Toutes Les Choses que font on heureux.

Well, my spring break commenced this week, and I've been genuinely enjoying how it's gone so far.

I really went into the holiday with absolutely zero plans, and it's all played out very well in seemingly serendipitous ways. I decided on a whim Saturday evening to return to Dallas, see my parents, and celebrate my upcoming birthday with some old friends; chiefly my best friend from high school who I rarely see, and my good friend Jon. I had a wonderful time there, and my friends and family really helped make me feel special. I had reservations about making the time and spending the money to travel, but I'm glad I did now. Outside of that, I've fared on the side of audacity recently in some other facets of my life, and I see the rewards coming already.

(Note: This was written over spring break and never finished. Life became very busy soon after that. I have decided to publish it as written with the original datestamp. Normal posting will resume soon. I will continue with a short summary of spring break written congruently with the rest of the post.)

Spring break has been quite busy. It's during SXSW (South by South West) for me this year, and my good friend Eddie came into town and has been staying with me. I also found time to work on my bike and get it rebuilt with it's new Groupset (the wonderful SRAM Rival). My man Drew at Austinbikes also sold me some delightful high-end Mavic wheels that he was letting go for a good price so that he could upgrade to some Fulcrums that run tubeless tires. The finished bike is now depicted in the header.

After that, I stumbled upon a used but virtually like new Digital SLR that was perfect for me. I snapped it up, which will bite me in the ass later as that was all of my savings pretty much, but it's worth it, as I got lots of SXSW pictures. Eddie is hobbyist photographer as well, with a penchant for Concert photography shot with high-speed film (he really likes how grainy and vivid the colors become). I got to seriously play with my new camera, and it's readily apparent by the quality of my work over SXSW that the learning curve was present, but ascended fairly fast.

All in all, Spring Break was wonderful, and I got to do a wide variety of things and spend time with wonderful people. What more could you ask for?

Le Projet du Vélo Jaune

After something catastrophic happened to my commuter bike two weeks ago, I've been looking for a solution to its replacement or repair. It's a bike so old and worn that it's barely worth fixing, and I couldn't justify retail price for any replacement components; chiefly the rear derailleur and the rear wheel, which had the rim bent so badly that it can't be trued.

When the most economical replacement to be had was found to be about a $125 used bike, I decided to investigate Yellow Bike, as I mentioned earlier in the week. This ended up being a wonderful experience, as the people there are truly helpful and honestly willing to assist a person with a bicycle in need in whatever way they can. With their assistance, I managed to replace my wheel with a used wheel (after overhauling the hub) and, with a new chain, get the bike running single speed with a few hours of work over the past few days. The derailleur will require a bit more work, as it was all an integrated piece with the old derailleur hanger (which fit into the sliding dropouts of the frame), and I've had to acquire a new hanger. I will return on Monday to attempt to repair the shifting system with another derailleur.

Anyway, I know this entire entry reads like a plug for Yellow Bike (and they have definitely earned that sidebar link), but they are a seriously great group of people who just want to help everyone with bikes. Even though I'm almost done there with my bike, I think I'll be back several times to volunteer and refine my mechanic skills. I highly recommend stopping by if you want to learn a lot about bikes, or keep your beater bike running. They are currently working on a new location, so let's hope that their transition goes off without a hitch so that this valuable resource for cycling in Austin grows and becomes available to even more people.

Il Fait si beau.

Yesterday was interesting, and I'm really enjoying this extra hour or so of light, so I ended up taking an evening jaunt about Shoal Creek for two hours. Little League season has begun, and so it was lively at the baseball field with families and their children enjoying the weather and the season. Most of the people at the field were nice, and the people in the concession stand will fill up your water bottles for you, which is super nice. I also passed by a duplex I've begun looking into renting in the Shoal Creek neighborhood, so if you read this and are interested in splitting a 3bed/1bath duplex, drop me a line.

I'm going to start including the data from my cyclocomputer during training rides in the journal entries specific to rides, and maybe even for races. Here's the data for Yesterday:

March 10th, 2009:
Trip Time: 2 hours, 7 Minutes
Trip Dist: 31.1 Miles
SpeedMax: 30.5 MPH
SpeedAvg: 14.5 MPH
CadMax: 174RPM (must be wrong)
CadAvg: 64RPM (I need to stop coasting)

This reminds me, I actually acquired a Polar computer a while ago, but I've been putting off installing it until I finish a bunch of other work on my bike, including a rebuild and a refit. The heart rate information should prove to be a valuable training tool.

This afternoon, I need to go by Yellow Bike and see if they can help me with my commuter bike, which got seriously damaged the other week, and needs at a minimum a replacement rim, chain, and rear derailleur. On top of yellow bike, some people at UT are trying to launch "Orange Bike", and there are some other community bike shops in the area, but I don't know much about them. I'm actually quite fond of community bike projects, and I really love these organizations, because they go back to the simple beauty of the bicycle: a machine that allows a person to go exponentially further than they could on their own, with very little materials cost (relative), and a lot of ingenuity. The reason I actually got into cycling was a concern for community development and city planning; what with the way that cities in Texas are built around cars and driving, and are incredibly difficult to traverse in other ways. Riding in heavy traffic with apathetic or animous drivers still frightens me considerably (though I am much better than I was), but a bunch of more seasoned cyclists I know (such as Miguel and the T4K People), can easily hold their own and commute almost anywhere in Austin par vélo.

While I've thought that yellow bike was a cool idea for a long time, I've never really participated in it, even though I've been living in Austin again for over half a year now. I'm not sure why. It probably doesn't help that most of the bikes assembled for "community use" without any compensation at all by the volunteers usually end up stolen, and that makes me quite sad. For the time, the project is in a transitional period as they try to relocate, and only one of their shops is actually operational, leaving them sort of hard to find.

My living situation is rapidly deteriorating, and it's creating a considerable amount of stress in my life. I'm trying not to let it affect my schoolwork and training, but it's hard to balance it all, and I'm expending a lot of my time and energy that could be spent studying or riding on trying to sort this out.

Wish me luck.

l'Internet, C'est un chose Terrible.

After a defective cyclocross frame debacle (More on that later, don't shop at Performance), I have a bunch of left-over bike parts, some of which are cyclocross specific.

I decided to sell the remaining cyclocross parts on craigslist, starting with the tires.

As usually happens when selling on Craigslist, after a while I began to get e-mails. One of them seemed innocuous at first, but soon went weird places:

"Hey man,

are your sweet tires still for sale?

Dan"

I replied that they were, and then the weird began:

"I dont really know much bout bike tires but i need some. My boyfriend wrecked my car so i need some new tires for my bike so i can ride it down to work. so what are some good tires?

Dan"

It is weird to try and find something like specific bike tires on Craigslist if you don't know what you are buying. I replied that I hadn't seen his bike, and since they were a strange sort of tire, they probably wouldn't fit his bike; however if he could read the old tire size, I would tell him if they would fit. His next response became officially strange:

"Yeah it says 700 something. How does $30 dollars sound, and a little man to man action?

Dan"

At this point, I just quit replying, but I continued to receive e-mail:

"yo dude so do we have a deal? I need some tires and im kind of gettin restless now since me and my boyfriend are temporarly [sic] apart since he crashed my car. Let me know tough guy............"

This was really creeping me out at first, but Scott said he thought it was probably a prank, seeing as I'd posted the ad on facebook. This makes a lot of sense, after the fact, seeing as there are no pictures of me in the ad. The last e-mail, which was just one word and some question marks, leads me to the same conclusion.

I still don't know who did it, though...

It's just not easy being a tough guy, I guess.