I know, I know.

It's been a while. But look, it's not you: it's me.

I'm a lead logistics organizer for a 400-500 person bike ride. Tomorrow. And then on Sunday J and I fly to the USVI. Whee!

I couldn't resist this (presumably unintentionally funny) screen shot from Patch, our little "hyperlocal" news source.

No, that's not the "crime beat" box, that's just some headlines you can click on. Yes, APD are clowns, all the way up the chain of command: that's a quote from (edit: former) Major Chris Leighty, Zone 5 Commander (where I live.)

Kryptonite update

Alright, loogit: I'm not one to plug commercial companies. In the 688 posts in this blog to date, I'm not sure I've directly plugged any. (Sharp-eyed readers are welcome to correct this via comment, email, or writing it on the back of a $100 bill.)

But I gotta give it up to Kryptonite: they did right by their lifetime guarantee. As detailed in this lengthy post, I had some serious trouble with a Kryptonite combo U-lock. About three weeks ago I sent the broken down, 10+ year old lock back to them, with a print-out of the email response from the company website asking about warranty protection for a lock I had no receipt for. Today, poof: a brand new lock showed up in the mail (well, the UPS.)

Good on ya, Kryptonite. I'll buy from you in the future. No, I didn't get any additional incentive to post this, aside from the replacement lock.

I left part of the address unredacted for fun: I live on Peachtree St, not Beachtree St. But it got here all the same. Good thing there aren't any Beachtree Streets in Atlanta, unlike the 90+ streets that have some variant of "Peachtree" in their name.

Bikes bikes bikes!

So, yeah: I've been SO DAMN BUSY these last few weeks I've barely remembered to eat, much less blog. Here is a cool video about one of the big things that has been taking up a ton of my days: BIKES! WHEE!



I totally love the intro line: "Bicycles are beautiful, like the stars are beautiful."

More soon, really, seriously. Soon means after Saturday May 7 when a major event I'm helping organize is done.

Walking out of airports, food porn, bicycles

Seriously: after a long draught in blogging, what more do you want than these three things? Tell me, dammit, and I'll probably make it happen, despite being ridiculously busy and juggling about ten pots on the burner.

Back in March, I once again enjoyed walking out of the Eugene airport, and back in at the end of my trip.

Here's a view looking north, as you're about to actually get into the airport proper. As you can see, there is plenty of shoulder to walk on. (Go back to that linked post for explicit instructions on walking out of Eugene, and for more discussion of walking out of airports generally.)

And a little food porn: I've gotten really in to sandwiches lately. This is tofurky, fresh tomatoes, dijon, and ONIONS!

And here's the obligatory bike porn:
This is my mountain bike after 28 miles of some of the most challenging cycling I've ever done, up in the wilds of Chamblee and Dunwoody, GA (ugly big box suburbs northeast of Atlanta that have some incredible off-road riding in the woods.) At various points my front wheel was over halfway submerged in muddy water (and remember that this bike is a 29er.) I got some moderately bad poison ivy:

Doesn't look that bad, I know: but this is almost two weeks old.

2011

I was inspired while reading this post on a blog I like to consider the year ahead.

Notably, the post is a fun read if you're any kind of a cyclist: this guy is a seriously obsessed gearhead cyclist. From what I can tell just from this post, he and his wife own about nine bikes between them. That would be one more than J and I owned at our peak in Alaska, but several of those were kids bikes from when we were fostering. He loves the high-tech expensive stuff, which I'm somewhat ambivalent about (like dyno hubs) but it's fun to read someone else's considered opinions even when I would never buy the stuff.

Anyway, on to 2011: some ideas, some plans, and some hopes for what I might do.

VERY LIKELY OR DEFINITE

• Continue my legal work with activist communities, including (already planned) trips to West Virginia, Nevada, and Columbus, GA.
  
• Do at least one lengthy bike tour: already have one in the planning stages from Atlanta to Richmond, Virginia, then on to West Virginia. And I'd love to do Adventure Cycling's Underground Railroad Bicycle Route, but I don't know if this is the year. More possible is the C&O Canal Towpath.
  
• Participate again in the Courage Classic. Fundraising appeal coming soon!
  
• Have a vacation with J. We're thinking about something outdoor rather than tourist travel. Maybe Colorado, maybe Alaska. See below.
  
• Continue and improve my short story writing. (Interested? You should be. Many of you are characters.)
  
• Some mountain biking. I've got that fancy new mountain bike, so I need to use it. Probably both some local stuff in Atlanta (which has some surprisingly fun trails intown) and also some in the mountains of north Georgia.
  

KINDA LIKELY

• Get better with linux, really dig in to my ubuntu installations, and understand more of what is going on under the hood. A, are you listening? I might want boot camp. I'll provide the beer.
• Speaking of beer, get back to regular homebrewing. As delicious as it is to have Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout and Westy 12 and Hebrew Bittersweet Lenny's RIPA on tap, I'd like to have some of my own on tap again.
  
• And speaking some more of beer: every time I'm in a beer store with any kind of a legitimate selection (which gives me a pass on most of West Virginia) not buy a beer I've already had if there is something reasonably interesting to buy instead (or at least in addition to.) Notice the multiple qualifications. This is something I've been working on for the last couple years.
  

NOT VERY LIKELY BUT FUN POSSIBILITIES

• Hike the Chilkoot Trail. I definitely want to do this sometime, and Skagway is truly my favorite small Alaska town, but I'm just not sure it's feasible to have it on the agenda for this year.
• Get rid of our car, and go car-less, again. Primarily this is unlikely because we'd take an absolute bath on the value of the car: we tried to sell it in Alaska, with no luck, where people genuinely need 4x4, unlike Atlanta. As it is, we leave it parked for an average of 26 or 27 days every month. We'll continue working on this.
  

Couldn't resist

here are a couple more bikes from Egypt. At least they're kinda like bikes.

This is a delivery vehicles for the fast-food chain Gad, in Alexandria. Though I disagree with review #2: it's actually quite easy to mess up fuul and falafel in Alexandria. Back to the bike, though: that rear wheel is even more bent than the image conveys. It's what we'd consider potato-chipped in the states. Check out those spokes!

And, uhhh, how do you ride this thing, anyway? In this case, the operator didn't: he pushed it along, muscling it into a vaguely forward line.


This is another bicycle-based delivery vehicle for a preposterously overpriced store for stupid expats in Aswan (which J and I found has even more hassle than Luxor, known as the "Hassle Capital of Egypt".)

Egypt & bicycles

I'm slowly going through the, cough, 489 pictures I took in Egypt. I feel like slogging through the post-processing is part of the deal of taking a huge amount of pictures. Otherwise, it'd just be crap to add to the, cough, 25,000+ images, totaling 53.4 GB, that I have (just on the desktop computer.)

People ride bikes all over Egypt, but they are especially prevalent in Cairo, and often used for transportation. Every bike I saw, and the ones J and I rented to ride to the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, are singlespeed. Most are in mediocre to horrible repair, but nevertheless get people, and stuff, around.

This guy is carrying a big rack of aish, soft pita-like pillows of Egyptian bread, on his head down a moderately busy sidestreet near the Islamic Museum of Art:


And here he is cutting into a very busy intersection, weaving through traffic, and jockeying for position with cars and hand-drawn carts.

This guy is riding some recycling/re-use across the 26 July Bridge over the Nile in Cairo. It's vaguely reminiscent of my own approach to recycling, though he's carrying a lot more crap. But not in -15 Fahrenheit weather!

Many more wacky bicycle pictures to come, but probably not until I'm back from Arizona.

Drive nicely

A nice sign on a nice milk crate, spied in Jamaica Plain, Boston, June 2010:


I'm downloading and processing pictures from the last 2.5 months of traveling now, so more pictures to follow. Woo!

Phew: as amazing, intense, wonderful, difficult, beautiful, and full of fantastic people as the last 2.5 months have been: it's sure nice to visit Atlanta every once in a while, and see J.

Back to West Virginia in five days.

Dangers of bicycling

This is a horrifying article about two cyclists that were shot at by guys in a pickup truck in an upscale community near Houston while riding home from work:

Shotgun Blast fired at 2 on bikes in Woodlands.

Sometimes my faith in humanity is really, really challenged, as it was in the case of the physician I blogged about here, who weaponized his car to assault two cyclists because he didn't like them riding in his upscale neighborhood.

What is wrong with us? Really?

Fundraising, and bicycles

I'm very happy to be back in Atlanta, even if only for a few days. It's awfully nice to sleep in my own bed, and use my own shower. Even silly little stuff like having a coffee maker that I know how it works is nice.

Enough smalltalk: gentle readers, I want you to consider donating to a fundraising ride I'm doing at the end of the month for the Children's Hospital Foundation of Denver. As some of you know, I'm not very good at fundraising, in large part because I don't like asking for money. So, while I may or may not hit you up personally by email, I'd really like you to consider donating.

The Children's Hospital Courage Classic is a three day, 155 mile bike ride up and down mountain passes in Colorado I'll be riding in honor of J's best friend from medical school, Gretchen. She died in New Orleans in a boating accident in 2005, right at the end of her pediatrics residency, just before returning to Colorado to be a pediatrician in Rifle.

Gretchen's father and brothers have been riding this ride for the last few years, to honor her life, and her commitment to pediatric medicine, which she was natural at: she had an immense amount of love, compassion, dedication. She was genuinely one of the kindest people I have ever known.

Gretchen's death was, in a strange way, sort of caused by Hurricane Katrina (which I flew to New Orleans to assist with protests, rebuilding, and resistance work around, and to stay at Gretchen and Frank's house, only to show up on the doorstep and find out they had drowned two days before.) This drowning was a little different than the ones we heard so much news coverage of: Gretchen and Frank went out in a boat that Frank had built on Lake Pontchartrain shortly after the hurricane, it capsized in high winds, and they held on for hours: long enough to shred their lifejackets from the friction of the boat bobbing up and down. Before the hurricane, a boat floating out on Lake Pontchartain within a half mile of the Pontchartrain Causeway would have been cause for alarm. Not so after the hurricane, when debris was still floating throughout the lake, thoughout New Orleans. So for J and I, and perhaps for Gretchen and Frank's families, the official death toll from Katrina should be 1,838.

I've wanted to do this ride in previous years, and the stars all lined up this year: I'm going to fly back to Detroit, ride my bike from there to Denver, and do the ride. Then maybe I'll ride to California and thank some of you in person for donating. That remains up in the air.

Okay. Writing that made me cry, so I'm going to wrap up. Please consider donating toward my measly $300 fundraising goal at: www.couragetours.com/siteapps/personalpage/SearchPage.aspx?c=tmL0KbN0LxH&b=5612731, and plugging in my name. Any amount you can afford is awesome. Really. Thank you.

Of bicycles, and ice...

"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live."
—-Mark Twain, Taming the Bicycle, May 10, 1884

"Every time I tried to steal a look at a pretty girl, or any other kind of scenery, that single moment of inattention gave the bicycle the chance it had been waiting for, and I went over the front of it and struck the ground on my head or my back before I had time to realise that something was happening."
--Mark Twain, Chapters from my Autobiography, Chapter 20

I don't even have Twain's excuse: pretty girls and scenery are in short supply in the dark, at midnight, on my ride home.