Bike polo fever

November is a tough time to catch the fever for bike polo. I say this because it's getting late in the season and soon play will have to wait until next spring. However, it's also a blessing, as I can spend the winter building a bike and making myself a mallet. Reading one of my favorite blogs, "How to avoid the bummer life," I saw some references to bike polo and explored further. The more I read, the more excited I got, and the more ideas came to me.

I spent much of this last summer and fall tinkering in the garage with my new windfall of bikes and parts. As I work at the local newspaper, I got a free classified ad that read "Looking for bikes, working and non-working." For the first couple weeks I must have gotten 10 calls a day, mostly from people with Huffys and Roadmasters and other assorted garbage. But every so often I found a diamond in the rough. I never spent more than $50 on a bike (a Specialized Hardrock and an old single-speed Gary Fisher KaiTai), and usually got much better deals than that. Many people just wanted me to haul their stuff away, which I did. Some of it went to the recycling company, but a lot of it went into my garage. After outfitting friends and family with a lot of the better rides I found, I was still left with a pile of bikes, frames and various parts.

One guy out in the boonies had a pile of at least 50 bike frames, some twisted and broken, some with a hint of possibility. The only one I took (for free, as he woudn't accept any money) was an old Raleigh (I forgot which model) from the seventies. I cleaned it up and put a little primer on the places where I sanded off rust. It's by no means perfect, as it has a few small dents in the 23-inch frame, but I think it will make a good asphalt bike polo steed. Most of the research I've done indicates that you don't want to bring your shiny new bike onto the field. I'll set it up as a low-gear fixie with some polo handlebars and a cool brake lever I saw online at http://www.boxwoodbicyclepolo.com/index.htm. The single lever operates both the front and rear brakes, leaving one hand free to hold the mallet. I have a single speed, but have never set up a fixed-gear ride, so I don't know how much I trust a brake-free bike.

I scouted a few places to play after work last night, and think I've come upon a good spot at Montana Tech. There is an old unused tennis court (two, actually), and it looks like the net posts will come up without too much trouble. I'd be willing to bet the school would let us use it. There I go with the "us" word. That's my other challenge: finding someone to play with. It might be a good idea to get the word out at Tech, and maybe at my LBS. We'll see where this goes, but it would be fun to get a few guys together and maybe even play some teams in Bozeman or Missoula.

I'll get more used to this blog setup and get some pictures of the bikes and the tennis courts up.

Wildfires

The wildfires in California are quite a disaster. We have much worse fires, size-wise, in Montana, but nowhere near the property damage. They've already evacuated more than 500,000 people, which is more than half the population of Montana. I would venture to say that there are more destroyed homes in California in the last two days than there have been in Montana (by wildfires) in recorded history.

I was looking at some AP photos of the fires and their aftermath, and saw one where they said a hilltop hadn't burned in recorded history, and the surrounding area hadn't burned in more than 50 years. Montana has much of the same problem, in that fire has been artificially suppressed for so long that the amount of fuel has increased and increased over the years. Some say "let it burn," and some say "clear-cut the forest." Neither is right. It's always a touchy thing fooling around with Mother Nature, but then that's what man does.

I felt like a total soccer mom today, running the kids to school, picking two up, then dropping one off at dance, then taking the other back to school to pick up his brother, then dropping him off at art class after picking up little sister from dance, then picking up dinner, then picking up the art student before heading home for dinner. Then I went to work, mostly because I needed a break.

Back for more

Wow. Why not read a blog that's updated once a month? Pretty darned exciting.

I'm back, not that anyone noticed I was gone. It's kind of like my old college radio show: The only people listening were my roommates, and they knew that every time I played the 11-minute-long Layla I was down the hall taking the Browns to the Super Bowl, if you know what I mean.

I've been reading Bike Snob NYC, and I do truly enjoy his sense of humor. I've also come to grips with the fact that my writing style doesn't lend itself to humor. So don't expect the guffaws here. Or maybe you're the type that sees the sly sense of humor below the monotone grey exterior. Whatever.

Thinking of snobs, though, reminds me of a photography course I took in college. Part of the deal was having to buy your own 35-millimeter camera, and the prof gave us a talking-to about our options. He opined that the Pentax K-1000 was a perfect student camera. He taught us how to use all the manual settings, and said that with our newfound knowledge, we could do things with a $100 camera that the nit-wits brandishing the expensive new models couldn't touch. He described himself as a reverse snob, and I immediately took a liking to the term

Reverse snobbishness runs through my life. I love having the same job as a guy with an Ivy-League degree, though I was educated in public schools. My old piece-of-junk Justy had almost 300,000 miles on it when some moron stole it on Christmas morning and blew the engine. The old car still got 35+ mpg when it died. I was very happy looking down my nose an people in fancy new cars that cost 50 times what mine did.

I'm not sure what bikes BSNYC has, or what he would think of my pitiful fleet, but I love seeing people on expensive bikes that have nowhere near the character that my pieced-together old machines do. I love to ride bicycles that I assembled from scavenged parts. It's fun to take pieces out of a pile of junk and make something that works, and works well. They may not be as light or fast or pretty, but they're pretty cool to me. While I usually don't look down my nose at folks on nice new bikes, I would certainly change my tune if they snubbed me. They might wonder why I was laughing out loud as I rode off on my $25 pile.

Rat Ramblings intro

It's 2:12 a.m. and I'm sitting at work. Oh, sure, I get off at 12:30 a.m., but the watering hole down the street sometimes calls. So I have a few with the boys, then realize that I'm at or over .08, which means I need to head back to work and relax for a while. Tonight I decided to start a blog. What the heck?

I'm listening to "Lucy" on XM, which I "borrow" from my buddy who pays the subscription but doesn't mind lending his password. I think I'll connect my home computer to my stereo and blast XM through the house.

It occurs to me that I should have a point to this blog. I think of some of my favorite ones like bike snob nyc and, though I like his style, I feel the need to do my own thing. That doesn't give me subject matter just yet, but I'm getting there.