a midway bikelog

So now Campagnolo stuff goes to 11. Meh. I say 8 is enough plenty.

(ok, so my road bike came with 9, so there)

I got my acetylene tank refilled a couple of weeks ago, and got this put together over the last couple of nights:

It’s a first pass at a front rack and generator light mount. Nothing special about the design, really, it’s copied from many others. It’s pretty half-baked in some ways; one gimpy bend, and sort of tacked-on center rails. One support had to get moved by about 1 cm, so that got a little sloppy. On the plus side, my joints are getting a little cleaner, and i’m pretty happy with my slotted dropout-style tabs for the lower struts. I also made some little wire management loops by bending some small nails and brazing them on.

It seems fairly strong, for just being cheap mild steel. I wouldn’t put a case of beer on it yet, but it should do ok with light basket loads. It’s barely cleaned up, i haven’t even soaked the flux off, i just wanted to get it test fit and a couple of days of trial to see if it breaks.

With the Mississippi bridge at Winona closed now, it’s a golden opportunity to promote bike commuting. A few bikes on the bridge certainly wouldn’t stress it, right? So keep the bridge open to cycling and walking only, no motorized vehicles. Thrifty commuters will save $10/day over the proposed river ferry and get to work/home faster to boot!

oragami
once a paper
once a tree
once a seed
HOW COULD IT BE!

I spent a delightful afternoon Saturday taking turns attending a chamber music recital and playing with kids. The recital was organized by my friend Tracy, who played bassoon, and featured music from the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. The turn-taking was so I and another friend Lee could attend, and so our kids (who wouldn’t sit still for that long) could play together. The area around Ferguson Hall turned out to be a good place for kids to run around for a hour with art and snack breaks, and the plan worked great. I don’t have the program with me for the exact pieces, but got to sit in on the French first half with a bassoon/flute duo and a bassoon/flute/violin trio.

I’m not at all well-versed in chamber music; it’s sort of like my knowledge of wine, where i know bits that i like, but don’t necessarily remember where they’re from later on. I did enjoy this quite a bit. The bassoon was particularly interesting not just because i know the player, but because i don’t know if i’ve ever heard one alone in this sort of small group setting before. In many parts it greatly resembled a cello, as they share tonal ranges, but it also seemed to have a greater variety of tonal colors and overall sounded much more agile and versatile than a cello. I may be biased (and uninformed), of course, but it all sounded wonderful. I look forward to hearing the recording of the second half with the bassoon solo and the featured piece from Bachianas brasileiras, No. 6 for flute and bassoon.

Sunday was a lower-key day spent at home doing the usual sort of cleaning and fixing and playing around the house. I finally replaced the split (frozen, i was a dumbass and left the hose on) outside spigot so we could file up the wading pool. It was a beautiful day so we spent most of it outside, and the girls spent most of it covered in mud (see previous outside hose note). They made some beautiful mud pies and mud cakes and all sorts of mud-based creations.