Direct quote from a kid who’d stopped by Friz tonight to spectate. We were taking a break and chatting with the newcomer who’d voiced interest in the game. He was riding an IRO fixie, which would have been supremely difficult (if not somewhat dangerous) to try to play Friz on. So various among us were suggesting he surf the garage sales and/or Craigslist to find himself an old mountain bike of decent quality for Friz.
But he didn’t seem interested in getting a mountain bike, and I think part of it was a generation and fashion thing. He sported the floppy Bieberesque hair and tight jean shorts which signify a particular current subculture, along with that IRO fixed gear bicycle.
It was another encounter with the generation gap.
Much (but not all) of the Friz crew these days is over 30. We’re constantly inviting passers by, and occasionally lure a few fixie kids into the mix. They generally seem to be having a lot of fun, but they seldom come back. Friz can be tricky and it’s definitely fast paced, but skilled riders usually catch on quickly.
I think the image factor of playing a stoneresque pick-up game with a bunch of “old people” is part of what kills it.
Which is entirely too bad. Friz is a damn good time, and getting better all the time. The institution of our potluck picnics has been a great boon. The snackage is hard to beat. Likewise the not-spending-money-on-mediocre-Westport-bar-food is a benefit not to be taken lightly.
I think, also, some of the younger set who poo-pooh mountain bikes have never ridden them properly. You know. Offroad.
I commuted for many, many, many years on that old Trek 800. It’s not really a fun bike on the street. It’s not that great of a mountain bike, but I can tell you, it’s a hell of a lot more fun to ride that thing on dirt (or at least grass) than it is to schlep around town on it.
Friz Machine
If you’ve only ever ridden a mountain bike around the subdivision, then you just don’t have much of a concept of what mountain biking can be. Real, honest-to-goodness trail riding (and not just piddle-putzing around on a gravel “multi-use-path,” can really be a sublime experience.
It’s about the closest I’ll probably ever get to meditation. Working with your bike to work with the terrain, soaking up the fresh air, taking in the lush, green scenery (or the romantically gnarly bare trees, if it’s fall or winter). How can you possibly say “piffle?”
The constant building and testing of skills is gratifying; you can actually mark your accomplishments by which logs you can clear, which rock gardens no longer unseat you, and how quickly you make it through a particular loop. Or you can take it all leisurely and take pictures, cool your toes in a creek, or stop and watch a cicada unfurl itself out of its old carapace.
Maybe I’m “stuck in the past” because I like to mountain bike, but I’ll happily roll with it, especially if I’m rolling the sweet “whoopdy-doos” of the Lawrence River Trails.
Minnie is really into taking naps. It’s pretty much her favorite thing.
At 11, she is finally mellowing out. After several years of being intentionally kind to her, whether or not she wanted him to, Joel has broken through her nasty attitude, and discovered the sweet, cuddly cat within. In the past couple of years, her behavior has really turned around and she’s a pretty sweet creature nowadays. She is a snuggler! And since she is a cat possessed of the most delightful, silky fur, it is a treat now that she wants to sit on your lap, or lean up against you while you’re laying in bed reading.
I took these pictures just before I went to take a nap, myself. Minnie “shared” my naptime with me.
So…another Dirty Kanza 200 has come and gone, and I was on hand as a helper-varmint again, though this time as support crew for Joel and Wade. Which meant driving Joel’s pickup from one tiny Kansas town to another, with a 5-gallon water cooler in the back (as well as a cooler of food and a box containing tools, parts, extra shorts, and god knows what else)
First stop was in a miniscule township known to those who know it as Cassoday. As far as anyone knows, 129 souls reside within the Prairie Chicken Capital of Kansas.
The principal attraction of Cassoday, if you’re asking me, is the old train station, which has been brought inland from the tracks and is stationed pretty much squarely smack in the middle of town.
I peeked in the windows and was gratified to learn that it has been set up to look much like it must have looked circa 1900. I took a few pictures through the closed windows, and would very much like to have had a chance to actually go inside. Perhaps someday I will.
I got to Cassoday a good two hours before any riders were due, as I wanted to get a good location so that Joel and Wade wouldn’t have to search for me to get their supplies, and also so that I would have time to take a little bike ride for myself before I needed to be back and on duty. So I got parked and organized and took off for a little spin, then came back through town and took the pictures linked above. At that point in the day, the weather was completely beautiful…maybe 75-80 degrees, light breeze…lovely!
At 60 miles, Joel and Wade came in grinning and laughing. In fact a lot of riders came in at that point still looking pretty fresh and chipper. The weather was still pretty co-operative, and the general atmosphere of enthusiasm was infectious. They re-watered quickly and headed back out for the next 40 miles. I hung out with my friend Susan, whose husband John was not only making his first attempt at DK200, but was doing so on a singlespeed Pake with ‘cross tires on it. Big brass ones on that man. He came in with a smile on his face, sailing on endorphins, I’d reckon. Pretty shortly after saying “hi” and “best wishes” to John, I headed for stop 2, in Florence, KS.
Now I’d laid eyes on Florence, KS about a month earlier, on an astoundingly ill-fated pre-ride, whereupon all four of us who’d planned to ride together were in some stage of malaise. I was having wicked period cramps. Joel had a stern case of hay-fever. Christie was flat-out overworked, and Tim was recovering from a cold. On that particular day, the day dawned at about 50F and the temperature fell steadily. By the time we all packed it in around noon, we’d ridden about 30 miserable miles and wrote it off as “just one of those days.” But it is an ill wind that blows no good. That ride had started off from Florence, which has a delightfully scenic downtown.
This old stone house, though abandoned, is still a rather handsome ediface.
The carved pediments over the windows provide a touch of the outstanding to this otherwise straightforward stone wing-and-ell dwelling.
A very typical two-shop building on the main street. There are similar commercial buildings in small towns across the midwest. This one particularly reminds me of a row in Chadron, NE.
Chadron, NE downtown, for comparison.
Any town with any hopes of being anything had an opera house. Florence was no exception.
If there aren’t the spirits of a few Valkyries perching on this cornice, waiting to swoop some deserving soul off to Valhalla, I would be just a bit disappointed.
Here are the Outpost and Some Place Else, which confusingly enough, may well be above the Outpost…?
Here are a couple of junked out Ford Pintos on a car-hauler. I was tempted to try to find out who owned them as I’d sure love to acquire one of these:
for an art-project-bike I have in mind to do up.
Anyway, I didn’t have time to track down the “proud” Pinto owner. I’d spent enough time messing around taking pictures that I figured I’d best get over to the park and be ready for Joel and Wade. Wade pulled in ahead of Joel, obviously feeling the heat, which had been rising steadily since last I’d seen our intrepid cyclists. He re-watered, cooled himself off at the hydrant there in the park, and sped off for another 60 miles. Joel hit the checkpoint about 20 minutes later, reporting a wicked bad headache, and was of two minds as to whether to press on, or to call it a day at the halfway point. Even after a cool-down and a snack-break, his head was still hurting, and he decided not to continue on and make himself feel like complete hell for the rest of the day.
Turns out that Joel DNFing would turn into a good turn for another exhausted cyclist. Ebby, owner of Sedalia’s Pro-Velo cycling shop, had hit the wall and was unable to contact his support crew. So, we gave him a lift back to Emporia, then continued on to Checkpoint 3, to be there for Wade when he got in.
We met up at Checkpoint 3 with Barb, who had started the day in the race, and who decided to call it good enough at Checkpoint 1, after hammering out a seriously hard-and-fast 60 miles. She had switched into support mode and had supplies (and a ride, if necessary) for the inimitable Dennis Grelk. Dennis was this year’s winner of Trans Iowa, so I figured he had a pretty good chance at DK200, but the heat took its toll on him, too. The heat, plus the unexpected and fairly violent storm which hit right about when the bulk of the riders were about halfway between Checkpoints 2 and 3.
Thanks to modern technology, the following gentleman actually has video of the storm experience from the road!
As we were heading to Checkpoint 3, we noticed some weird, mottled clouds on the horizon, right over where the cyclists were likely to be. Lightning arced between the massed thunderheads, and things looked to be getting ugly.
At the checkpoint, the skies cut open. As riders trickled in, caked in Kansas, they reported hail, being blown off their bikes, and holing up from the storm in sheds, barns, under trailers, and in ditches. The storms demoralized and exhausted a great many of the riders who hadn’t already been knocked out by the peak heat of about 95F from earlier in the day. As we waited around, a truck came in with a familiar green Kona on its roof. Wade had called it quits after taking a severe buffeting from the storm. Exhausted, filthy, and hungry, he was happy for a lift back to town.
Despite the dirty tricks that the weather and landscape of the Flint Hills threw at the field, 65 riders managed to finish. The winner was a team this year. For the first year ever there was a tandem class, and last year’s second-place finisher, Lance Andre, and mountain-biking wonderwoman Barbi Miller joined forces to knock out a win. Even more astounding, they’d never ridden together before! Lance needed a strong, yet small “stoker” as his tandem frame was sized for a very petite second rider. Barbi fit the bill, sneaking in perhaps just over the 5′ line. They took a practice run on the tandem the day before the race, to get fitted up and situated, and went forth to kick some ass.
Our friend who’d started off his first DK200 on a singlespeed finished the same, gritting it out through heat, storm, and…well…singlespeededness. I haven’t seen him since Checkpoint 2, but reports are that he was ecstatic as he crossed the finishing line.
So, another DK200 down.
Joel and I will be back next year as volunteers. So many great people to see, and such an epic event to support. You can hardly go wrong to get involved.
Lately, I’ve been seeing little girls just wearing fancy dresses for normal wear. Like they have a dress leftover from a stint of flower-girling, and instead of just letting it molder in the closet until it is outgrown, then fobbing it off on Goodwill, the parents are letting the kid just go ahead and get some use out of the darn thing.
I saw a little girl this weekend disporting herself in sky blue chiffon trimmed with darker blue velvet, and another girl last night at a restaurant, accessorizing her white, lace-trimmed net dress with a hot-pink arm cast, a straggly ponytail, and a pair of grubby sneakers.
I think this is really a pretty sensible option. When I was a little girl, I’d get a pretty dress for Easter or for some occasion, and be lucky if I got to wear it 4-5 times. And like most little girls, I never met a frill, rosette, sash, or lace flounce I didn’t like. I’m sure these delightfully overdressed kiddos are feeling mightily stylish wearing their fine frills when and where-ever they so choose!
I have become ridiculously fond of the Black Dice and other similar bleep-gizzle-frunzzzz type music. It is completely fantastic if you like weird music made up of random electronic bonking noises and zoinky sounds and general chopped-stirred-and-fried bleep-gleep effects.
At work, we are allowed to listen to streaming ‘net radio, so long as we either listen to it really quietly, or use headphones. When I am doing invoicing or data entry, or coloring in large blocks of PDF documents, I put on “Slacker” radio, and find a station of electronic noises music, as it stimulates various wobbly, knobbly bits of my brain.
My god…the “voop-voop voop” noises in this just make me want to spin around in circles going “Squeeeeeeee!” And the jumbly, choppy beat….and the disjointed chanting. I just get happier and happier and happier as this song goes along until my little pointy head is all like “wheeeee!”
When I was a little girl, I used to have visions of recording “Martian Music,” which to my way of thinking, was songs made up of weird noises melded together into a cohesive form. I used to use my Dad’s tape recorder and record the sound of Mom’s old-school bubble-hood hair-dryer warming up (this video is of the same model hair-dryer), of a beaded-wire centerpiece clattering in the breeze, of myself using a decommissioned bubble pipe as a miniature didgeridoo. If I’d had the technology and know-how, I’d have layered these and other odd sound-effects into song-length conglomerations, and probably annoyed seven shades of shit out of anyone who would listen.
So, here I am grown up now, and find that other people have been making Martian Music which is not unlike the sounds I used to daydream about making into songs.
If anyone can recommend to me some similarly whacked out outer-space music, I’d be just tickled silly over the moon. Fuckin’ A!
We’ve had a rash of broken coffee cups lately. Cone shaped mugs which tip over too easily. A pretty, but obviously clumsily hand-made cup which suddenly and without warning separated into three wedges in the dishpan. Slippery, soapy cups launching out of hands, into the sink, and shattering dramatically. Things were getting a bit ridiculous, so on Saturday, I set off for my favorite thrift shop to see about remedying this state of affairs.
I had criteria –
1. Broad-bottomed cups, please!
2. Sturdy and structurally sound: if it looks like it was made at a Community Education Pottery Weekend, no matter how pretty the glaze is, just say “no.”
3. Not “made in China,” for pref. Quality control on a lot of Chinese goods is still pretty shoddy; I don’t strictly trust that the handles will say on, or that the glaze is not chuck full of lead or other unwelcome elements.
4. No novelty handles. I hate weird, chunky, sculptural cup handles that are a bastard to clean and are the first thing to chip. No fire-plugs, no giraffe necks, no curvaceous pickles. All I want in a cup handle is a loop to stick two or three fingers through so I can carry it.
So, here’s what resulted – a surprisingly consistent aesthetic theme of earth-toned earthenware:
Sweet apples – I think this one might actually have semi-recently come from Target. I seem to recall they had a line of kind of “vintage-looking” kitchenware a few years ago.
Cheerful abstract floral pattern – has become my favorite for my morning coffee.
I have been unable to do justice to the Roadrunner mug, which I find incredibly cute. It has two roadrunners and four small barrel cactus arranged in a running scene around its outside. As it turns out, it’s from the Otagiri company of Japan and is semi-collectible. Similar cups are going on Etsy and Ebay or anywhere between $8 and $25. I got mine for fifty cents.
This is a better picture, swiped off an Etsy listing. The gal selling had two of these roadrunner mugs and was able to arrange them so that you could see the whole pattern. When Audrey and I were little kids, we had a chicken we’d named Roadrunner, as she had very similar coloration, and was one of those little crested bantams, so she also had the head-fluff. So I’ve long had kind of a soft spot for roadrunners.
This one strikes me as a kind of hippie take on Piet Mondrian’s geometric aesthetic. I like the cobalt blue and the dark brown together.
This is the most ridiculous mug I bought…only because I convinced myself NOT to buy the one that looked like a goose was swallowing a blue ribbon and shitting it out the other end, continuously. That mug is so fascinatingly horrible that I may go back and get if it is still there in a week or two. But back to the mug at hand…this crackle-glazed monstrosity features two pheasants with delightfully shamefaced expressions. The male looks shocked in an “Oh, I say!” sort of fashion, while the female looks decidedly repentant. It’s a weird piece of crockery, but I decided that its stout construction and generous capacity made it an ideal tea mug, and the charm of the poorly executed birds has grown on me.
Second objective was to scavenge up as many ripe mulberries as I could:
I made an scouting trip yesterday with the dog, and just snacked on mulberries as I find them, but made plans to come back again…with tupperware!
I got one of these big semi-disposable plastic tubs about halfway full. And I found some more bushes, which are conveniently on my way home from work. I will be stopping nightly to scavenge berries for the duration of the mulberry season.
I pureed the lot and portioned them into smaller containers to freeze. I will used them mixed with other berries in smoothies. Mulberries don’t have a very strong flavor, but are quite sweet and have a pleasant, almost creamy texture. The seeds are tiny and you hardly notice them. I think they will be a good mix with strawberries or blueberries.
Speaking of strawberries; the strawberry bed I started last year has begun to produce. It seems like it will be just about the right amount. We had the first berries of the season with breakfast. They were small and kind of lumpy, but the taste was just fiiiine. I do not have any pictures of the berries, but here’s one of some green berries and one of the flowers:
More green berries – I think I took this picture last weekend or maybe the week before. I’ll have to take some pictures of the ripe berries after the next round of them are ready to pick.
As is well documented, one of my pet amusements is riding around town aimlessly with a camera in my bag, in case I see something cool to take a picture of.
Last Saturday, I did.
This here is a 1959 Chevrolet Corvette. I’d never seen one in person, so there were a lot of neat little stylistic details that caught me by surprise. Like this split rear bumper. Is that not an elegant looking bit of chrome-work?
I’m a little sad now that I didn’t get this picture squared up better than I did. Still…the paintwork, the chrome, the whitewalls…you get the idea.
I expect this speedometer is more about idealism than reality, but it’s an exciting array of potential anyway.
The iconic crossed-flags side-badge. I love old enamel badges, be they bicycle headbadges, or things like the Corvette flags above or my car’s Wolfsburg crest (pictured below).
One of the reasons that I was so taken with this ‘Vette is that it represents the other end of the spectrum from my old, crusty Volkswagen. Both in its early days, when it was an expensive sports car, and the Volkswagen was a cheap runabout, and today, when this Corvette is beautifully restored, and my VW is still a rickety project car:
We’re apparently going to haul the ol’ ’59 back here to Kansas City this fall, after an eight-year stint of moldering in the driveway at my parents’ place. I’m sure my mom will be happy to not have to look at its decaying carcass any more. I’ve got leads on two different body shops that sound like good candidates to take on the rust repair and paintwork, so I’ll be making further inquiries when the car is actually back in my possession.
For this is the sort of thing up with which we will not put!
So…that’s basically the sound of my brain these days.
Holy crap, April was pretty much a waste. We’ve been having one of those notoriously shitty Midwestern springtimes. Spring in this part of the country is really unabashedly rotten. After something on the order of 8,762 days of freezing ass hatefulness known as Winter, we all get restless as fuck and ready for some warmth and sunshine.
What we get are about 5 gloriously ideal days, and about 70 damp, windy, uninspiring ones.
So, my annual hibernation stretched through the bulk of April. Fie and woe and shit.
But enough tedious bitching about the weather. Don’t you just hate people who bitch about the weather all the time? I know I do.
I’ve actually been doing some stuff while the weather has been crap. Like baking a metric assload of cookies to store against the time when it is too hot to run the oven.
And there’s the Tweed Ride, a much-belated writeup of which is forthcoming.
Another little article that has been putting me off writing here is that I had obligations hanging over my head. Obligations I’d been dragging my feet over, and obligations which made me feel that it was patently improper for me to be fucking around with my own vanity blog, which does absolutely nobody any good whatsoever.
So, I finally knuckled down and got some stuff done.
River Market Cyclery has a new webpage now. It’s still a little light on content and features, but the important stuff is there, and there’s now a good framework for future content.
So occasionally I swear I’ll reform. I’ll throw away a few of the more egregious old ratty tee-shirts and burn a pair or two of wretched khakis. But I usually end up looking like this again pretty soon:
But I think I made one resolution that will actually stick. Last summer I started making myself a couple of lightweight el-cheapo cotton sundresses for wearing around home. I call them my “sweatin’ dresses,” and they’re little more than a glorified bathrobe that one could appear in public wearing without much shame. It’s based on a modification of New Look 6674, which is the same pattern I used to make my swanky orange silk wrap dress.
Only these dresses aren’t swanky. They’re the sort of thing a girl can wear in the garden, or while cleaning house, or riding around the alleys with a dog in tow. Just crappy cheap cotton calico, suitable for getting grubby and throwing in the washing machine and starting all over again.
This is the first and ugliest of the three. Perversely, it is my favorite. It is everything a housedress ought to be. Unalluring, busy enough to not show stains much, and totally comfortable.
The third one I finally finished up today. I cut it out sometime last summer but kind of ran out of enthusiasm for the project after doing the first two. But here it is, in all its twee, flowery glory:
That contrasting floral print theme gives it a bit of a Laura Ashley feel. I almost feel like I should be wearing a floppy sun hat along with this dress.
Anyway, I was sorting out my summer clothes yesterday and putting up my woolly carapaces for the season, and I threw out another round of disgusting, shreddy, horrible old tee-shirts and two pair of shorts that had really gotten beyond belief, so maybe I’ll present a little bit more presentable exterior this summer.
