Hello there! Today is the Fourth of Joo-lie.
Yes, it's American Independence Day. And it's my birthday. But I can't say I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy: I was born in Georgia! Then again, it was one of the thirteen colonies that declared independence.
(One thing they never teach in American History classes, at least in the US, is that there were really fifteen colonies. Thirteen seceded. The other two, Quebec and Nova Scotia, didn't. The reality is that they couldn't: Nova Scotia was the North American base for the Royal Navy, and Montreal and Quebec City were essentially garrisons for the Royal Army. But I digress.)
Anyway, on a day like today, what better theme than red-white-and blue bicycles?
Perhaps it's not surprising that red-white and blue bikes come out in the wake of victories by American riders. It seemed that during the reign of Lance, every other Trek model had some sort of variation on the flag that poet Bill Knott referred to as "a starry sweatband of cheese."
All right, it's a Do-Rag. My question is: Will it fit under my helmet?
Back when I was training in Prospect Park, I sometimes rode with a guy who wore a yarmulke under his helmet. And the fringes of his tallit dangled from underneath the hem of his jersey. I also sometimes rode with an observant Jewish woman who carried a skirt in her jersey pocket. As soon as she got off the bike, she pulled the skirt on. Where else but in America, right?
Speaking of Americana: Like baseball, basketball and snowboarding, mountain biking originated in the USA. So, of course I had to include a mountain bike here:
And, of course, the Fourth is not complete without parades and such. And there are always kids on bikes. This one's for them:
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't end my homage to red, white and blue bicycles on the Fourth without mentioning the web page of someone who has a red, a white and a blue Cannondale.
A couple of weeks ago, I described one of my rainy-day DYI projects that resulted in an easy-on, easy-off Carradice Nelson bag for my commuter.
Now, I'll describe another project I did the same day I did that one. It also involved a Carradice bag: in this case, the Barley. Actually, it involved two of them.
Some cyclists complain about "thigh slap" when using traditional-style Carradice saddle bags, particularly on racing bikes. That is because those bags were designed when bikes, even the racing variety, had shallower angles. That meant that saddles sat further forward on seat posts and seat tubes than they do on modern bikes. Also, Brooks saddles, for which Carradice saddlebags are designed, sit further forward and have less room on the rails to set them back than most saddles designed at a later date.
The so-called Bagman is designed, in part, to alleviate this problem. It looks well-made enough, but it weighs and costs nearly as much as some good racks. (I own one, which I haven't used yet, for the possibility of using the Nelson longflap on Arielle or Tosca.) Plus, it's not the easiest thing to install. Finally, it mounts on the saddle rails and, depending on your saddle and where it's positioned, you may not have enough room on your rails to install it.
So, I adapted someone else's idea and added one of my own to set the bag back.
Here's the idea I adapted: I took two short pieces of PVC pipe, which you can find in any hardware store, screwed them together, filed one end to fit on the seat post and wrapped them in black tape. Then, instead of using the strap Carradice provides for attaching the bag to the seat post, I took a cheap strap and threaded one end through the pipe, into the part of the bag designed for the strap, and back into the pipe, which I cinched around the seat post.
After I installed the bags and rode them a couple of times, I discovered something else. Canvas bags, like leather saddles, become more supple with use. So the bag "collapsed" around the pipe, and sometimes (depending on whether I slid back on the saddle), my thighs grazed the ends of the bags.
If you're familiar with these bags, you know that there's a wooden dowel that runs across the top. When you attach the bag to the slots or loops on a Brooks-style saddle, you loop the straps around that dowel. Well, I installed another dowel like it across the bottom of the bag, at the point where the pipe meets the bag.
I fastened the dowels with small wood screws. That is how Carradice attaches the original dowel, so I figured those screws wouldn't harm the fabric.
A few days after I made the modifications, I got caught in a pretty fair downpour. (Is that an oxymoron?) I am happy to report that everything I had in that bag--my camera, notebook, an extra layer and, ironically, a tube of sunblock--remained as dry as Charlie and Max were in my apartment.
Last night, I stayed up much later than I'd planned. There was a technical glitch, and I got a bunch of angry e-mails from students and a couple more phone messages from the technical school in which I taught a couple of classes this year. It turns out neither the college nor the students got the grades. For some students, it's not merely an inconvenience; it can actually affect whether or not they can register for some of the courses they need, or get financial aid.
And I got another message from the college telling me that I hadn't taken some online training course in sensitive communications (a subject about which I know absolutely nothing) or some such thing. When I opened the site for that course, which is not maintained by the school itself but by an outside contractor, it crashed my computer. Of course their IT department denies that their software would ever do any such thing to my computer.
So, after scrambling to fix those things (I'm still not finished with the course), I got to bed much later than I'd intended. That meant, of course, that I got up later than I'd planned. But at least at this time of year, in this part of the world, you can get away with that, as days are longer. In fact, it turned out rather nicely. I'm talking about the day as well as my ride.
And now, appropriately enough, I'm listening to Nick Drake's "Day Is Done."
