moving on

well well well

so i am feeling modertately anxious about this whole "getting money out of ups" thing because i found out the other day that my claim has been contracted out to a group called Galligar&Co which i don't think is a good sign. i felt better when i was dealing with Liberty Mutual, which was at least a name i recognized.....whatever....i'm still waiting to see what will happen. after consulting bicycleaustin.info i found some lawyers (all of whom were very eager to call me back after my initial phone call to them), none of whom were willing to take my case, since my injuries were negligible, in terms of $$.

and i had been borrowing a mountain bike from my friend tom, but i couldn't really get into the way it felt. so i tried harder to buy a road bike and i found one in san antionio for $95 which will suit me until i can get a better one. it's nice. older, steel, light, basic. bikes in SA are much cheaper on craigslist than they are in austin, which is good to know. the dude i bought this bike from is almost exactly one hour from my door. so that's not bad. the picture above is my new bike. i like it ok, but i feel like i will never get over the loss of my first road bike and her untimely demise.

i was almost run over by a ups truck yesterday. coming north on congress, downhill. the truck made a right hand turn into me and i had to ditch my bike to avoid getting run over. the truck rolled over my bike a few feet from my face....i am mostly ok, except for a few scrapes, but my bike is totally FUCKED......i just met with the insurance adjuster, and he took a statement.....i need to get some insurance money from them ASAP so i can get a new bike. it's hard to say yet how skeezy these people are gonna be.....it'll be a learning experience......

moonlight

oh my goodness

i went on the moonlight bike ride this past monday and it was totally awesome. it was my first critical-mass-ish activity (this was not technically critical mass, but i'm sure there was a lot of overlap), and it was super-fun.

the route was ten relatively flat miles that started at the lamar bridge and then went east on cesar chavez through downtown, then west through downtown on 6th, then north through the capitol to 51st, then east, then south to long branch on 11th.....just in time for last call....w00t!

anyway, i met some kids from nuage days of yore and some new friends as well....everyone was happy & amicable, and i learned that not only does "green mean go" but also "red means run it!"...which is to say: when there are 100 of you, it really doesn't matter what color the light is.....

the one next month is gonna be at 2am....which seems a bit too late for me but we'll see....the one for OCT is on the 25th and at midnight so i'll probably do that one for sure.....

summertime in the city

oh jeez

it was a wet summer in austin..... very very wet.....i think it rained every single day in june....and what did i learn from it.....well for one.... is that i need to get some fenders if i intend to ride in poor weather conditions. otherwise, i get splattered all up my butt and back. i read somewhere once about stealing one of those plastic "we buy houses" signs that people put at intersections and cutting that into strips and then attaching that to my frame as a fender using zip-ties......i meant to do that all summer but instead i just ended up driving a lot.....hmm.....matt tells me that if i want to keep my feet dry while biking in the rain i should put a plastic bag (like from a grocery store) on over my socks and then put my shoes on over that.....i guess i also need a ziplock bag for my cellphone....

and man, i still haven't rigged up comrade's trailer b/c i still haven't had the money to do so.....i think i'm gonna apply to be a pedicab driver. my friend james from the thriftstore gave me the contact info for capitol pedicab which is what he works for. he said that capitol doesn't require you to use your own bike, which is good b/c my bike would die under the strain.....james said that he makes good money but is occasionally groped uncomfortably.....

but nowadays it's sunny and hot as fuck. and so i'm trying to compile a list of drinking holes that are easily accesible and free and preferably cool, here in austin.
some places that have a water cooler around town for public consumption are:
jo's coffee, little city, and runtex.

finally!!!

I haven't seen chris in days but I have seen his car, so he's doing a good job of staying on two wheels. My big news is that yesterday I biked home from work for the first time (from this job)! That's over [pant] sixteen [pant] miles but it was worth it. It actually wasn't very enjoyable for a bike ride but it was more enjoyable than driving. For several hours before I left work, I tried to find a route that wouldn't take me on the roulette roads. Jeez, I'm not sure I succeeded. Mapquest crashed on me twice; google maps, yahoo maps, and some Austin bike maps I found to be a bit unwieldy. Anyway, I wrote down a rough route but never found a key backstreet and rode Metric to Rundberg to N Lamar. Metric is the quietest, traffic-wise but some fucking asshole got pissed I was on the road and revved up his engine to what sounded like 100mph and screamed past me, narrowly missing a car in the other lane. Where's a cop when you need one? On North Lamar I did something I really never advocate (aside from a few bridges over highways). I rode on the sidewalk. Bike research shows that riding on sidewalks is more dangerous than the road because drivers don't notice bikes in driveways when they are turning into businesses (in fact, I just heard about a guy that got hit in that exact situation in S Austin.) But my fear of the busy street with no bike lanes convinced me to take sidewalks until I got to this side of 183. The whole ride took an hour and a half. Notes for next time: change into shorts & tank top, ditch bag or bungee it to my rack, and if I want to do it frequently--get a road bike. Anyway, it was the longest direct ride I've done in Austin. The only bike ride that tops it was a 20 mile journey I had to take in Brazilian sands to track turtles--on an ill-fitting bike.

i can has bike to work day?

so i haven't updated lately because, when i started this blog i wanted it to be entries of only success stories, and my latest bike project was outfitting my dog's trailer. BUT i royally fucked up the retro-fitting and, well, have run into snags in fixing it. but whatever, i'll fix it, it'll just take some time. i'm moving right along. the best thing, bike-wise that has happened to me in the past two weeks is that i lost my job and got a new one much closer to me that doesn't care if i arrive all sweaty. yes. doggy day-care is the best bike thing to happen to me in a while. even despite the ridiculous early hours and the constant poop-scooping and the poor pay, doggy day-care is fantastic.

(dot dot dot) lest it go unsaid. (dot dot dot)

Bike Month

So much fun. Let's all go to everything!

http://www.austincycling.org/bike_month.html