Meanwhile I stayed in slept late, watched some TV, ate what was left of pecan pie and turkey dressing. I then worked on the Voodoo some. Since working big retail years ago I saw up close the ugliness of black friday. I admit it seems to have considerably ramped up over the years and be much worse for the normal retail worker, especially with most everything being open on thanksgiving.
In my view the holidays should be about GIVING and not BUYING. To that end often I chose not to really participate in the insanity of holiday shopping. yeah yeah I know the economy needs it and all that shit seriously it's often consumerism at it's ugliest. I know I fall on this trip every year and I get the "Well you don't have kids, so xmas ...yadda yadda yadda..."
I have stated before and will time and again that you should not need one specific day on the calender to give something to someone to show that you care. You should do that at anytime of the year. I practice what I preach here dear friends. That's why people get random gifts and acts of kindness out of me during the year.
I am of the thought that if you're going to give something for the holidays it should be made by hand. I'm not talking some elaborate thing just something simple. In the very least if you have to go to the store it's for supplies to make something not the ends to a means. If you make something and give it to me it means more and I figure it's the same with most everyone, there are exceptions of course.
During this holiday season as usual with this blog I'll show my irreverence for the holiday. If you get a gift it means I actually made time to finish up a project or two or three.
How does this fit in with BOSAHFOW? Well it's the "head full of weird" portion you're dealing with just now.
Still under the banner of weird my current fave song:
Now onto cycling.
As mentioned earlier I worked on the Voodoo some yesterday. I realized that I have hardly ridden it as of late and reflected on it. I took it out for a spin and realized once I got back to the garage that compared to my other bikes the bars were way short. I realized that I had these bars on one of my version of a city cross check and cut the bars a bit short to avoid breaking my hand again on car mirrors while splitting lanes. These bars were fine riding in an urban environment not so great when climbing when you need to leverage especially when your single speeding or in my case a fat middle aged MTB type.
My first choice was to go carbon. I'm no money bags and figured I could find NOS ones in my stem size on the ebays for cheap. No such luck. Because of my only occasional attention I give to the trends in the bicycle industry now I missed the boat on the whole converting to 31.8 for carbon bars and regular old stems. Not wanting to spend the money on a new stem 9because of certain budgetary constraints) I decided to stick with aluminum or steel riser bars. The brand I prefer is Salsa they are a quality outfit and been around for awhile now I've never had a problem with their parts (knock wood). Naturally I could not find 25.4 salsa aluminum bars that were not cut down to bare nubs by hipsters. Then on to my second choice Ritchey. I fell into the Ritchey stuff at the bike shop I use to work it. We had a lot of it so naturally a stem or two make it onto a bike. Never had a prob with the stuff so (knock wood) I'll give their bars a try. I found on the ebays an affordable set of bars that were NOS and got them. I did not cut them down even a little because I figure right now I can use all the leverage I can get.
The bike is all dusted off and ready to ride today. I confess that I gotta get the bikes out of the garage. I moved them there because I live down here. BIL does a fair bit of wood working in there and saw dust gets on everything. It seems the bikes have to constantly migrate in the garage. For a big two car garage there ain't much room in there. Not complaining it's just an observation. I'm thinking on moving the bikes to the basement and doing like a pallet bike rack thing with some tarps. I have not sketched it out the idea would be similar to a yard stash just a whole lot cheaper and using some things that are inexpensive or what we got lying around. I have about 6 weeks left of free time until school starts again. I need to organize thoughts and make a crazy person board :
I got the space and I've made the effort to put some thoughts onto 3x5 cards instead of post its. I'm just not going to do that today. I got mild weather brewing up and a hankering to ride over at Dauset despite how many people are going to be there today. Oh and one final holiday thought:
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