The Strip Down

I've decided to rebuild The Purple Trail Eater -- that heavy monstrosity of a bike that I rode for the Dirt, Guts, and Donuts race. I mean, I gotta give the bike props. For a P.O.S. that was likely manufactured by child labor in a developing nation, assembled by a minimum wage earning high school student, ridden for a few years, bought at a yard sale to be refurbished by a guy that earns his living doing such things as refurbing Walmart bikes, and bought by yours truly who got a crazy notion one day that she should start cycling the twelve odd miles to campus...it held up like a champ in the 8ish miles of DG&D. Of course, I suspect this is because the bike is composed of metals once used in Cold War era Soviet tanks. Anyway, another crazy notion hit me tonight. I want to put new life into this bike. The initial plan: strip the bike down to the frame and rebuild it into a single or fixed gear (to be determined) mountain bike. This is also a solo project with minimal expert (read: professional) or technical (read: manly) help.

Step one, the strip down, was completed tonight. I learned a lot of things tonight...mostly about using tools whose names do not exist in my vocabulary (but have made up my own names...kudos to anyone who can give the real name to the "shiny metal locking clamp thingy" and "the clicky wrench"). I did have to dig into my limited reserve of technical assistance for brute strength tasks like cutting the brake and shifter cables and removing the crank turned out to be a two person job. But 99% of the strip down was completed sans help.

And here is all that remains of the Purple Trail Eater.

I haven't decided whether to keep the purple or do a repaint, I'm kinda digging the idea of some WWII mat Jeep green, complete with white star. But ignoring the aesthetics for the moment I think the first task is a new crank. It was the last thing to come off, so seems right that it should be the first to go back on. Lucky for me Nashville has a bike shop that sells slighty used and lightly abused parts, and I imagine that will be my first shop stop. Steve pointed out a few obstacles which may kill this project. He thinks there is a possibility that the frame may have proprietary (that's the word he used, but I prefer non-standard) sizes which may make shopping for cranks and downtubes an impossibility. But we'll just have to wait and see.

Stage 1, The Strip Down: Complete

Stage 2, The Crank: Standby

The Church's Chicken Burn-Off Ride

I had lofty and some-what healthy plans for lunch today. A homemade...well, okay...workmade toasted turkey and Swiss sub complete with pine nut hummus. Yums. But as I was prepping my sandwich materials I noticed that my sub bread had sprouted little fuzzy green dots.../sigh. So, in a moment of weakness I threw my debit card into the hands of today's lunch lackey and she came back with a Church's chicken tender meal, mashed potatoes with gravy, and a biscuit (which I'm pretty sure was deep friend in butter and then doused with honey), which came to a whopping 660 calories. Okay, I'll admit, that's not really that bad...but it was deep fried and had something like 100,000 mg of sodium (I'm rounding up). So, with the weather being fairly good today, I left work an hour early and went for a quick 10 mile jaunt on my road bike, burning approximately 492 of those 660 calories off.

Stupid green fuzzy dots. Ruins everything it does.

Saint Stephen the Confessor

With nearly a week gone by with my new communications device, I'm proud to announce that it is no longer winning the struggle between human and machine. Up until Wednesday I'd seriously thought that I was witnessing the dawn of a robot uprising. I would open up an app only to not be able to get the app to disappear (cue movie clip: Adam Sandler yelling at the golf ball, "Why don't you go to your home?!?!?! Don't you like your home?!?!?!?!). No, joke, all day Tuesday I could not get the alarm icon to disappear off the main screen. I'd press my finger onto the icon, flick it off to the left...the icon would go zooting off in the correct direction...but alas, it wouldn't disappear into the menu. /sigh But, by Wednesday, I'd figured out all the tricks to making and moving my app icons.

So, with much elation, I'm proud to announce that I like my new cell phone and I am keeping it. And this is where the title of this post becomes relevant. I told Steve this about two hours ago, and without putting any effort into hiding his disappointment, his body sags and says, "Awwww...but I was hoping you'd hate it so much that you'd give it to me!"

....crickets....

This becomes all the more entertaining considering HE TRICKED ME INTO GETTING THE PHONE! (see previous post) This could have easily been solved with him buying the new phone I was way overdue for, stuck his SIM card in it instead, and just sunk extra cash into expanding the memory on my SLVR. But ya know, this is kinda like that episode of the Simpsons where Homer buys Marge a bowling ball for her birthday with the expectation that she won't want it and will just give it to him instead...but much to his dismay she takes up bowling. Yeah, well,...Steve, guess what...I just took up Samsung Sillouetting....or...something.

The Mark

So I bought a bluetooth enabled motorcyle helmet.... wait, but first let me say something else:

Ok, a small confession...I'm not a tech nerd (or whatever it is those people are calling themselves these days). As a general rule, I'm best described as a ludite. I'm usually the last to jump onto the "latest and greatest" technological bandwagon, and once I do accept some form of technology I tend to hold onto it until its considered archaic (which by today's standard is about 4 months, but in my case tends to be years). My cell phone history is a great example. I started out with a Nokia flip phone, you know that basic piece of crap they give every new cell phone subscriber for free...in fact, its so shitty they may actually pay you to take it off their hands. I upgraded to a Motorola SLVR four or five years ago...yeah, seriously...who the hell keeps a cell phone for four years these days? Even better, how many cell phones actually last four years? Anyway, I love the SLVR so I've been very hesitant to part with it, as is the way of ludites.

Right, so I bought a bluetooth enabled helmet. It's a pretty nifty concept...well to someone out of the technological loop it seems pretty nifty...phone and music through a bluetooth device. Nice! But after searching the net for a reasonably priced bluetooth MP3 player and coming up with nothing, Steve says, "it would be cheaper to just buy a new cell phone." Now Steve knows I don't want a new cell phone. He's tried to seperate me from my SLVR for years, and to no avail. So it's with this knowledge that I'm going to go ahead and say that he tricked me into buying a new cell tonight. He'd bought the same bluetooth helmet as I, but his was having limited range so I'd pretty much resigned myself to just having a bluetooth helmet sans working bluetooth capabilities without ever really plugging the damn thing in and testing it out. But I did, and to my surprise, it connects and has a range of 10+ feet. Sweet!

So Steve chimes in with, "well now all we need to do is get you a bluetooth device that will hold lots of songs, we could go to Best Buy." So with 30 minutes til closing time we speed to Best Buy, pick out a new cell phone (a Samsung Sillouette btw), fiddle about with the phone over dinner and then go to Walmart to purchase a memory card to hold all these songs. And it was on the drive back to the house when my brain put one and one together. I'd just been tricked into buying a new cell phone. Because, my SLVR has an iTunes app and Bluetooth and a memory card. All it needed was a larger memory card so that the phone would hold a practical number of songs.

I mean sure, the new phone is nifty and new and has lots of cool features (like GPS with vocal turn-by-turn directions or I could watch streaming video),...but there was and still is nothing wrong with my SLVR. Its a great phone and it (and I) have smuggly sat back as friends with lesser communications devices have had to upgrade because their latest and greatest phone has turned out to be a total piece of shit. And here I am, with my own latest and greatest phone, loading songs and transferring contacts...and keep asking myself,...how the hell did I get talked into this again?

Dammit.
Geeks: 1.
Jen: 0.

Halloween Festivities

Steve and I headed to Knoxville this weekend to celebrate Halloween with Gabe and Em. Friday night was meant to be a pumpkin carving event. I had a brilliant idea for a jack-o-lantern: buy a large white pumpkin and carve it into the shape of a ghost from the classic Atari game, Pac-Man. But the fates were against me. There was a guy selling white pumpkins for $3 at a stand, but when I went to buy one no one was in. Okay...sure I could have liberated a pumpkin and dumped the cash in its place. But well...too honest I guess. But besides *not* having a pumpkin for the event, we got into Knoxville so late that we'd missed the carving party. So, while waiting for Gabe and Em to get home we watched Sean of the Dead and ate Doritoes and donuts.

Saturday we all dressed up and attended a couple of parties. Emilie went at a hot demon, Gabe went as a prison convict (but only after his attempt at making a good Sideshow Bob costume failed), Steve went as a couch potato...again, and I went as a Greaser, more specifically I was aiming for Sodapop from The Outsiders (this was an impromptu costume after inadvertently leaving my original costume at home). The first party...while in concept was cool, actually sucked because of the rain. It was an outdoor bonfire party hosted by Gabe and Em's hiking meetup group. There was tasty food and a huge ass fire...but after standing in the rain for two hours it got a little tiresome. So we headed to some people's house I didn't know, but apparently have met before. We hung out with the "strangers" and some newly acquired friends I made on my last Knoxville/D.C. trip...and the night pretty much ended as expected: Steve vomiting his guts out.

Sunday we met up with Allison and Ron (the newly acquired friends) for a hangover cure breakfast at Mimi's Cafe. Afterwards we went to a world market and bought British chocolate and teas, went to a few other shops and then spent the rest of the day lounging about, watching movies, playing games, etc until bedtime. It was a great weekend, but very tiring. :)

Note- pics of the costumes are the exclusive property of Steve's cell phone. If he should ever chose to share them I'd post a couple here.