On Saturday, we bought my wife a new bike, a Specialized Globe Daily 2 step-through in blue from Outback Bikes. It should be a great bike for her.

On Sunday, I redid the grips on my bike and my daughter’s bike. It’s amazing how just a couple of bucks spent on grips can make a bike feel like a brand new bike.

My bike used to be my dad’s bike, and he had put bar ends on it. I didn’t like the bar ends, so I pulled them off. I couldn’t slip the grips back to the end easily, and I didn’t like the grips in the first place, so I got a new set, very plain Giant grips in black. I really like this setup.

My daughter’s bike used to have white BMX grips, but the ends of the handlebars ate through the grips. A couple of drops of the bike and the grips were wrecked, with the metal handlebars sticking through: a real hazard. I drilled holes in a pair of handlebar end caps, to fit pink tassles, and put the handlebars with the tassles through the holes. So, nice white grips, tassles, and end caps; should be safe and hold together a lot longer than the last setup. She also got a basket, which I attached with hose clamps. It’s a very girly setup.

I also cleaned up a touring bike which I’m giving to a friend. It’s a blue Univega touring frame with 27″ tires and 10 speeds, a real classic setup. I set up this bike for my wife a little while back, but she didn’t like the geometry (she wanted more of an upright fit). So, hopefully it’s a good fit for my friend.

It was very bicyle-oriented weekend, even if it didn’t involve much biking.

The rain cape worked great! I was sort of hoping that I would get some more ran days to test it, but it just hasn’t happened. So, this report is from just the one rain day, BUT:

It is a Grunden’s Nordan Poncho, sold as a rain cape on Rivendell’s web store. It’s a bright yellow, heavy PVC poncho, which has features that make it usable on a bicycle. It is shorter on the butt than it could be, which keeps it out of the rear wheel. The front of the poncho has loops that make it easy to keep it on position while I am riding. It has no hood, allowing for the use of a helmet.

When I left work, it was raining. Not the faking-kinda-raining that we’ve been having periodically. It was a solid rain. On the ride, I was wearing my regular work clothes (business casual), as usual. I rode through one Very Serious puddle, which soaked some of my left shoe, but otherwise, I was completely dry. Rain day, rode dry. I can’t recommend it enough.

I think that I will have to find a lighter nylon or other breathable rain cape, especially for warmer weather.

This winter, I have met a bunch of really nice people on my bicycle commute, including:

• Corny, who takes the bus in the morning and bikes home in the afternoon.
• Mike, who works at Tech
• Roy, with the awesome green bike with internal gear hubs
• Jane, who doesn’t ride when it’s less than 38 degrees
• Jeff, who wears neon green and rides to Medlock every day
• Tony, who is running on the path every morning

I really like that my commute can be a little bit social.

I’ve only made 2 real rain rides this year. There have been a couple of days when it’s been solid rain in the morning and I’ve had to find alternate transportation. I’ve had a couple of sprinkling/drizzly morning rides, which were no problem to ride through. The only time I’ve pushed through the rain have been afternoon rides on towards home.

It was on those rain days that I discovered that my supposed rain gear is lacking. My jacket soaks right through, as do my “rain pants”. I need to investigate a good way to re-waterproof both of those. At this point, I don’t have gear that keeps me dry in the rain.

There are warm clothes and a shower waiting for me at the end of a ride home in the rain, so it doesn’t worry me. It would, though, be nice to stay dry the whole ride, and to be able to ride to work on rainy mornings.

Last Monday, the rain was coming down, and there was just no way that I was going to make the ride to work in the rain. So I spent a few minutes researching rain capes. A rain cape is a big, weird poncho that you can wear while riding a bicycle. It has tie-downs on the hands and waist to keep it from blowing around. It’s supposed to provide protection from rain coming from the sky. Your fenders provide protection from rain coming up from the road.

Together, they should provide enough protection to ride in moderate rain with moderate wind. I wouldn’t trust that they’d keep you dry in extreme conditions. But, what better way to find out than to try it out?

So, another piece of this is that I have made my first purchase from Rivendell Bikes, the mecca of practical cycling. Actually, my first and second purchases. The first: a Grundens rain cape. It’s a big, yellow, industrial strength poncho. The second purchase is old-school use-with-a-brush shaving cream. I’m that kind of geek.

It looks like I’ll have an opportunity to try it out this afternoon. Wish me luck.

The weather headed my way

So, umm. Hi. Come watch me bike to work.

Enter Rita at Intown Bicycles. I had a morning meeting that conflicted with their 10 AM opening on Friday; the earliest I could drop off the bike was 11:30. She took it and promised to have a reading on it by 6 PM, so that I could either get over there and ride it home or take MARTA. Well, around 3:30 she called me and said the bike was done: the chain is OK, the cassette is OK. The chainring was bent, and she fixed it. She lubed the shifters and they’re working fine.

So, now my bike is working like a new bike. Shifting just fine, all the gears work. Total cost: $35.50. THANK YOU INTOWN BICYCLES! That’s why they’re my favorite shop. My experience with Bicycle South, a quality shop, was that I could pick a repaired bike up a week after I dropped it off, if I was lucky. Same day service just can’t be beat. Especially if it’s your daily driver.

I was so used to car repairs: you can’t look at a car without it costing you $300, if you’re lucky. The economy of bike riding is just amazing.

I’ve only driven to work one day this year. That was Wednesday of last week, which was sort of a hell day, with a deliverable, two meetings, and it rained non-stop. It was a fine day to drive.

Yesterday, I finally got my task list lined up such that I got my parking pass to work on a day that (1) I didn’t drive, (2) I wasn’t slammed with meetings and teleconferences all day long. And so, I traded in my yearly fixed-rate parking pass ($647/year) for a per-park parking pass ($25/year + $5 each time I park). Just like I said I was going to do. So, now I have built in an incentive to bike. It’ll cost me $5 every day that I don’t, and it’s a cost that will be much more visible than insurance, maintenance, fuel, etc., that gets amortized over time & trips.

Friday was a lovely day to ride. I had a beautiful morning ride, a long day at work, and was on my way home when…

I had recently been experimenting with shifting a little less. Rather than shift up and down, up and down, I was spinning a bit more, and more frequently standing up on the pedals in what would normally be, to me, too high a gear. I was standing up on the pedals when my chain slipped.

My chain is probably worn. It was Dad’s, and I don’t know when he last had it replaced. The chain is likely shot, as is the cassette. So, I’m standing on the pedals, with all my weight on the right pedal, at the top of the stroke, when the chain slipped. My right foot suddenly shot down. It threw my weight down and to the right. My body went to the right, and my hands stayed on the handlebars, pushing them to the left. The wheels shot to the left, and the bike went out from under me, sending me to the pavement.

I felt my helmet smack against the pavement, along with my elbow. I was shocked, but largely unhurt. A passerby stopped with offers of help, for which I was grateful. I was also grateful that I wasn’t badly hurt. My panniers had come off but bent back into place easily. My eye mirror had come off, but I found that after a couple of passes over the accident scene, and it looked as good as new. My adrenaline was up, but I got home OK, wondering if I was going to feel it later.

I spend the weekend sore, but not too badly beat-up. I’m not standing up on the pedals until I can get my bike looked at. My helmet was cracked, and I disposed of it and am using Dad’s old helmet, which he bought after he gave me my last one to wear on the last half of my 2002 bike tour.

On Monday, my wife and daughter and I hopped on the bikes and rode down to the MLK center for the parade. The weather forecasters predicted sunny and warm, and instead we got cold and light rain. No problem. A little Mexican food and a parade was just what the doctor ordered.

My cold-weather gear:

• My regular (street clothes) coat, which has a waterproof rain shell exterior and a zip-out fleece liner.
• A thin balaclava, covering my head and face.
• Thin fleece gloves with rubber grippers.
• Glasses.

After a few blocks, I was already overheating. I took off my gloves to vent some heat, but the backs of my hands began freezing, painfully (lesson learned). So, the gloves went back on (maybe I should get thinner ones?), and I vented other ways, opening up the coat, unzipping the pit zips, and taking the balaclava off of my head. So, that is just too much winter coat when biking to work (lesson learned). I’m not sure how cold it’d have to be for me to need that much coverage, but it’d have to be cold.

On the afternoon ride, the coat retained just too much heat. Otherwise, a lovely afternoon ride.

Thursday morning was a balmy 34°F, and I wore instead my usual yellow REI rain shell jacket. No problems with cold. No problems with heat. Perfect perfect morning ride.

We got out in the afternoon and headed to the Poncey-Highlands playground, a fairly new playground located on the Freedom Park bike path at its intersection with North Ave. Its about as far as I can get my daughter to ride in a day, and a trip there makes a nice goal for her to put a couple of miles on.

A snack and water for her, and a book and a camera for me, and we were ready to go.

She had a good time playing at the playground, and I spent my time sitting on the bench, reading The Hot Shoe Diaries by Joe McNally. Its a great read, where he talks about his equipment and methods for shooting a bunch of photos with speedlights, gels, and reflectors. I’m trying to learn better how to shoot a decent photo, to understand how the parts work together. When I wasn’t reading, I was chasing my daughter around on the playground with my Canon S95, trying to balance a fill flash against the direct light of the setting sun. Very fun.

On the ride back home, my daughter took a turn too fast and down she went, skinning her knee a bit. That added to the drama, but wasn’t a major crisis, fortunately.

All in all, a lovely afternoon on the bike.

The web interface isn’t designed with the iPad in mind. It’s difficult to insert references to photos. I uploaded a bunch of photos to the blog, and am trying to insert those photos into a blog post. The media dialog, however, is unnavigable on the iPad, using some javascript dialog, and it does not scroll, so,you can only see the top few photos, and can’t insert any of them. It looks like I’ll be inserting HTML by hand until I can figure out some other approach.

The WordPress app is a real trainwreck. It’s OK only for editing raw text, with the major caveat that it eats apostrophes and HTML tags. “I’ve” gets converted to “Ive”, and “<b>hi</b>” “bhi/b”. Lovely. And it has no support for references to images in the media library.

I’m looking for solutions. Forgive me if posts go up without images and I add the images later.

Monday 12/19 and Tuesday 12/20 were my daughter’s last two days of school for 2011. These were nice biking days. I dropped her off at school and rode on to work both days.

Since there was no school on Wednesday and Thursday, my daughter was instead registered for camp. Camp is run by my employer, and is very close to my place of work. When I take my daughter to school, she rides on the bike rack and hangs on to the seat post. Its fine for a short distance, but I wouldnt want to try it for a six mile trip with traffic.

One of my goals this year is to resolve the porting the child issue, especially in time for spring break and summer camps. Id hate to be leashed to the car just because I couldnt find a way to transport my child.

But for now, it was driving. Wednesday and Thursday I dropped her off at camp via the car. It was probably a good thing, since it poured rain the whole time, and would have made for miserable riding.

On weekends and days off, though, I’ve managed to bike to the grocery store and bike with my daughter to the playground. I’m taking any excuse I can find to get on the bike, and only climbing into the car when I absolutely must.