Darth Lefty 

Playing with Apple watch and GPS at the same time. The morning leg, Strava just ignored the Garmin entry. This afternoon, they came in as a "group activity" and I'm not sure what it did, if anything, with the Garmin entry.

I had a great afternoon ride. Pounded up the short steep section. This is really unusual, doing any kind of burst for me has been difficult for years due to my bum ticker. Still stuck in zone 2, though.

Darth Lefty 

Ordered another different tire.

I feel as though I've found my groove for now. The GPS is a simple model but encouraging me to go faster, which helps with being timely. Fitness is improving again. I'm in the phase now where I can ride most of the week before needing bike shorts and now my knees are hurting. In the past I've gotten through this phase too. It's nice to finally be back at it after not just the pandemic, but years of upset in my schedule that prevented a lot of riding. With all the kids on similar school schedules I can rely on getting a ride nearly every day, and the ride is long enough to be effective.

essiemyra

It was a very pleasant ride to work this am. The temp was a cool 57 degrees when I left the house. With the sun not rising until 5:52 the mornings are starting out just a tad bit dark.

Tundra_Man 

Consecutive bicycle work commute number 1250:

First day back on the bike after being on vacation all of last week. Weird how fast your butt can lose its fitness. Wasn't terrible, but I could tell it wasn't used to sitting on a saddle.

Beautiful morning with the temps in the 70s. Going to get into the 90s for the ride home with a 20 mph headwind. Not looking forward to that.

A train was parked on the MUP, and it would have been a mile to backtrack and take a different route. I momentarily considered crawling under it and pulling my bike through, but that was just a fleeting thought before sanity knocked me to my senses. I started walking alongside the length of the train to walk around it and had only made it about 50 yards when the train started moving. Glad I decided not to be a moron and try to crawl through.

DQRider 

This bike is a "Best English Custom" show winner that has been sitting in the shop for over a year, awaiting maintenance.



Sturmey-Archer 5-speed, Woody's bamboo fenders, Brooks saddle, Carradice bag, V.O. Milan handlebar, Ergon cork grips, and my careful Rustoleum rattle-can paint job.



She makes a good commuter, if a bit delicate feeling. The SA 5-speed internal hub is pretty sensitive to adjust; you need to get it just right, or you end up skipping and damaging the internals. Not to mention your knees...

We had a beautiful commute this morning, however. Saw 5 deer while riding through Thompson Lake Park: one buck, two does, and two fawns. They just stood there looking at me, as if to say, "What? Never seen a deer before?".

Then their tails went up, and they bounded into the underbrush, gone from sight in seconds. These encounters always feel somewhat magical to me.

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Tundra_Man 

Consecutive bicycle work commute number 1251:

Ever have one of those days? This was one.

Had an echocardiogram scheduled for this morning. Just a yearly routine check, which I will have to have for the rest of my life after my open heart surgery. I was supposed to have it done in June, but they were booked solid until today. Echo wasn't scheduled until 8:30, so I thought "Hey! I get an extra half an hour to sleep!"

But then I woke up at my normal time needing the restroom. These situations are a lose-lose because if I don't get up, the need to pee will keep me awake. But if I do get up and pee, the activity will wake me up enough that I can't go back to sleep. I got up.

Started to ride to the hospital, and was about 1.5 miles from home when I got a flat tire. It was one of those where I heard exactly when it happened, and knew my tire was going to be flat in a few hundred yards. Most of my flats happen right in this same area where there is a lot of construction traffic that cuts across the MUP and the path is always covered with rocks and debris.

Attempted to patch the tube, but the patch didn't hold. You would think after all these years that my success rate at patching tubes would be greater than 50%, but it's always a coin flip for me whether or not the patch is going to hold. That was my last patch in my kit, too. Out of frustration I threw the tube in the trash.

I called the hospital and explained that I could still get there, but I would be late. They said that they were too full to handle me getting there late, so they cancelled my appointment and I will have to reschedule. I have a bad feeling I'm going to get billed for a last minute cancellation.

Walked the bike the mile and a half back home, as fast as I could in bike shoes. At home I grabbed my last spare tube and installed it. (Note to self: order more tubes and patches.) While I had the bike on the stand I noticed my front headset was loose. I figured as long as I was blowing a couple of hours of vacation time I might as well take the extra five minutes to fix that. So at least I accomplished something.

Once the bike was repaired I left the garage only to have my front headlight go dead before the end of the driveway. I've noticed that my headlight switch is no longer turning red every time when the battery gets low. By this time it was plenty light outside so I just finished the ride to work without the light and took extra care to make sure oncoming traffic saw me before I made any turns.

Hopefully I got all the ugly stuff out of the way for today.

DQRider 

Rode my Peugeot PFN-10 "Velo de Ville" this morning. Originally purchased for $35 from an angry divorcee as the movers were loading up the truck in front of her house. I felt a twinge of guilt for the fellow it used to belong to.

That passed, however, once I realized how worn out it was. So I rebuilt it for commuting, and finally rode it to work for the first time this morning. The handlebar bag comes in really handy. With it, I don't have to wear my backpack, and can complete my ride to work with literally no sweat. Since I arrived early this morning, I rode around the perimeter of the parking lot, and shot these in front of our wall of pallets:




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essiemyra

It was a pleasant yet uneventful ride to work this am.

DQRider 

I drove from Saint Paul, MN to Cedar Rapids, IA to pick up this bike. Something like a 9-hour round trip with the lunch stop. Now configured as an all-roads tourer, it is an absolute joy to ride. I retrofitted it with period Deore XT derailleurs and thumb shifters, in 3x7 speed configuration. Rather than my usual Brooks saddle, I went with a Cardiff Mercia leather saddle, which is similar in comfort and quality to the Brooks, but about half the price. Today dawned hazy from wildfire smoke blowing in from out west. I rode my usual 6-mile downhill route to work, but I'll be taking the 18-mile "Long Way Home" to complete the loop tonight.

First generation mountain bikes... gotta love `em!


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Darth Lefty 

Did not ride today. Got a chipped tooth and a dentist appointment that would basically double my miles for the day and that's too much time away from the desk.

Not that I might have ridden after all. There is a fast growing fire about a 45 minute drive east of me in the Sierra foothills and it's only gotten worse so far, started this weekend and already up to 53,000 acres this morning. Global warming killed all the pine trees via bark beetle infestation and they have all just been sitting there waiting to burn for years, the drought this year doubled the chances

Darth Lefty 

I'm looking forward to a really solid week of bike rides but it depends a lot on the smoke forecast. The huge Caldor fire mentioned above has doubled since my last report. It is a 45 min drive east up US 50 from me on the South Fork of the American River. The fire weather has been weird. It's been cooler than normal because the sun is blocked. Sacramento to the west is at the apex of the great delta that leads from the Sierra rivers to the San Francisco Bay, so when we get the delta breeze like this weekend the air at ground level is fairly clear. I feel a bit guilty about that. I can ride but that wind keeps blowing past here and stokes the fire. It crossed north of US 50 today, has burned more than 160 square miles, and God knows where it will end. The deadwood from the bark beetle plague is parched from the drought. Hoping it does not burn over Echo Summit and threaten Tahoe. Meanwhile the Dixie fire to the north burned over the entire Sierras to the east from the foothills by Chico and burned north to Lassen Volcanic, and is still going pretty much uncontained, having cooked more than a thousand square miles


https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/7801/

essiemyra

My ride this morning was pleasant and I saw a deer standing on someone's front lawn.

Last week on a ride home from work I saw a dog standing on the front lawn in his yard. He was barking. I kept riding and out of nowhere another dog, whom I had not seen earlier, both dogs came racing to my bike, and stood in front of me. I had to stop the bike as not to run them over. They were not small dogs they were about the size of a collie. I yelled at the woman sitting in the driveway from the house they came from to call her dogs back. She said they were not hers. Yet they came from the yard of the house she is sitting at. But she did call them back. I have taken this road frequently over the years and never had any issues with dogs from that house. Anyway going forward I think I am going to find a way to attach mace to my handlebars incase that happens again. I am scared of big dogs that I do not know, especially if they are able to get that close to me.

groovestew

Hey everyone, I'm back after 3 weeks off.

I'm taking some inspiration from DQRider and posting a picture of today's bicycle. My photo is crap compared to his, but here it is anyway.



This is the first time I've ever ridden this particular bike to work. It's a Peugeot Performance 5000, which best I can figure, is a mid-90's mid-range racing bike, old enough to still have been made in France. I bought it several years ago for 250 Euros in Brussels, and rode it up to Amsterdam over three days. Once there, I put it into a cardboard box and brought it home, where it has hung on a hook in my garage ever since. The bike looked pretty much stock when I bought it, and came with early STI levers that didn't work very well. The front shifter worked okay, the back shifter hardly worked at all. For my European bike trip, I managed to coerce the rear derailleur onto a cog in the middle of the ring, and then just used the front shifter to gear up and down. Thankfully, the Netherlands is very flat, so shifting was minimal.

During my vacation this summer, I managed to find some gently used bar end shifters and brake levers at a snobby little boutique bike shop in the trendy area of town, so I finally refurbished the bike, along with new cables, bar tape (double-wrapped with yellow and blue to match the bike's paint scheme), and tires. The tires that were on there when I bought it were in decent condition, but they were teeny little 20mm things (horrible for riding on some of the European cobbled streets). These are 23mm. I would have liked 25mm tires, but the bike shop was out, and in fact, I took the last 23mm tires they had in stock.

The bike seems to ride nicely. I don't really like bar-end shifters; I would rather have down-tube shifters in fact, but those are hard to find. I also don't really like the narrow racing bars, but they're okay for an eight mile commute. Chilly morning, with the thermometer on my house showing 5C/41F, and damp streets from 48 hours of much-needed rain. (There was snow in the mountains, 400 km/250 miles west of here.) I too saw a couple of deer, which ran across the path about 100 meters from where I took the picture above.

Have a great day everyone.

essiemyra

A very pleasant ride in this am. Though we are having high humidity it is not so bad in the am.

DQRider 

Excellent ride this morning, on a bike I've just finished converting to commuter. I saw mama doe and her two fawns in Thompson Lake Park again this morning.

This `84 Peugeot Canyon Express used to be my Beer Truck:





Until I realized that it is too good a bike for such limited use. So I removed the big porteur basket up front and swapped the Continental Retro-Ride tires for a pair of DTHs, which noticeably improved ride quality.

Now all I have to do is reinstall the Suntour Power Ratchet shifters the right way `round!

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Welshboy

Decent weather this week so I knocked off my 3 days on my road bike which backfired on me when I punctured. Grrrrr!

essiemyra

Another pleasant commute this morning, though the humidity is still high.

groovestew

A few degrees celsius warmer than Tuesday, so I decided to forgo the gloves, and regretted it almost immediately. Noticeably colder in the valley. I've been in the office for nearly 20 minutes and my hands still feel a bit numb...it's literaly hrd to typ and i kep making speling mstakes.

This also seems to be the season where there's more poo on the trails.

Cool breeze under sunny skies.

Darth Lefty 

Smoky. Hope this means the east side of the fire gets some relief, while the west side doesn’t move into town streets

groovestew

Wow, that yellow grass looks one carelessly tossed cigarette butt away from an inferno. Scary.

essiemyra

Finally its Friday, I commuted four days by bike this week. Yay. It was a very pleasant commute this morning it felt cooler than it has in a few days.

Tundra_Man 

Consecutive bicycle work commute number 1259:

My wife has had shingles the last two weeks. I became eligible for the shingles vaccine two years ago, but hadn't gotten one yet merely due to procrastination. Seeing her go through it made me decide to bump getting the vaccine higher up the priority list. I went to the doctor yesterday for my yearly physical and as long as I was there I went ahead and got my first dose.

My doctor warned me that this vaccine often makes people feel pretty lousy for a couple of days. I tend to react poorly to medications as it is, so I fully expected to wake up this morning and decide to call in sick. Turns out, I feel pretty OK. My arm feels like someone punched it, but it's more annoying than painful. I might be a little more tired than usual, but overall I'm doing fine. So I decided I had no excuse but to suck it up and ride the bike to work.

It was raining this morning when I got up. By the time I was ready to go, the rain had momentarily stopped, but another system was moving in. I decided as long as I had a window, and as long as my road bike was already filthy from a summer's worth of riding, I would just take it instead of my hybrid with fenders. The rain is supposed to taper off by this afternoon, and will appreciate having the road bike as I fight the headwind on the way home.

Got to the client's office and had a pretty good skunk stripe up my shorts, shirt and backpack. Apparently the roads were still quite wet. Oh well, I survived.

Pantah

I can assure you it is. Nearly lost all my possessions in the 2017 fires that whipped through a corner of Santa Rosa, thankfully moved out of that house a week before it burned down. Several friends lost their homes that year. My parents have been evacuated twice, myself once. Unfun.

My commute, however, was much more pleasant a couple of days ago. Foggy, so a bit damp, but pleasantly cool. Late afternoon heading home was a bit warmer but not uncomfortably so. Most of my commute is on a bike path, so smooth sailing and uneventful, both welcome when going to and from work.

Darth Lefty 

Rode four days previous. Wednesday was a lunch ride, not a commute. But not today.

Darth Lefty 

Watching the AQI. Judging not likely to ride tomorrow. The last few days the smoke has been blowing down here in the early morning and blowing back again in the afternoon.