...the weekend madness (installment 9)

So this weekend past, I had planned a number of exciting activities for myself in attempt to stave off boredom more effectively than in previous weekends. Friday I did essentially nothing, I presented myself at work in a timely fashion as usual, and then went home and caught up on satirical punditry before going to bed.

On Saturday I did manage slightly more productivity, doing laundry and cycling around from bike shop to bike shop hunting for another knog frog to compliment the two I already own. I had noticed that not only were my knogs getting dimmer with age, my front light needed a compatriot so that I could mount them on the fork blades without worrying about which side I was weighting more.


At any rate, I found the "frog" surprisingly difficult to track down as it seems Knog is promoting their "beetle" light now and all the LBS's are flush with beetles and devoid of frogs. Because of that, I was forced to finally settle on a frog in the clear-ish 'colorway' as opposed to my usual choice of black (depicted above).

Still not wanting to appear unbalanced, I removed the electronics from the new clear-ish frog and swapped them out with the red light from one of the frogs I already owned. This allowed me to be able to affix the two black frogs to my fork blades and the clear-ish frog to my seat post, where the red light would be more visible from the sides through the rubbery housing.

Also, I bought new batteries for the two frogs I already had, but was shocked at the steep cost of frog ownership, for the batteries it requires (2032's I believe) are "medical batteries" and $8 a pair at Duane Reade, which is just crazy. On that note, I needed to buy batteries for my camera as well (hence the extreme lack of first-person documentation on this blog recently) but opted to wait since I was going to see the Decemberists at Terminal 5 later, and didn't want the hassle of toting around a brick of AA's at a concert.

As I had come to expect from these Oregoners, the concert turned out to be pretty awesome. They got some MC to draw songs written on plastic balls from a tumbler that the band would then play before a preppy looking tennis guy came out to lob the song ball into the audience.

I didn't manage to catch one of the balls, but I did catch a cool vibe from both the band and my fellow spectators. This was the first crowd I had pushed my way through (in following the much smaller girls toward the front) that peacefully accomodated my path by scooting aside as much as they could or pointing out gaps that I could exploit to that end.

For me, the Decemberists were merely an indie-rock group that my girlfriend liked, and that was the end of it until I actually took the time to listen to their work. I'm no musical authority, but I found that I really enjoy their music and even moreso their good-clean-fun approach to putting on a show.


After the concert, we went home to sleep though I was having trouble doing so, either because of or in spite of the fact that I was planning a ride to Bear Mt for Sunday morning. I washed my bike, filled my water bottles and tires, packed a fresh tube into my seat bag and set out all of my gear and clothing for the morning.

Then Sunday morning everything went off without a hitch, I left pretty much right on time and was well on my way out of the city enjoying the cool weather when my bicycle broke.

I'm being vague about what "broke" because to be honest I have no idea what happened or why. All I know is that while riding normally, my pedals seized up for a split second, then made a very loud snapping/cracking sound and then I could no longer shift smoothly in the rear or at all in the front.

Using my meager set of bike maintenance skills, I attempted to reset my front derailleur but could not get it to work, so I pedaled back to Soho from about 170th St in my next-to-lowest gear (aka slower than molases). Once I made it to Bicycle Habitat, the head mechanic, Hal, corroborated that my front derailleur was both out of alignment and bent badly. As usual, he happily fixed it while dropping some lesser known bike facts on me about the parts he was fixing.

(my derailleur looked like the photo on the left, above, though much more exaggeratedly bent)

For a while I had noticed that though I have only two chainrings my derailleur was indexed for a three-chainring setup. Not quite understanding why this was, I chalked it up to the fact that my bike came with mid- to low-end components that may not have been paired properly with my setup. Hal elucidated for me why this was: apparently its just easier for companies to include triple-indexed front derailleurs on all the bikes they make. This, like the tire misconception, is another instance of people's stupidity driving product development.

If you have a geared bike, one of the first things you will read about shifting gears (If, like me, your inclined to read at length about such topics), is that the #1 no no is what's called "crossing over". This just means that its bad for the life-span of your sprockets and chain if you get into the habit of riding with the chain on the leftmost (smallest) sprocket in the rear and the right most (smallest) chainring in the front, or vice versa. So Shimano, Campy, and SRAM all offer triple indexing so that you can "trim" the derailleur position if the chain is rubbing it when you're crossing gears badly.

Hal went on to say that if bothers you to the point where money is no object, then the top-o'-the-line Dura-Ace comes in a "double indexed" variety; but at those prices, most people are content to deal with the extra click required to shift.

Anyway, by the time He straightened everything out and bent the derailleur cage back into position, it was already well into the afternoon and thus far too late for me to get anywhere interesting and back before nightfall (though I am still itching to try out my new 'lightway'). Knowing this and bummed that my ride was scrapped before it even really got started, I rode home and cleaned house with my roomate.

Oh well; 'til next time y'all, maintain your drivetrain...