With only 6 colors to choose from, I installed both Friday and Saturday with purple bears, in a ROYGB-V-V way in this little plastic pill popper weekly calendar.
Then Junior advised me that Saturday and Sunday should both have red counting bears. Her eye is intrinsically trained to size-up patterns and asymmetry and imbalance and then offer symmetric solutions.
It’s been about 11.67 years since I got myself a new-to-me used bike. Yesterday I adopted this Poprad at BikeWorks with a super bro deal thanks to Steve G.
Within 5 minutes of arriving home I chucked the carbon seatpost and the saddle and replaced the crap seatpost collar with an investment cast lost wax steel collar. I thought of Steve Gluckman a la old school Novara and I smiled a quality old school steel bike part smile. That collar has been hanging on the wall in the garage for years, waiting for its chance to get back out into the world. Now it's on my new used Poprad.
A work in progress. After a couple hours tinkering with parts I had sitting around the garage. Including the Schwalbe 700 x 38 marathons and the SimWorks handlebar that cost me more than this entire bike. I will be investing in a new steel fork, a new old stock 7-speed cassette and a brand-spanking-new chain. I’ll get back to you with before and after photos when I’m actually riding this thing. There will be no Bucky's training day. There will be no electric assist. There will be no carbon fiber....
Every once in a while I wear a Grinnell College hoodie. Sometimes someone will chat me up about their friend that went there. I took Junior to the airport recently and I was wearing this hoodie… …but got not a word from anyone about the finest liberal arts school in the country. If I was wearing it at O’Hare, I’d get high fives and backslaps and free beers all around, as Grinnell, Iowa is just a western suburb in the greater Chicago-Land area and there are way more Grinnell alumni in Chicago than there are in the entire Pacific Time Zone.
Shortly after I arrived I rolled it onto the industrial scale at the mothership. (The mothership is cool like that)
This thing weighs in at 28lbs.
In my mind it was clocking 35ish. Psychosomatically. It was all in my mind. As heavy as the day is long.
Then I stepped on the scale to weigh myself. (we can talk about this some other day someday) I’m where I was 40 years ago as a placekicker in Spokane. No joke. Some kind of genetic miracle, as I drink enough beer to feed a family of four, day in - day out, here & now 2026.
I’m now inspired to weigh all my other bikes at the mothership. Compare & contrast.
My actions inspired coworkers to weigh their bikes and weigh themselves too. Some of them have very expensive, very light gravel bikes. But some of their bikes are steel and heavy. Heavy duty.
I was digging through the archives for a photo I thought I had in my photographic memory. That photo eluded me. But I found this one from 2007. It brings me joy in a phantom nostalgia syndrome way. The good old daze.
A small part of me wishes I was back there on that Sunday afternoon, October 14, 2007. With nothing but free time. Having a beer with Corndog.
...A small part of me wishes I still had that green Fuji hanging in the garage, collecting dust. Simple clean coaster brake fun, easy like Sunday afternoon. I’d like to draw your attention to the radially laced 27” steel rim on a Schwinn BMX hub. And the glitter green grips.
Please now direct your attention to 39’s bike and how clean it was in 2007.
