Not A Three Speed - for a while

 

I'm having a slow day at work, which is really one of the few times I spend much time on the internet, other than our current slog through HBO's "Succession," which we call in our house - the mean people show.  And I have been watching my way through all of "Heartbeat" on FreeVee, though I have not been happy about reacquainting myself with ads.  When did advertising prescription medications become a thing?  Probably longer ago than I want to hear about.

For some reason - well actually here's the reason, and it will be a significant detour from that beginning. . . That's a photograph of me, taken by my wife, with my Rivendell in the foreground.  I've been doing a fair amount of black and white photography and developing my own film, (you can tell I'm developing my own film by the water stain on the negative just above my handlebars), and learning to make prints.  I don't have as much time to do that as I would like.  Mostly, I go to the darkroom at the college where I work at about four in the morning some Sundays and do darkroom stuff from 4:00 until 8:00 a.m.

I'm also working on a project I'm calling the Singular Year Project.  I'm trying to use only one item among the things I tend to obsess over - bicycles, cameras, parkas, camp stoves, typewriters, coffee cups, pocket knives, watches, daypacks, pens, etc. - for a year. I am writing one or two pages a night, on my typewriter, on one of those items for an entire month, dredging up childhood memories, telling stories, etc.  I wanted to do that partly to stop spending money on multiple versions of things I already have multiple versions of, and I wanted to create a daily writing practice, and to see if I could settle in to the sort of simplicity I'm always yammering on about.

The thing is, I'm failing - maybe not miserably - but I'm straying from the original intent.  The camera I am holding is the Konica Auto S2, which is a camera I really love.  It can be fully mechanical, which is nice if something happens to the battery and I'm in a far distant place, but it shoots in auto, in shutter priority mode, and however much I would like to regard myself as an Artiste, let's admit it, I usually shoot in auto mode.  I now know what pushing and pulling film is, but I just don't do it that much.  I might if I had a large format camera, and I was dealing with one negative at a time, but a large format camera is one of the things I am trying to avoid thinking about buying over the course of this year.

The Konica did develop an issue with the spool that takes up the film leader.  It was binding, and I actually broke a roll of film inside the camera.  The take up spool wasn't taking up, so it was winding around elsewhere, until it jammed, and when I tried to rewind it, the film snapped.  So I switched to the Olympus OM-1, thinking that would be my camera for the year.  But then I realized the lighter fluid I had used to unstick the shutter and aperture might unstick the takeup, and it did, so it was back to the Konica, but then, for reasons I don't remember - maybe it was related to making some long night time exposures - I decided to use the Yashica Electro for a roll of film.  So, not so much a singular year for the camera, though I am mainly using the Konica.

The Rivendell was supposed to be my singular year bike for this year, and I got a cheap bike computer for it, because I've always wondered how far I ride in a year.  I chose it because it has the best lights. It fits a bigger tire than the Happy Little Three Speed.  It has plastic fenders, as opposed to the steel fenders of the 1952 Raleigh.  I'm always worried, a little, about turning that old Raleigh into a rusty relic from riding it too much, though everyone reassures me about how durable they are.  "They are built to last a long time," people say. "Well," I think to myself in response, "it is already 71 years old, and I'm riding it sixty miles a week."  I thought I would not worry quite so much about wearing the Rivendell out.

But... it began to snow the second week of January, and it is still snowing now, as I write this.  Laura and I had to switch to our Xtracycles, which we have studded snow tires on.  Why we are running the heaviest tires on the heaviest bikes through the worst weather is one of those mysteries of poor choice.  And it has been so cold, and windy, and snowy this winter, that I think we have driven an automobile more this winter than we have in our twenty-seven years of being together.

So, I've ridden the Rivendell and the Xtracycle, (and driven the old Subaru). And one day, the Rivendell had a flat tire, so I rode the Raleigh instead.  

And then, a couple of weeks ago, I snapped and started riding the Happy Little Three Speed again.  I love the three speed.

That got me thinking about a 650B conversion.  The biggest tires I can run on the HLTS are 25mm.  Any larger, and they hit the fender where it is under the fork crown.  It was merely raining earlier in the week, so I had the yellow Grundens rain cape, and I thought to myself, "Self, you should go ahead and buy that Grundens rain hat while Rivendell still has some in stock."  So, I bought a rain hat, and then I saw that they had the long reach Tektro brakes in stock, so I ordered those, (and then, to make it up to free shipping, I ordered two of the "cussin patch kits" and four straps).

So, my singular bike year is in disarray, and I am thinking about building wheels, so the financial part of the reason to use what I have and to stick to one thing is also a little shaken, not to mention that I just spent sixty dollars on a funny yellow rain hat.

But, I've been on the internet, originally looking at 650B conversion information - it turns out the Tektro brakes I ordered may not reach far enough for the Schwinn Super Le Tour to run 650B rims, but we'll see when they get here - and that gets us back to where I started several paragraphs ago.

For some reason, I've been looking at a few bicycle blogs.  I often read blogs that resonated with what I was trying to accomplish with my vintage-ish preoccupation with bicycling, and with being carfree at the time.  It felt a little bit like a community.  It seems we all, including me to the extent that I deleted my Carfree Family blog, and rarely post to this one, fell out of the practice of writing. Lovely Bicycle, for instance, hasn't had a post since 2018. I've kind of lost track of Kent Peterson.  I know he was working for Bike Friday, retired, moved somewhere else and was writing some things about typewriters a year or so ago.  I lost track of Scott Cutshall (Large Fella On a Bike) when I dropped Facebook soon after the Trump election, and I used to communicate with him personally, a bit, about being at-home-dads.  Even Grant Petersen, over at Rivendell, has cut back on his Blahg output. I kind of miss that community.  Instagram, which is the only social media thing I still look at, just doesn't cut it.  I like to read stories about people's lives, and what they are doing, and struggling with, etc.  I don't really need to see another photograph of a bicycle with a string of "sweet ride" comments appended. Shawn, the patron saint of the Society of Three Speeds, seems to be the only person out there posting.

"So," I thought, "since I am really part of the dearth-o-blogs problem, I would post this entry.