A Temporary Death of Inertia

Packages to the nice FedEx lady (including a kickstand return to Xtracycle)...



To the Home Depot for secret Big Dummy dog project supplies, then 40 pounds of cat litter from the friendly ladies of Whole Pets...


And to the remarkably unfriendly local post office, to pick up a prezzie to me (new bike pedals!)...


Couldn't tell you how many miles. 10? 4? I need to put a cycloputer on this bitch.

Edit: I found the miles. 6. Moi je suis le super-dork.

Edit encore: Add some eggs and soy milk to today's on-Dummy list. This is exactly the type of thing I hate doing with the car: "Ah shit, we need a sprig of dill for this recipe. We'll just run down to the store in our car." The store is half a mile away, but we're almost as lazy as the rest of America. Tonight it was eggs and milk (and dill, in fact). Faster on the bike.

Thinking vs. Doing vs. Thinking

At this point, more than a year later, I'm gonna be honest with you: I'm a shitty blogger.

I'm also a shitty Big Dummy-ist. I'm amazed at how much shit gets in the way of biking, and working on bikes, and writing about bikes. I did a whole season of cyclocross after I last wrote you -- and did it pretty well, too, popping my first podium with a 3rd place a year ago this week. There was that, then a sprained ankle, then a long but apathetic ski season, then this and that and some other things that just made the rest of the last 12 months rather deadened. I did make a building, hey-ho. But the rest of the stuff was a little dead-end. And entirely lacking in Big Dummy.

But I don't know if it's the fall or the lack of cyclocross this year (too lazy in between bouts of being to busy), but I'm back on my BD kick. More is coming. More. Coming. Right now. Today.

It Lives!

The Big Dummy is alive, my friends, my fiends. Picked it up Friday from the kind gents at the shop, who were all agog and full of questions about the new rig. Like: "Damn, dude! Where are you going to take this thing?" Which is a good question. I mean, mostly I just want to haul the dogs around in it, but... where? Alaska? Tierra del Fuego? So now, in between tiny spurts of work (and dreaming about the coming cyclocross season), I imagine grand trips into the wilderness, the dogs' floppy ears a-flopping in the wind as they snorfle in the saddlebags. 

I also imagine free money. And universal healthcare.

Pics of the full machine are on the way, once my daydreams break. The biggest trip so far was on Saturday: 

• to the shop for some shiny white bottle cages and toeclips (with which much strapping of cargo will be done)
  
• to Home Depot for three boxes of cap nails for a near-future roofing project
  
• and to the Whole Foods (or as my friend Chivers just called it, "White People") for 384 ounces of soy milks and juice, plus some bread and a box full of eggs. 
  

Packed well, packed tight, and put on my bike. Check the results of my delicate riding style:

Another sideshow: I'm a new preacher of the streets. Everywhere I stopped, people asked me what I was riding, how much it could haul, and where they could get one. There was some laying on of hands, some preaching to the choir, and an awful lot of amen. 

Il Est Arrivée!, pt. deux

With the bad weather on the way and a whole other too-big and overdue project hanging over my head and the usual shite of freelancing hanging over my head, I called quits on the Big Dummy Self-Assembly Project and sent it down to the sweet dudes at Full Cycle instead to deal with the brakes and drivetrain. 

And today, she is done! Walking down to the shop right now -- but I'll be riding home.

Also, I realize the blog is lacking in both frequency and a design that doesn't look like the same lame blog your sister writes about the dating scene back in Cedar Rapids. Improvements will come, swear.

Jealousy

A few weeks ago we bought my wife a new commuter bike: a Novara Transfer from REI. Lovely little bike, racks and saddlebags and a light that shines when the front wheel spins. Totally hubba hubba, a who's-that-girl kind of bike. ("I love my bike," she told me last night. "Whenever I see it, I just get so happy." Very romantic.)

She'd been trying to tool around town on her reg'lar ol' mountain bike, but with a laptop, jackets, a lock, whatever, this is a pain is the ass.  She's not really the giant messenger cargo bag type. Neither am I, really -- it fucks with your shoulders. So I was deeply jealous of her and her new machine. Look at it:

I grew up riding bikes -- hopping the curbs on my BMX back in ABQ -- but it wasn't until high school that I got the supercrush. In the summer between my junior and senior years (after I got kicked out for the first of three times) I went on a cross-country bike tour from D.C. to Seattle, 3,000 miles, 47 days. Total heaven. I was with a group of about a hundred kids, from everywhere: Russia, Japan, Zanesville Ohio. We had six vans and a UHaul to cart our gear from town to town; we slept on high school gym floors or outside on the soccer field, like we did all across Montana, the sky all Milky Way, all the time, every night, heaven. It was a charity ride, for a group allegedly dedicated to ending world hunger -- not by digging wells in Africa or working for policy changes at the UN or handing out sandwiches, but by telling people about world hunger. Like, giving presentations about it. Raising awareness, I believe this is called.  Total shit; I have no idea what they did with the money except make ugly t-shirts. The group was Youth Ending Hunger; the summer of bike was the Tour de YEH. Yes, the Tour de YAY!, like we were riding with balloons and streamers and clowns painting our faces. Bad cause, excellent summer. I joined as a junior evangelist for YEH (yay!), but I left as a lithe biker, in love with my legs and motion. 

And now I'm in Boulder, where it's gotten really bad: spandex, specialized shoes and a $200 helmet, a road bike a mountain bike a singlespeed mountain bike a cyclocross bike a spare cyclocross bike and now, the Big Dummy. (It's not really so bad -- I sold my spare cross bike just the other day. For money to buy new bike parts.)

[That's me on the left there, after coming in 2nd place in the local short track series. Beat by a 13-year-old.]

I've tried to get off the car kick with these other, more specialized bicycles but, like I said, the main way is a big bag over your shoulder, and how many groceries and laptops and dogs can you really carry in your garish Chrome bag? (yeah, OK. The BD is totally the most specialized bike -- but it's also got the broadest base of specialization: to get all your shit somewhere else. And that puts the others to shame.) (At least in my head, because the damn thing isn't built yet so I haven't ridden it.)

# # #

It rained all damn day yesterday -- like, Portland rain, deepest BC rain. Lovely. This morning, the sun out again, we went for a hike; the views to Summit County were already dusted with snow.

Which is beautiful but bad, because the BD's not done yet (drivetrain, brakes TK), and I deeply need to get some time on the thing before the four foot snows come back to Boulder. 

Whatever, I'll ride it through those -- but I'd still like a little sunshine and trail dust time. 

What's all this, then?

I live in Boulder—tiny but urbane; pretty cosmopolitan but small enough that you see the same people over and over again. And small enough that the nearest grocery store is six blocks away from my house. The next-nearest grocery store—in strip mall along with the cafe I like to eat breakfast at, the bank where I cash my checks, and the giant hippie brewpub where I spend many evenings—is barely double that. Perfect bike riding distance. Slow, lazy, tipsy-but-still-able-to-carry-the-groceries bike riding.

But the convenience of the car is killing me. I find myself driving that half mile to pick up a bar of soap, or some toilet paper, or a bag of garlic powder that we'd forgotten on our last trip to the ever-precious Whole Foods, 1.7 miles away. There's a perfectly lovely trailhead just four blocks from our house, one that gets you up and away into the Rocky Mountain foothills in 35 steps, but twice a week we drive our dogs up the 11 or 12 switchbacks to take them hiking. Between my wife and I, our Subaru's been racking up 200, 250 miles a week. 20,000 miles a year—more if you count the annual 5,000 mile road trips we've been taking since moving to Colorado.

And filling up the Sub's gas 16-gallon tank—at $4 a gallon—is killing me too. Not because I have some "Blood blah blah Oil blah!" sticker on the bumper, but because spending $70 a week just to port the dogs around town makes me feel like an idiot.

But instead of trading in the Sub and its 100,000 miles for a $30,000 hybrid (one that's incidentally too small for dogs), I bought a $2500 bike—a big mother with a back deck and two dog-sized saddlebags on the tail and room for a surfboard on the side: A bike built to take the car out of my life.

This rad beast is called a Big Dummy, designed by the geek kings at Surly in tandem with a company called Xtracycle. XC's been making its Free Radical attachments—basically big bike extenders that plug into your existing frame to give it a longer wheelbase and room for saddlebags and surfboards and dogs—for years. But the Big Dummy, as far as I know, is their first foray into purpose-built frames. And I got one.

So do a lot of people, and you can read all about their Dummies on the vast internet. But I'm going to tell you all about mine.

IT HAS ARRIVED

What's in that box??