Some good ol' fashioned:

While I'm going through the 228 pictures I took in Australia, here is some good old fashioned FOOD PORN and BIKE PORN to tide over my eager readers!

It's ridiculously simple comfort food today for blunch: organic multigrain bread, earth balance, mashed avocado, coarse sea salt, and freshly cracked pepper. Yum!

Last night, with my continuing inability to get to sleep, I worked on bike stuff until almost 3am (when I took an entire ambien, which I almost never do, to knock myself out.) Among other things, I double-wrapped the handlebar tape on

Another shot, and another way of uglifying your bike: choose accessories and components that are all different colors. Relatively new pedals on there, too: Performance Forte Campus double-sided, with SPD on one side and platform on the other. I was getting annoyed with having to wear my SPD bike shoes or deal with the small SPD pedals every time I rode.

What I didn't account for is the Long Haul Trucker's unusually low bottom bracket, which is great for stability when you're riding with a heavy load, and great for scraping and chewing the shit out of your pedals when you go around corners. I don't actually care: it doesn't impact performance (no pun intended, and I'm too lazy to think of an appropriate synonym right now), and it contributes to the uglifying of the bike.

Speaking of uglifying: here is the newest whip in our collection (well, maybe J's newly built up Surly Cross Check is technically as new, but she had the frame around for a while.) It's a Performance Access XCL 9.7, with 29 inch wheels (which I've wanted for a while.) Note that the provided link is for the 2010 model, and I have the 2009 model, and paid significantly less for it.

I'm super excited that I now own THREE BIKES that ALL fit me, the first three bikes I've ever owned that actually fit me properly.

Now that I sold the road bike that J lovingly built up from frame for me, but was just too small (61cm frame):

and sold my old beater winter commuter,

and J sold her mountain bike that she hated, J and I are up to five bikes between us.

This is down from an all-time high of eight when we lived in Anchorage (in our defense, though, two of those were kids bikes when we were fostering.) Nevertheless, five bikes in our condo is a little crowded, and I need to move a few down to the bike room. The problem is that I find a use for each of them almost every day, and it's a lot more convenient to just grab the bike and jump in the elevator than it is to go to the bike room each time I want to get out one of my trusty steeds.