Bike Blog

We have a mailing list for my neighborhood. And we have a problem with cars in my neighborhood. See, we've got a grade school near the park.. and the park has a crossing guard. And so a few months ago the crossing guard was hit and injured by a car while trying to ensure that things were safe. And then a month or two later, a six year old got buzzed by a speeding car. Yesterday morning, a pedestrian was killed by a hit-and-run driver.

I deliberately avoided posting this for a while because you need to understand the context behind it. But I always like to tell all of the stories that I've done...

I was biking home from work. Behind me, two other cyclists were helping a third one, who was a bit lost and trying to get to Santa Clara, one town over. So, eventually, I offered to ride with her to get her un-lost and closer to her destination.. because it was pretty much on the way home for me.

This is pretty much the reason why I bike in jeans most of the time...

Last year, I did the 200km Lighthouse brevet on a mountain bike, crashed, and walked my bike to the finish. This year, I aimed to do it on my new road bike and to not crash...

I'm signed up for the Point Reyes brevet with the San Francisco Randonneurs next weekend. This was, for a while, a cause of a certain amount of bellyaching...

Garmin has been fat and lazy, being the only real provider of GPS units for the bike, so it's good that Pioneer is also in the marketplace... albeit, a soon-to-be-smaller marketplace given that most riders are going to be happy enough with an iPhone in a handlebar mount.

Even though I'm saving an insane amount of money because I don't drive most of the time, I still hate spending too much money on bike stuff. Even though it's one of the activities I do extremely consistently, it still feels like a little bit of affectation...

A helmet saved me from a concussion and maybe worse.

But I still think that getting people to ride with lights at night is probably more important than getting people to ride with a helmet.

I was riding last weekend on a group ride and, before I started, one of the guys reminded me that the quick release on my front brake was open....

I've been waiting for years for this trail to open up.

Sadly, I missed the festivities.

I've been feeling kinda cruddy for the past few weeks. I'm better now. The story of this is a bit interesting, however...

Since I upgraded my cyclecomputer, I've ridden 2406 miles. If I were to have driven that distance in my wife's car, that's maybe 80 gallons of gasoline. My cyclecomputer tells me that I burned 188,155 calories (food calories, actually a kcal). That's about 349 big macs or 0.13 barrels of oil equivalent (equivalent to the energy stored in 42 US gallons of crude oil). Less than half (46%) of a barrel is able to be turned into gasoline.. but in terms of gasoline energy, we're talking 6.288 gallons worth.

I was wondering why it was so hard to find Klean Kanteen bottles of late with the sport top. Then I checked the website.

I had a bottle fail in this fashion. But I wouldn't regard it as anything too critical. Not like metal bottles advertised as being an alternative to BPA-containing plastic bottles that also contain BPA.

I thought of posting an April Fools gag, but this one takes the cake this year...