Stopping by the park on a cooler evening

As you may have heard, it's been hot.  Really, really, disgustingly hot.  Just as many people will look out on a snowy day and think, "no way I'm bicycling in that kind of weather," I see 90-degree temperatures in my 10-day forecast and die a little on the inside.  (To be honest, my tolerance for heat is even lower than this.  I get anxious as soon as numbers beginning with 8 start to show up.)  Among other things, this has negatively affected my progress on Part 3 of the Let's Go Ride a Bike Summer Games.  "Covering new territory" has been pretty low on my list of Things That Seem Appealing When I'm Already So Effing Sweaty.  I've still been riding to get places I need to go, since it is better than walking in the heat, but my extracurricular activities have been heavily curtailed as I retreat to an underpants-and-popsicles existence. 

Coming to my bicycle after work today, though, it was one of those instances when you put your feet on the pedals, and it just feels so good.  I didn't have the most time to detour, but I did take a long-er way home.  There's a left turn about halfway through my regular route that is the perfect off-ramp for nights when I decide on the spur of the moment that I'm not ready to go home yet and just want to toodle around a bit.  Tucked among the quiet side streets is a small gated park (which happens to be in Lovely territory) that I've walked by a million times but never entered.  I was about to glide by again when it occurred to me that it was sort of ridiculous that I'd never gone in, especially since I lived directly across the street from it for a year.  So we went.

The sign on the gate said No Bicycles; but I wasn't planning on riding, and Frida promised to be on her best behavior.  The tall trees always made the park seem dark and secretive when I would pass by.  It was sunny today, but inside, it still felt shadowy and hidden away from the rest of the neighborhood.  I know a lot of people take their dogs through, but today it was empty, and very, very quiet.

Frida blends right in.

Actually, even though I'd never entered the park before today, it's the setting of one of my favorite Cambridge moments:  The year I was living across the street was my first year of architecture school-- a year notorious for keeping students in studio almost nonstop, at least partially so they can be broken down into itsy bitsy architecture pieces that will theoretically be molded into great big architecture geniuses by the end of their training (I remain unconvinced by this methodology).  I was walking home one night/morning in the spring on one of those nights where you first notice that the air doesn't feel so cold and you don't have to walk fast anymore.  It was probably around 4:30 or 5, and as I made my way, barely awake, through this neighborhood of enormous, dark, silent houses, I found myself suddenly surrounded by birdsong.  It was as if I had stepped into a bubble that was full of nothing but singing birds, with no other noises to interfere, and it was so incredibly loud that the sound almost started to feel tangible.  Every minute of sleep I got that year was precious and jealously guarded, but I had to stop.  I just stood in the middle of the street, listening and feeling like I was in a dream.  I'd never heard anything like it, and no matter how many times I passed by the same spot at the same hour, I never heard it again.  I like to imagine now that every one of those trees in the park was covered, branch by branch, with birds, and they'd all just woken up at the same moment and were really excited about it.

No birds today, though.  Just me and Frida in the park.

Wedge issues

As others have noted, biking in heels is a lot easier than walking in them.  Not easier?  Biking in platform wedges.  Obviously, right?  I mean, just look:

There's a solid inch of cork under the toe there.  But apparently, I needed to try this out for myself to be sure.

It's par for the course for women's fashion that the rare pair of heels that is actually, miraculously easy to walk in would have to be difficult to cycle in.  Whereas your average pair of high heels makes me feel like the balls of my feet are being continually stabbed with flaming knives if I try to wear them for more than ten minutes, these are notably flame-stabbingness-free thanks to the platforms.  I knew this extra height would affect the ride once I got on the bike, but I seriously underestimated just how much.

The problems were apparent almost immediately.  It felt like I was riding a bicycle that was two sizes too small, and it was hard to really feel the pedals, which was disturbing and uncomfortable.  My legs felt incredibly inefficient; starting from a stop was touchy; and I think my balance was generally a little bit off.  All of that from just one little inch!  Once again, I'm learning how sensitive bicycle geometries can be to the smallest of adjustments, and an inch here is no small thing. 

Still, my ride to work is very, very short, so I didn't want to take the time to go back for other shoes or stop to adjust the saddle height and instead just wobbled along, feeling kind of foolish.  It was non-fun. 

not excited to ride home

The one upside was that I did find it considerably easier to put a toe down at red lights, which was especially helpful for me since I'm trying to train myself to stop automatically hopping off my bike whenever I come to a stop.  I don't know why I started doing that, but it's been a really hard habit to break and it makes me feel amateurish, particularly if I'm sitting out in an intersection waiting to make a left turn.  So then, these were good as "training toes," though that was about it for positives, bicycle-wise.

In short, this is what I learned today: don't bike in platform wedges.  Just don't.  I do not think you will enjoy it.

Plans for the Lady?

a shot from the Lady's very short stay at home

For the past few weeks, the Lady Raleigh has been sitting in storage at Quad Bikes while I tried to think of what to do about her decrepit real wheel.  There was a brief but thrilling moment where it seemed that there might be salvation from California, with dear reader Corey K. offering to check out what appeared to be a Raleigh rim with Sturmey-Archer hub in place; but it was not to be.*  Then there was an inquiry with a local craigslist bike guy, who happened to have a like-new rim from a 1960s Raleigh Sports that he could give me; but he ended up advising that if I were going to be rebuilding the rear wheel anyway, I might as well upgrade to an alloy rim to up my braking power.

So it's finally happening on Thursday.  The Lady Raleigh will be getting a brand new Sun CR-18 alloy rim, and I get to come watch!  I really wanted to try doing it myself with the wheel-building class at Broadway Bicycle School, but you have to have completed their advanced course first, and they don't even have another wheel-building class scheduled for the rest of the summer.  Plus, the advanced class seems like it would be perfect for the Lady Raleigh herself, since it covers wheel truing and overhauling the headset and rear hub; so it would be good to have her up and running for when that starts in August.  

I have a lot more to say about the basic class that I'm taking at Broadway (short answer is: I love it!), but just wanted to give a quick update on the Lady's health for now.


*Here's Corey K.'s hilarious summing up of the encounter:

"He was a bike guy- in too good of shape, and too clean-cut to be a fixie-kid hipster. I don't know if it was ignorance or malice. But the Craigslist rim in question, while in decent enough shape, was a 27 x 1 1/4 rim like a '70s 10-speed would have. Bah!"

Typically Cambridge

The workaday milk crate

the dinged-up paint job

 the barebones lighting scheme

finished with a dash of well-worn elegance and European charm.

Just a peek...

... at my sister's new bicycle!  I've literally been begging for photographs and finally got a few precious snaps.  Anyway, here it is, with the man-bike (and man-owner) visible in the background, before getting some final work done at Recycle-a-Bicycle:

Just look at that Brooklyn hipster back there.  Can you believe he didn't already have a bicycle?!

Love the white inset on the head tube, and the gum wall tires nicely pick up the gold of the Phillips lion head badge.

Speaking of head badges, the man-bike comes with a rather jaunty one of its own:

My sister and her boyfriend got to pick these bikes out of what sounds like an awesome, giant warehouse, where they also came across a huge fleet of some 200 Batavi:

Apparently, Recycle-a-Bicycle received these as a donation but only to be used as rentals, not sales.  That's too bad because they are kind of cute, in a modern, imagine-the-Entrada-Spirit-had-a-baby-with-the-BUB kind of way.

I'll be heading to New York for the holiday weekend, where I will see if I can successfully ride the man-bike and hope to visit some cool bicycle shops (suggestions?).  That is, unless it's as hot as it is in Boston right now, in which case I will just eat popsicles and scowl all weekend long.  We'll see!

Monday, why can't you be more like Friday?

Today is, in a word, totally disgusting-- oh, snap! So disgusting it needs two words! Anyway, it's hot. It's incredibly humid. And there have been threats of severe thunderstorms all day, which, somehow, are not predicted to cool things down much at all.  I often face a rather stubborn headwind on one stretch of my commute to work; today, it was just as stubborn except it was also BURNING HOT. Ugh. I ended up scrapping my after-work plans to conduct both business and pleasure excursions around town due to the aforementioned disgustingness and also a vague fear of being struck by lightning on my steel bicycle (Question: how valid is this fear?), and instead, I rushed home to guiltily turn on my window a/c, take off my pants, and eat too much of a $15 block of torrone.

It's hard to remember just how gorgeous it was only a few days ago on Friday:

Perfect weather, the gently sinking sun, the river, a book, and a bicycle.  I will have it again!  Just not today.

ZOMG It's Caturday!

(Paws, you guys!)