kar0ling

Well, that was a day! If it had been any other morning, an unexpected omission with my transportation wouldn't have been of so very much account, but this morning, I was supposed to be at a meeting in NK at 9 a.m. So I was displeased (and flabbergasted) to discover my stem missing when I went to unlock my bike this morning. It's a tad difficult to ride like this. I rushed upstairs to my winter bike, hoping, after a conversation with a bike-riding (and bike-fixing) coworker, that a simple application of grease would partially address the problem that caused me to park the steed. After some lubrication, the chain was sagging like a plumber's pants and I realized the pushing and pulling in my drive chain was caused by the slack catching up with a start. In the drizzly back alley, I finally realized my rear derailleur was at fault for shifting forward, got my fingers good and greasy fiddling with the chain, and, after a few false starts up and down the street second-gues...

That I was blogging through April last year is quite helpful to gauge expectations and precedent for bikeable weather this year. Thus, this seems a good place to note for future reference that I took out my 3-season bike on Thursday, April 17. I'd dropped it off at Natural Cycle for a tune-up at the end of March, so it was ready Apr. 1 already, but, the roads still having some slippery spots and a whole lot of gravel, I decided to stay on the winter bike a while longer to spare my lovely from the worst wet and grit. Then it was hard to gauge when would be an appropriate time to make the switch. In the end, my bike made the decision for me. A month before, I'd had a bizarre incident with my drive train where my chain was tugging and pulling and catching and simply feeling wretched. With no measures to fix it, the problem disappeared. A few days before the fateful Wednesday, I'd been feeling some wonkiness in the drive train but it felt like my right pedal -- which ha...

Once again, some advocacy group has declared April "Bike Every Day" month, a group that obviously doesn't live in Manitoba where fair weather bike riders only begin to think of hauling the two-wheeled conveyance out of the shop part-way through the month. So numbers for Bike Winnipeg's annual spring bike count were pretty low this sunny but brisk morning. I learned something, though, and not about the demographics of Winnipeg's active transportation participants. I found myself tensing up when an approaching person's appearance suggested a life on the street. Thoughts like, "I wonder what it's like to get mugged" reared their ugly head, and, selfishly, "how will I extricate myself from some awkward conversation with someone who may not be fully in possession of all mental faculties?" On average, these persons of whom I tended to be apprehensive were the friendliest passersby of the morning. Given my previous post on how I see ...