iQue mala suerte!

I love this building. Pero '92!

I have a Spanish final in 5 hours, booooo. Luckilly once it's done, it's done. The anticipation of these things is often worse than the event itself, I have to remember that. This weekend I worked a bunch, nothing new. Otherwise I sat around and enjoyed being lazy. I built a new winter bike, because I'm not made of money, and I don't like the idea of riding my expensive bike all winter. My new one is a Fuji dynamic 12 fixed gear. The seat is pulled off of some crap bike, the brake lever is from an old school mongoose bmx, platform pedals which I hate and need some toe clips, and a welded rear hub to complete the package. I love it because it looks like a piece of shit. 52/16 gear ratio which is like learning to ride fixed all over again.








After I built my bike on Sunday I went for a ride around town to explore. It's cool how the snow turns everything into something completly different. All of the sudden you can walk across lakes, and the trees have no leaves. Sure everythings dead, and you have to worry about getting your socks wet all the time, but It's still really cool to see how things change with the seasons. I guess thats one of the reasons I like winter. It gives us an excuse to brood, and it brings a whole new host of sights, and things to do. Now I realize that I've yet to go sledding. For shame!

I got a message from a friend commenting on a photo of one of the first tall bikes we built together talking about how it seems like it's been so long since we built it. I've been thinking alot about that recently. I've always rode bikes as long as I can remember, but I've only seriously started riding bikes since I was probobly 15. It started with a Huffy Mojave Gulch escalated to a Schwinn Powermatic pro Bmx bike. Then I got a Schwinn World sport which I later turned into my first single speed and subsequently fixed gear after the derailer got trashed. About three years ago I built my first chopper, and then a tall bike, then I just kept building. Now I have alot of bikes. More than that bikes have become a large part of my life. Sometimes I think it's reall silly how excited I get about them, but then I realize that I've gone through alot of my life on a bike. Some people fix cars, I fix bikes. I've always been a quite poor kid and bikes have offered me an escape. Since I started riding bikes have taken me around the country and helped meet alot of really good people. I have them tattood on my body, and rely on one every day to get me where I need to go.

It's really began to occur to me how big of a part of my life bikes have played. Most people will hear that and not really get it. If I said cars played a big part in my life it would be a different story. People would immediatly understand and be sympathetic. Cars are expensive and big and a grown up thing, of course they are important. Bikes are small slow kid things, who cares about them? I guess it takes a special type of person to really love riding bikes. Not just buying expensive parts to see who can have the flashiest looking bike, but actually riding, and stopping to look around and take things in. And the more that I think about all the things I've seen on my bike, the harder it gets for me to belive that it's only been 6 years.