Road find of the Day

Folding stabby knife!

Stabby stabby stabby!
Found just over the Ottowi bridge. I have been really hurting for road finds the last couple years. Los Alamos is not that big a place and only has a few roads really, so it is difficult to find stuff, not like Knoxville, which was a non-stop road find fiesta. Lots of roads, no one walks around so little competition for tools there in Knoxville. I seem to find lots of utility knives. This is at least number 5, but only the third usable one. By far the nicest too, what with the folding action and the case and the 5 new blades in the handle. I also find an inordinate number of english sockets. Mostly 3/8". What are your common road finds?

I don't count truck lugnuts, but I have a lot of those too, including lots and lots of "locking" lugnuts that obviously don't work. Mostly I only pick those up if they are right next to me at a light. I pick up lots of ejected pedal reflectors off the trails too, but neither are really satisfying road finds. Lugnuts are an impressive amount of machining and plating though for something that falls off so often.

Yearly Apricot Blossom Snow

This year it occurred on March 26-27, 6+ inches of snow accompanied by an overnight low of 15 degrees or so. Last year we got 4 apricots, two years ago we had a billion. Lets see what we have this year. It seems like the blooms are a bit early this year, but we will see, I think, for future reference the first blooms started on 3/22.



2008 snowy apricots on 4/10/2008


2007 snowy apricots on 4/13/2007, looks like blooming started on 3/20/2007

Juniper pollen plagues moscaline

Despite tiny armies of juniper pollen infesting my entire respitory system, I have still been busy. Here is a brief update of recent activities:

1. I have been doing a fair bit of ski racing. I am three race reports behind. If I don't get on it, I will be 4 race reports behind by saturday night.

2. In betwixt ski waxing I have been desperately trying to get more than one bike running simultaneously. I think I had 6 or 7 down with flats or mechanicals as of last saturday. I am a lazy mechanic of late, but it is hard to predict things like oddly broken chains and bizarrely defective tubes:

There is a leak in that tube somewhere, but only that one bulbous section will pressurize, so I can't find it.

3. I have put about 50 miles on the 24" Hunter BMX bike this week in commuting and messing around. This is mostly due to the fact that is was my only functioning bike without studded tires. I suck at jumping still, but it is fun to ride. Cats are nonplussed:


4. I have discovered new ways of working out using only body weight resistance. Aida loves it:


5. Team baby blue bicycle dropped in for a visit as I was waylaid by the persistent pollens. They seemed to want practice babyholding, chad photographs as oddly as usual:


6. Between this and all the damn unicycle kids in town, I have some hope for the future:


7. Patch kits are confounding. I don't think I have ever had one that was useful at the time I needed it on the road. This was a new and unique failure, usually the glue just deliquesces, leaving behind a useless tube carcass:



8. The bees, they are kaput. I will report back with details, but they did not come out when the neighbor bees did, and they did not seem to be cleaning their stoop as they usually do. Our bee keepers took the hive away today, hopefully I will get some answers tomorrow. Our neighbors bees are going gangbusters, maybe a interbee war, or maybe just bad luck...

and put your helmeton

Instead of buying a new helmet, I plan to reuse Aida's bumbo. Clever, eh? Now where did I put those protein pills

These are for you

It has been warmer than usual since mid january so these grew, and then it was 18 degrees and hailing and snowing a bit, so I picked these for you.

I also wanted to be more like the LFOAB, so I shaved, for very similar reasons he did.

Never done this before

Or at least never done this and kept on riding.
The good news is that I did not crash in traffic when it happened, and I made it about two miles home before I figured out what the dealy-o was. I did drop the chain a few times, I thought I just bent a link, but no, that ain't bent. I now have two bikes with bent or broken chains. Both relatively new chains. Crap.

If you look carefully you can see the juniper pollen on the chainring. We are beset with eye-itching-sneezing plagues of it.

Ubikequitous 6, Tolstoy

It was also during his sixties that Tolstoy learned how to ride a bicycle. He took his first lesson exactly one month after the death of his and Sonya’s beloved youngest son. Both the bicycle and an introductory lesson were a gift from the Moscow Society of Velocipede-Lovers. One can only guess how Sonya felt, in her mourning, to see her husband pedaling along the garden paths. “Tolstoy has learned to ride a bicycle,” Chertkov noted at that time. “Is this not inconsis-tent with Christian ideals?”
Elif Batuman, The murder of Leo Tolstoy:
A forensic investigation Harper's Feb. 2009.

Ridiculous and very enjoyable tale of attending an international Tolstoy conference in Russia.


Possibly similar posts:
Neils Bohr on a bicycle

previous ubikequiti