at home one summer, and I’ve been wearing them since. I lost the original pair—I really don’t know what happened to them; they’re probably in a gutter somewhere—but I managed to find someone on ebay selling a bunch of junk a bike shop found in the back, among the items a few pairs of “Terry trouser bands.” I haven’t been able to find anything about this mysterious Terry. I don’t know if they even exist anymore. All of the clips I’ve been able to find are goofy reflective things that repel bears and make your coffee, and I don’t want any of that. They seem very inelegant; I just want to keep my pants out of the chain. I don’t have the legs for those goofy shorts. My pair of clips or trouser bands or whatever has been sitting on the coffee table for over three months now. I hope to use them again soon.

I bought a horn. I don’t even know if it’s legal to use. I bought it from some website in Hong Kong, and though it looked like a perfectly legit site and they exchanged my cash monies for a product without any difficulty, I can only assume that they’re up to something sketchy. I guess all of those bootleg DVD stories have made me a xenophobe. Did you know that the Hong Kong Currency is the dollar (HKD)? I didn’t. I guess I assumed they’d be on the yuan now, and maybe the pound or something before that. I was a little surprised when my $3 shipping charge turned into $23.50 worth of stamps. The Honk Kong dollar is worth about .077 USD, so I still came out on top according to the Internet, just not by quite such a shocking margin. And it’s good to know that it doesn’t really cost over $20 to ship a pound of whatever between here and Hong Kong.

Anyhow, I have a horn. It runs on 9V batteries and it claims to have a volume of 115dB. That’s 5 dB short of a jet engine and 15 dB short of a Manowar concert. I haven’t tried it out yet, both because I didn’t have a charged 9V battery handy and because I don’t want to upset my neighbors too much. The website I’m pulling these made up numbers from puts a car horn at 110dB, so it’s probably not shockingly loud apart from being honked by a bike. I hope it works.

To recap, my last doctor visit showed that my foot is still kind of broken but not very broken, so I can walk on it now. The schedule the doctor gave me was two weeks at 50% weight (boot plus one crutch), two weeks with just the boot and two weeks in a sneaker before I get x-rayed again, but, since he knows I had already been cheating, he said I might as well skip the first step. Today marks the end of week two walking around in the boot with no crutches, and the therapist suggests I wait another week before switching to sneakers again. I figure I’m close enough and I’m going to try getting back on the bike this weekend and see how far I can go. Bikes don’t use much of the heel, and I’m getting impatient. If anyone wants to join me, I’ll be on the Silver Comet; I’ll race you to the county line.

And now, the rest of the story.

I got my bike back today. Kat was in town for the day for some anime convention, so I enlisted her help in picking the bike up. The final total ended up being over $600, so I’ll have more fun with copying machines and faxes submitting the rest of this claim. I’m not even quite done with it yet. I realized after I got home that I didn’t get the fancy extended warranty on this new set of wheels, so I have to talk with Raul on Monday to sort that out.

The new crank is a Shimano Ultegra, which I’m told is way better than the worthless pieces of junk Schwinn installs at the factory. Both the crank and the bottom bracket are chrome colored, whereas the old ones were both black. It still fits with the three-color scheme of the bike, so whatever. The new bottom bracket says “DO NOT DISASSEMBLE,” written in the same ominous font and tone as “REFILL ONLY WITH KIKKOMAN,” so I guess that means the new one is a sealed assembly and the old one probably wasn’t. So that’s a nice improvement. The wheels have some different markings on them, but they’re the same model, so I guess it’s just a new model year. The new rear rack is the exact same one I bought at REI a few months ago.

As far as the healing process goes, my therapist says I’ve been making a lot of progress, and she keeps finding new ways to torture me in our semiweekly sessions. Though the ankle is still a concern, things have been moving on to getting the rest of my leg working again, and that hasn’t been really very pleasant. Apparently my bone should be pretty well healed by now, but it still hurts a little bit to put a lot of weight on it. While at the bike shop today, I decided on a whim to hop on and coast the fifteen yards or so from the door from the car, and, while beginning to instinctively dismount on the right side, I got a feeling in my heel that, though I didn’t hurt myself, I was about to do something really stupid. I quickly corrected with no damage done, but I still found that concerning. If the bone is healed, why does weight make the heel hurt? The heel’s not a muscle, so it’s not like it’s been wasting away or anything. My foot is also still all swollen and gross, though, so maybe that has something to do with it. I hope that goes away soon.