a midway bikelog

My mom has been sewing as long as i can remember. One of my first specific clothing memories ever is of a brown velour shirt she made for me in grade school. While i also remember hating that shirt at the time, there were many other things she made for us that were great. Chief among them were the many halloween costumes she made, including a fantastic devil costume, complete with stuffed tail and horns.

She revived the halloween costume tradition with my girls, out-doing herself with wonderful ladybug, elephant, tiger, lion, and fairy outfits. This year Ella wanted to be a water nymph, which luckily turned out to be mainly a flowy blue dress. We made the costume during an early October visit, finishing most of it over a weekend. I helped out quite a bit, knowing my way around a sewing machine from earlier lessons from Mom and middle school Home-Ec class. I enjoyed the project quite a bit, and within a week i was trolling Craigslist for a sewing machine for myself. In true style, i ended up with two machines, both from the mid-to-late 50s, and each of them $50; a Singer 185 and a Pfaff 230.

The first project was to replace the rotting canvas on a porch chair, but part of the justification was always to try building a saddlebag for my bikes. Messenger bags are handy off the bike, but i hate having a sweaty back and sweaty strap lines on my shirt. I’ve been doing most of my commuting with a saddlebag for the last 3-4 years, the only problem is having to swap the two i have between bikes, so i wanted to make more. Here’s the first model i made for myself:

It’s all plain white canvas, with an orange fabric stripe. I like the style quite a lot, it’s a bit of a reaction to the plethora of black canvas bags around. Black canvas is smart: bike bags get grimy, and black looks good for a long time as it gradually fades to a charcoal grey. But i wanted something different, and i had a bit of plain white left over from the chair project, so that’s what i used. On the first day i used it, i lost a brand-new seat cover from the bag because it didn’t close very well when mostly empty. I did a couple of rounds of modifications to close up the mouth of the bag and keep things from falling out, and it works very well now, though the capacity is also reduced. It’s still a good size for average commuting loads, and i’ve added a front basket to that bike for shopping trips anyway.

I made a couple of small kid-size saddlebags next, because the kids liked my bag so much they wanted their own. These are made of Sunbrella outdoor canvas, which isn’t waterproof, but should resist fading. I added some basic straps that should hold the bag under a kid’s saddle ok, and they’ll probably work as handbags too, with a strap added.

I wanted a larger bag for myself though, so i kept playing with design ideas. I used to have a Carradice Lowsaddle bag, which is a little smaller Nelson bag, and it was a really nice size for regular commuting and light grocery trips. I got that bag used, with a ripped side panel. The previous owner included a replacement side panel so i could get it repaired, but i ended up just having the rip sewn shut rather than replace the panel, so i still had that oddly-shaped piece of canvas in a drawer at home after the bag was stolen last summer. It was a good find. Contrary to the round or trapezoidal shapes i was playing with, it was laid out like a pentagon, which gives the mouth of the bag good support, and keeps the opening relatively up once the bag is mounted. With this as a starting point, i played with the size a little (deeper) and added some side pockets and ended up with version 2:

This is a nice bag. The buckles are a little awkward, they should probably have some sort of guide to keep the straps more controlled, and the mounting point would be stronger if it were back about an inch. But overall, i like the bag a lot. The fabric seemed really bright at first, but with those atomic yellow straps, the canvas is downright understated. I assume it’ll get filthy and look like hell, but at the moment it looks great.

I don’t know if this will be any sort of serious undertaking, but i’ve had a great time with these sewing projects. My seams are getting straighter, and i’m figuring out some better techniques for planning and joining pieces. More than anything, sewing things myself has given me a real appreciation for the high quality of work in the great many sewn things we all use every day. Look at the average shirt or pair of pants and try to find an uneven seam or loose thread. It’s hard to do. Sure, there’s a lot of automation and machine work, but for many (most?) of those things there’s a person running that fabric through, and they do it extremely well, time after time.

One of the big reasons i love to make things myself is to better appreciate some of what we take for granted in daily life. You can easily cook a meal and compare it favorably or not to a restaurant meal, but things like tailoring and furniture-making and metalwork are more abstract. It’s inspiring to pick apart the pieces of something to see the thinking and skill involved, try to make my own version of it. Most of the time they’re flops because i just don’t have the knowledge or skill to do it well, but sometimes it’ll click and i end with something i like and use for a long time.

This poor ol’ blog hasn’t had much love lately, and that’s been gettin’ me down. And makin’ me drop g’s when i write.

My friend Tony has been talking up the Blueprint CSS framework for a while, but i haven’t had any time to give it a try. Then earlier this week, a very interesting new web font service called Typekit went public, and i decided to take a night off to play with the website again. After months of very slow progress on an ecommerce site, it was fun to get back into the comparatively clean and simple world of WordPress for a while.

The new site design is a fairly minor tweak of the Blueprint WP Theme though i may futz with it some more as i get used to the new look. The Blueprint CSS system is nice to work with because there are clearly laid out files controlling different parts of the page; layout, typography and grid, but the real magic is in the reset system. Blueprint does a really nice job of standardizing the display across browsers, greatly reducing the headaches involved in cross-platform CSS work. Bravo.

Compatibility aside though, i couldn’t help doing a little Safari-only text shadow for the title font. Oh, and the fonts! Are you seeing this in a nice/different font? You should be. Typekit is a service that allows you to use a wide range of different typefaces on a web page. You create an account with them (the free account gives 2 fonts and a reasonable bandwidth limit), and add 2 lines of code to the page headers. From there it’s just a matter of mapping the fonts to the selectors you want, and you can use a whole new set of fonts on the web page. The page is still text, and loads faster than if it the same thing were done with images, and remains searchable and accessible and all that good stuff.

In my 1/2 day of playing with Typekit, it works great. There are some fonts from local font guy Chank! and lots of good display type options, especially with the paid accounts. The type houses represented are small, and it’ll be interesting to see how the bigger companies respond. It would be great to have these sort of 3rd party services rather than a different sort of font service from every single company, as these things usually seem to sort out. The other question is whether designers get on board. Is this sort of design flexibility worth money to designers and their clients? I wonder how many designers will start using the tool and not even let the client know what’s behind the scenes. Given the volatility of web startups, i bet it’ll be a year or so before there’s widespread adoption, until the company seems to be good for the long haul. It would be bad all around if websites around the world suddenly lost their luster just because the font server crashed, with the rending of garments and biting of pillows and whatnot.

Ella has had a hard time falling asleep some recent nights, and while counting sheep worked ok the first night, i’ve been mixing it up. The setting is a big pasture, climatically appropriate, with a barrier dividing it into two sections. Of course, the section containing the animal is nearly barren of food, while the other is lush and ripe. Close your eyes (after reading the whole thing, silly) and imagine this next time you need a little help falling asleep:

Fairly athletic hippos, taking a running start and bounding over a fence to land (in a belly-flop, natch) in a giant mudhole. When they’re done wallowing, they relax in lounge chairs and eat heads of lettuce.

Reasonably limber giraffe, limboing their way beneath a tall fence to reach the trees on the other side.

Timidly hydrophobic monkeys on stilts, crossing a river of pirahna to the banana plantation on the other side.

Determinedly thrill-seeking sloths on a zip line, crossing a highway. It takes them each an hour to get up to the handle, 10 seconds to make the crossing, and another hour to figure out what just happened.

(uncredited photo from If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger)

It’s too late/to fall in love with Sharon Tate/and it’s too soon/to ask me for the words i want carved on my tomb.

I don’t remember how i first found Jim Carroll, whether it was a copy of the Basketball Diaries or the Catholic Boy album. I discovered him early in college, which was the late ’80s for me, and it’s just as likely that i would have found his album while flipping through the bins at Cheapo as finding the book at some little shop somewhere. Either way, whichever one i had first, it wasn’t long before i bought the other.

I read The Basketball Diaries at a good time. I was way into punk rock, even though i was just on the young side to see the 2nd wave of SST-generation bands play live before they all dissolved, i was a big fan. Unlike the psychadelic world-traveling stories of William Burroughs, reading Carroll’s story was immediately relatable for a half-irish, writing-oriented, music-loving (thought not as drug-prone) kid just a couple of years older than Carroll was at the end of the book. That book took the romance of the wild street life, of drug use and freedom and pulled it askew, like moving a refrigerator to see the layers of crap hiding beneath. It fascinated me but also snapped me out of the idea that there’s any sort of romance to a junkie’s lifestyle.

As much as i loved the music, it always seemed like a sort of hidden gem to me. Even among my fellow musician friends, few listened to them or even heard of the Jim Carroll band, by that point 10 years past their last album. His band was killer, putting interesting twists on pretty straight-ahead garage rock albums that spoiled me for the more common metronome-sounding punk bands. Any comparisons to Lou Reed of Carroll as frontman are good ones, both in the (high) quality of the lyrics and the (low) quality of the singing. In this way though, he was totally punk rock in the best DIY/Minutemen sense of it: he was just a regular person with something to say, doing his damndest to say it. It’s not the kind of musical package that’s going to move units, but rather spawn a thousand bands, and that it did.

I don’t know where my copy of Catholic Boy went, but i still have Dry Dreams on vinyl, just nothing to play it on. Likewise, i don’t know where my copy of Book of Nods is, or if it’s even on my shelves at the moment, i haven’t read him for several years now. But in the recent list of celebrity deaths (MJ, Walter Kronkite, Ted Kennedy, etc), i have to say that i feel this loss the most this year.

Credit where credit is due: the St. Paul city street patching crew did a kick-ass job on the northbound stretch of Hamline between Ayd Mill and 94. What looked like a blown-out minefield now rides almost as nicely as a repaved street. Really, I should have taken a picture, it’s that good. Looking forward to having the southbound lane fixed too!

This trail has been several years in the works, and has been on and off the table more often than a cat at breakfast. Finally, it appears, we have a solid GO for it, and I’m looking forward to it, though i might be the only one using it.

PioneerPress article | Strib article

The Strib article is a little incomplete, inferring (to at least one paranoid commenter) that the city will be taking away road or rails to build the trail, which isn’t true. You have only to drive down Ayd Mill road to see the wide expanse of right-of-way betwixt road and rail to see where it’ll go. The space in question isn’t even usable by the railroad in most places, as it’s behind a line of trees.

I’m the first to admit that it’s an odd duck of a trail. It doesn’t seem to go anywhere important, it’s not replacing a widely-used bike route, and no matter the mode of transportation, there aren’t that many people traveling between the Midway and southern West 7th neighborhoods (besides me). The big benefit to this trail will be the connections it allows.

When you look at a map of the area, you can see that Ayd Mill crosses or is near Marshall and Summit, both well-used east-west bike routes. At the south end there is an easy connection to the Shephard road trail. It will also serve as a great inter-neighborhood trail, with easy connections to shopping at several points. Way to go, St. Paul.

To celebrate the end of summer riding (not that it’s the end of the cycling season by any means), 4 friends and i took a leisurely ride from St. Paul to Prescott, Wisconsin for a little lunch, then home again, a 65-mile beer-and-burger run. Priorities!

Here’s the route (thanks to @truetone for entering this!)

I know, i’m not a huge fan of mapmyride either, what with all the ads. I would much rather use Bikely, but alas they seem to be pretty much inaccessible nowadays. Sad to lose a good site like that. Anyway. Moving along.

A few route notes, mostly for my own reference later. It’s not a good singlespeed route, with 3 good climbs and rolling hills that work best with gearing. We headed out along Summit Ave, then through downtown to Shepherd/Warner road and Pt. Douglas road. It’s a good thoroughfare for getting out of town to the south/east, a mix of low traffic roads and trails. Just before 494, turn off to Bailey road for the first big climb. At the top, we went straight on Bailey, which is long and straight and not all that scenic, but otherwise pleasant to ride.

At the town of Afton, we are undeterred by the offerings of pie and rest and forge on to the 3 climbs of St. Croix trail. It’s a pretty route, but practically no shoulders, best ridden on low-traffic times. Today, with the holiday weekend and spectacular weather, it was full of Harleys and Corvettes out for a spin.

In Prescott, we’re all sweaty and hungry and thirsty and seek out the Boxcar (cafe? pub?) downtown. It’s a really nice little spot there, great sandwiches and beer selection. A Rush River ale and New Glarus Fat Squirrel and juicy bluecy. Yum. It’s also Wisconsin, which reminds me that there are still places where people smoke in bars. Bleah.

After lunch, a short stint along hwy 61, which is busy but with wide shoulders, and we’re soon on Manning then Lehigh Road. Lehigh to Military road is a lovely and rural stretch of road; scenic, with nice rideable shoulders. Back down the big hill after rejoining Bailey, we head across the 494 bridge and hook up with the new-to-me South St. Paul Regional trail. That trail connects nicely with Concord Ave, which is probably the best tour of mexican culture in South St. Paul, (El Burrito Mercado! etc.) and on through downtown to home.

The girls helped me dig up potatoes from the garden today. The plants weren’t totally dead yet, but i haven’t done much with them, and they were planted from potatoes that sprouted in the pantry over the winter, so i didn’t expect much. We were pleasantly surprised to find that there were potatoes under there though, and though approx. 1lb per plant is probably pretty sad, i was happy to get them. And they’re delicious.

Next year i think i’ll get some seed potatoes and really make a go of it.

1. They’re writing funny w/r/t their use of abbreviations
2. Whatever bag they’ve been carrying always seems to be 2.5 lbs heavier than usual
3. They start calling dead people ‘de-mapped’
4. Always asking if they can borrow that to use as another bookmark
5. They’re making lists like this when they can’t just sit and read the thing

(via Minnesotacyclist.com)

We definitely need something like this on the new post-Light Rail version of University Avenue. The video is a follow-up on lanes painted in Long Beach, and many other cities are using them as well.

Cross-sections of the new version of the 120′ right of way layout along the Central Corridor seem to be finalized around 2 rail tracks, 2 traffic lanes with left turn lanes and sidewalk. That’s it; no parking space, no dedicated bike lane space. Parking is a very different issue (though i think off-street and side-street parking will pretty much take care of this). The bike lane isn’t such a huge loss as there’s no dedicated bike lane now, in fact the new University Avenue would be a safer cycling road than we currently have, if the right lane is marked as a shared bike lane.

Currently, cycling on University is a hit-and-miss proposition. Traffic is usually moderate to light and free-flowing. There’s a wide, sloppy right lane and parking space that generally allows the same amount of cycling space that a bike lane would allow, it’s just not marked. This works fine for some more dedicated cyclists who are comfortable negotiating traffic, but is intimidating to young and novice cyclists who (understandably) feel unsure about where they should be. Factor in speeding drivers and the poor condition of the road surface along most of University, and it’s not a very friendly route.

Sharrows in a well-marked shared traffic lane would improve this in many ways. Despite an overall narrower set of traffic lanes (especially a perceptibly smaller traffic space than the current layout), overall traffic speed won’t likely drop much, so cyclists will be caught up in high traffic flow with no buffer or escape space. Marking a shared lane will let drivers know both that this is shared space with slower road users as well as that the left lane is for faster speeds (and bike-free). The marking will also remind pedestrians to look for cyclists when crossing the street. Finally, cyclists that have a place to be will generally use it. If you watch a road with striped bike lanes, the vast majority of cyclists will use that lane rather than the traffic lane or the sidewalk. Most cyclists aren’t looking to interfere with cars, they just want to get where they’re going with the least grief and resistance (just like drivers!).

So why not shuttle bikes on to one of the parallel neighborhood streets? Lots of cyclists already use Thomas or Charles between Snelling Ave and downtown, but to the west those streets are blocked by the train tracks west of Prior. Just like with drivers, commuting cyclists want a smooth thoroughfare to their destination, and sharrows would provide that for everyone. No bikes on the road? No need to slow down. Really, for the price of a little extra painting, this would solve a lot of problems.