New Friends

Yesterday afternoon I walked through a door and found myself the subject of many curious gazes. Faces I'd never seen before turned towards me and watched to see what I was going to do.

Over the course of the next few hours, I told Lou he had some of the most striking eyes I'd ever seen, let Jack blow into my nostrils, and made Delilah walk in a circle twice for trying to barge through a door in front of me. I was told Martha will become my favorite, Holly is the craziest, and Radio never stops talking.

This was my first day of employment at my new, very, very part-time job. Once a week I get to go play stable-hand and be around 14 of the giant four-legged creatures I so dearly love and miss. There are also potential exercise riding opportunities. Nothing is finalized yet, but I've got my fingers crossed.

Rollers and Builds

The last few days have been days of discovery. I have embarked on two different (though closely related) kinds of new experiences, and am blundering my way through them with a certain degree of satisfaction.


The first was to buy a used mountain bike frame on ebay. I did this in order to test my recently formed hypothesis that the reason my knees cause me so much pain on a mountain bike is due, not to the cycling itself, but to the full suspension. I can't quite recall, thinking back, why I decided full suspension was so important to me when I was a spindly 17-year-old trying to win the junior beginner women's AZ state championship race series. I guess the Racer-X was just all the rage in the 90's, so I had to have one.


My "new" frame (it is 14 years old) and fork (which is a fairly new, very nice component Brian is sharing with me) is at least two pounds lighter than my old frame and fork. This in itself will be a good change, (although admittedly this number was provided by the same scale that told me once I'd lost six pounds overnight, and then gained three back after drinking a glass of water).

So, when my new frame arrived I was excited to move all my parts over. Taking everything off my Titus required some help from Brian - mainly in the cranks and bottom-bracket area. I was neither strong enough nor educated enough to get those parts out. Then Brian left for class and I brilliantly decided to try to put the bottom bracket into my new frame all by myself.

The following is an approximation of the conversation between me and the service manager at the bike shop I went to the next morning:

Me: I just bought this frame on ebay. I'm having trouble getting the bottom bracket in. It looks like some of the threads in the frame are damaged.
Him: Sure, I can fix this no problem.

Later:

Him: Okay, the bottom bracket is in. Do you need anything else?
Me: Yes, cables, housing, chain.
Him: Are you building this up yourself?
Me: Yes. With some help from my boyfriend.
Him: You know, we are looking to hire some mechanics right now.
Me, Internally: I don't think you'd be offering me a job if you knew the reason the threads on this bike were screwed up was entirely due to me trying to put one side of the bottom-bracket into the wrong side of the frame, and the only reason said component is not still stuck in the wrong side of the frame is because Brian came home and patiently wrenched it back out again.
Me: I don't know if I'd really call myself a mechanic, but thanks.

Disaster averted, I brought my repaired bike home and proceeded to add on less intimidating components. From there, I managed to here with only verbal outside help.


I am now waiting for Brian to come home so I can adjust the rear-derailleur and decide on the chain length with his excellent advice and supervision. After that it will only require two more things that could not be swapped from my Titus: a front-derailleur (important or not, depending on your philosophy) and a seat-post (important no matter how minimalist you are).


My second grand adventure has involved Brian's rollers. Since I have apparently developed plantar fasciitis in my right leg, I've been limited as to my activities lately. Finally driven stir-crazy, however, I put on all my cycling clothes and went downstairs.

I have long been scared of the rollers, given the possibility of grand and painful crashes off of them onto the hard, cold, unforgiving basement floor. But once downstairs in my cycling clothes, I overcame my fears and tried them anyway. I proceeded to fall off of them many times (thankfully always onto my feet), and discovered that my spin is horrible to non-existent.


But I was pleasantly surprised after a day off to discover that my mind (apparently while I was sleeping or cooking or at work) assimilated all of the impressions it had gathered during my first half-hour of graceless roller-riding, and when I tried again I discovered I'd improved dramatically.

So, I look forward to my continued experiments involving my two new past-times.

A Tale of Tales

I love audiobooks. I love the days when the gallery is closed and I am happily left to my own devices in my little upstairs room with a radio, a whole lot of frames and a really good story. I find myself particularly tickled with my situation on days like today, when it is bitterly, horrifyingly, bitingly cold outside. The wind shakes the windows of the mansion but I remain cozy, employed and entertained.

The iPod is Dead, Long Live the iPod

Well, I'm shaping up as a model consumer so far this year. Hopefully this will be it as far as big purchases go for a long, long time.


Here we have a little glimpse of the new and the old, side by side. The new one is actually much smaller in comparison than this photo somehow demonstrates.

I spent the afternoon paring down my music collection to fill 8 gigs instead of 16. That was hard, but probably worth the effort.

Now I just have to get used to the change and hope the Nano lasts at least 2.5 years, too.

RIP

Although I won't deny I'm a bit nerdy, I'm not actually all that into gadgets. I don't care at all what kind of phone I have - usually failing to upgrade until my old one is so out of date my friends start to distance themselves if we are out in public and it is visible. I like my computers, too, but only in a very basic way. I usually buy a semi-nice system every few years, not caring at all if it is cool or flashy, as long as it runs the way I want it to.

Not only am I generally not into gadgets, I'm a bit anti-gadget. It drives me crazy that so many people walk and drive in an oblivious bubble, unable to hear when you speak to them because they have headphones on. Sometimes I walk around downtown and keep a count. There are always more people than not who apparently can't even make it to class without some sort of entertainment. I scorn these people, and turn up my nose at them. They strike me as plugged in, thoughtless, and lame. In short, I have a strong distaste for those people who can't exist without their iPod.

Last night, I dropped my iPod on the floor. It broke. Badly. Not visibly, but terminally. It makes a horrible combination of grinding and clunking noises when I try to turn it on.

Certainly, I've known for a while now that I take my iPod everywhere I go. I bought it a little under three years ago at NAU, and it saw me through many long hours in the studio, playing me Jane Austin while I printed or soothing me with music while I learned to weld. When I moved to Iowa, it became my escape from the commercials on the classic rock station at work. Soon, I discovered the library here has an extensive collection of audiobooks, and suddenly I could expand my literary repertoire while joining frames.

Today I went to work without my iPod. I felt lost. Helpless. I had no choice but to listen either to silence or what was on the radio, broken regularly by advertisements that made me feel simultaneously angry and victimized. Although I almost never take headphones with me anywhere, and am perfectly capable of walking (and even driving) in silence, after one day, I am forced to admit it.

I am one of those people. And now I don't have an iPod.