Portland (OR) is the Best Place #1

Better Together

From The Royal Library, Denmark on Flickr's "The Commons"

This photo tells me that to be a true success at a tweed ride, I'm going to need higher trousers.

Seems Normal

Old Normal School Building in University Heights

Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty

Pretty excited about this. I've been wanting a go-to vegetarian cookbook for main courses and side dishes, and this fits the bill exactly. Mostly Middle Eastern and Mediterranean-inspired, but not heavy-handed about it. Made the sweet potato cakes (think crab cakes -- fritters, you might say), with a Greek yogurt-based sauce for dinner last night. Simple ingredients, easy to make, extremely delicious. I didn't think to take a photo of the meal since we had people over, but I'll try to document more of my cooking from this book in the future.

Instead of providing an Amazon linker, I'm going to recommend checking with your nearest independent bookstore and asking them to order the book if they don't have it in stock. It's a bargain at $35 US.

General Putnam's Ride

General Putnam's Ride

General Putnam, hearty and stout,

Certainly tired the enemy out,

Boulders and ditches he took with glee,

And from all harm escaped scot-free,

'Twas easily done for Old Glory's sake,

A-riding his Corbin Coaster Brake.

Mourning Cloak Chrysalids

Nymphalis antiopa

This Town's So Strange, They Built It To Change

Just Finished: William Faulkner, Light in August

The Internet, Brought to You By This Horse

This is brilliant. Via BoingBoing:

Fred, a Belgian draft horse, working with line crews to attach a fiber optic cable to a utility pole in East Burke, Vermont, on June 24, 2011. Fairpoint Communication hires Claude Desmarais and his horse Fred to pull fiber optic cable through difficult terrain in a effort to bring high speed internet to all of Vermont by 2013. (REUTERS/Brian Snyder)

Happy Summer, One Day Late

I forget where I found this.

The Difference a Year Makes

Neither of these are ideal photos, but they show the changes I've made to the Peugeot. The photo on the left was taken last May after I bought the bike (a steal at $70), and the photo on the right was taken last weekend. The major changes are a Brooks B-17 saddle, Velo-Orange Belleville handlebars, Tektro inverse brake levers, Velo-Orange hammered 45mm fenders, 28mm Panaracer Pasela tires, and a ViVa saddle bag support and Zimbale 11-liter saddle bag.

And of course, the incidentals: water bottle cage, lights, a bell, and a bit of leftover bar tape and twine on the top tube to protect against the brake levers banging it if the front wheel swings around. I also took the large chainring and front derailleur off, since there are a lot of hills in San Diego and I don't have any need or inclination to ride fast or hard. I may yet change out the pedals for something better suited to urban riding, but these are serving me well enough for now.

I am so, so, so happy with this bike. It gives me good versatility for the diverse San Diego topography, while still being suitable as a town bike. When I'm all the way forward on the bars, I'm in a good position for climbing, and when I'm all the way back, I'm upright and comfortable (that's why I have the bars wrapped well forward, as you can see here). The saddle bag holds a surprising amount, including odd-sized items, so it works very well for running errands. The ride is smooth and steady, not at all twitchy or squirrelly. In fact, this is the first bike I've owned that I can ride comfortably with no hands and not feel like the front wheel is going to wobble out from under me.

In my thinking about what I wanted this bike to be, I had two things in mind: aesthetics and functionality, in balance. I'm a firm believer that a person should love to look at their bike as much as they love to ride it. I was also guided strongly by what I wanted to be able to do on a bike. My old three-speed bikes were excellent for riding as town bikes, but they weren't well suited to San Diego's steeper hills (or perhaps I wasn't). I felt geographically limited by their weight and limited gearing options. I wanted a bike that could take me anywhere I wanted to go around town and beyond, and I just didn't feel like the three-speeds were doing it for me.

As much as I love this bike, both for its aesthetics and its functionality, if I lived somewhere else, or if I had a different set of requirements, I probably would have built up a different bike. The idea that a bike is created in dialogue with both the rider and the geography (both human and non-human) in which (s)he/it functions seems to make abundant sense, but it wasn't really something I considered in any overt way until after the bike was finished.

Anyway, words, words, words. I like this bike. That is all.

A Bird on the Door Is Worth

Sheds, Shacks, and Tiny Houses

I'm a little late to the party with this; the advent of the tiny house and "shackitecture" fad (at least in its current form) was a few years ago, but it still seems to be around, and I'm always a little slow on the uptake.

My wife and I recently spent a night in a rather large cabin out in the woods, but it got us thinking about small, simple, retreat-style cabins, sheds, or shacks.

I've been casually scouting what's on the Interwebs, and found a few sites of interest:

I can't figure out the name of this site. It it might be We Heart Sheds, and it might be Reader Sheds. The site has a fractured and annoying interface, but skip through to the gallery of reader submissions.

Of course, there's the venerable Tiny House Blog.

And also check out Dinosaurs & Robots entries tagged shackitecture.

Walks Like A

Fortune Magazine Cover, March 1933

The Bicycle Is Art

Perfect to browse on a Sunday morning.

Edit. It seems I already posted about this. Ha! Well, I must like it. At least I used a different image.

Edward Hopper, Approaching a City, 1946

Here's an art chaser for that spam e-mail post. Info on the piece here.

Santa Ysabel Open Space Preserve

Info here. Highly recommended.

Booted Bantams

From a recent trip to Julian.

Here's all you ever wanted to know about booted bantams (about 2/3 of the way down).

What's Your Bag?

I'm loving the 11-liter Zimbale saddle bag I have on my Peugeot. I use the bag with a ViVa saddle bag support, a small rack that attaches to the seat post and is designed specifically to support a largish saddle bag. If I get around to it, I'll post a more extensive review of the Zimbale bag and the ViVa support as a system, but for now, I'll just say that I absolutely love it and very much recommend it as a means to carry small loads around town or on longer day trips.

I especially like the extendable flap on the saddle bag, which allows for larger or bulkier loads in the main compartment and/or carrying bulky objects under the flap. That's a rolled up messenger bag under the flap in this photo, which I was going to use to carry home a small bag of cat food, but it turned out my saddle bag was large enough for both the cat food and the rolled up messenger bag, which was good, because I don't like carrying loads on my back when I ride.

PS. I was not compensated to say nice things about these products, I just like them.

Cheap Bike Art Experiment

This project was inspired by a vastly over-priced piece of bicycle kitsch I saw at a neighborhood shop. The piece was basically a large square board with beveled edges to which a low-quality printout of a diagram of a high-wheeled bicycle had been pasted and glazed over. "Hell, we can do that," I said to my wife. So we did, sort of.

We found four small wooden tiles at a local thrift shop, printed out some photos from the 1890s and early 1900s I found online, and glazed them onto the tiles with an acrylic matte medium. I used a bit too much medium, which produced some small wrinkles, and the hues I added digitally before printing streaked a bit when I brushed on the medium, but I actually like the effect it produced.

The whole project cost maybe $3.00 ($2.00 for the tiles, maybe a dollar's worth of paper, ink, and medium).

Gustave Caillebotte, The Floor Scrapers (1875)

Read more. This has been one of my favorites for a long time.

What's Up Louisville?

So here's a long shot. Any readers from and/or been to Louisville, Kentucky? I'll be spending some time in "The Possibility City" probably in late summer/early fall. I'll be there for a week, and although I'll be busy with research in the archives during the day, and likely drained of all ambition or energy in the evening, I'd like to know what's worth doing, where's a good place to eat -- you know, the usual stuff. I'm always in favor of weird, artsy, unusual, historical, or bike-related stuff. Whatcha got, Louisville?