Still grinding. Still working two jobs, getting out on the bike very infrequently, and generally just herding cats where the rest of life is concerned. Right now, it’s tough, but as we move into the off-season in a couple more months here, my hours at the shop will be cut back and I’ll be working ~4-6 hours per week instead of the 18-20 I am now, and that will make things a lot easier. Getting “Mechanic of the Month” for June was a nice win, too.
Bike
I haven’t been doing a lot of riding this year, but when I have it’s been mountain biking. I need to resolve this. Also, I need to stop “renting” ($0.00) high-end dual-suspension carbon trail bikes from the shop, because I’m getting spoiled rotten and find myself not wanting to ride my singlespeed or my fatbike anymore. Also, every ride I’ve been on this year has seen it start raining early into the ride, so I have to curtail these rides more than I’d like (due to trail damage, not me being a wuss), and I end up with a very dirty bike.
On the personal projects side of the bike, I’m assembling the stuff to build a set of road singlespeed wheels — Velocity Deep-V rims, DT Swiss Competition spokes (double-butted), All-City New Sheriff SL hubs. Will likely be tying-and-soldering the points where the spokes cross. They’re gonna be pretty fucking sweet, and I’m considering creating a how-to video around the process of building them. We’ll see.
Climbing
I don’t think I’ve really talked about rock climbing since my Livejournal days, but yeah, climbing. It’d been 7+ years since my last time out, and more than 10 years since I’d made a serious run at it. Eddy had some interest, and so we went. He did okay the first time out, and improved significantly between that and his second time out (processing stuff subconsciously, I’d bet), and he’s kicking ass at it. I’m not as crazy about it as he is — no one to belay me, so I’m stuck on auto-belay routes, which are okay, I guess, given how rusty/out-of-shape I am, but it’s still not the same. Anyway, he’s asked me to go and get re-certified on belay so that he can tackle some of the top-roping routes, and he’s already yammering about learning to lead climb, which is pretty sweet.
Maker Stuff
Do the bike wheels, mentioned above, count? I haven’t had time for much else lately.
Reading
Oof. I’m way off the pace for my goal of reading 60 titles this year. I’m so busy and so exhausted when I’m not busy that I’m not getting a lot of reading done. I am, right now, wrapping up my reading of Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers, which I’m going to review here at length.
Blog Format
I’ve been noodling with ideas for how to best approach this, and I think that I’m going to go ahead and rebuild this blog. I need to update the theme, and I need to set the focus to be more in-line with the stuff I do. To that end, I’m going to archive a lot of my old content, and then I’m going to focus on:
- cycling
- maker stuff
- reading/book reviews
And that’ll probably be about it. Thoughts?