I ordered a new pair of winter boots yesterday.

:-(

I’ve had my Trio KD1033 turntable, (from around 1978), along with its matching tuner, amp and tape deck, for around 20yrs now and it’s still sounding lovely through a pair of similar aged Wharfedale speakers.

Have a trawl around those second hand shops. There’s some amazing stuff out there!

I’ve got orange Hope stuff on my orange, Orange. I’ve also got orange Crank Bros. Candy pedals on my orange Orange. The orange pedals match my Hope, orange hubs, headset and seat clamp on my orange Orange, really quite well, even though you wouldn’t think they were the same oranges on my Orange.

I think you should go for it, unless you don’t like orange. I like orange, and Oranges, even the fruity types of orange.

C.

Wheel Jig!

I pedalled on and chuckled as I said to myself “I’ve just seen four kestrels manoeuvre in the park”

There’s a book called ‘Ronan the Barbarian’ by James Bibby where he devotes an entire chapter to describing how Orcs manufacture the ‘Man Hoover’ sword in the forges of the Astral Mountains’. A sword which emitted a ‘keening wail’ in the presence of humans. All this so he can end the chapter by saying how many a guard shivered in fear at the sound of Orc Astral Manhoovers in the Dark. I love that book.

Broadsword and the Beast by Jethro Tull, think I bought it around 1986 when I got my first YTS placement and had money to burn!

I love biking in different places, and although I haven’t the resources to travel to the places you lot do, I’ve still managed to ride the Port hills above Christchurch and some of the trails around Queenstown NZ. I’ve MTB cycle toured in Morocco and had a guided ride through Red Rock Canyon in Nevada. I’ve ridden a couple of Welsh trail centres and I’m a very frequent visitor to the Lakes.

My bucket list definitely has a big tick missing next to proper mountain biking in Europe though, I’d really like to do that, even though all I’m looking for is lift assists then flowing single track descents. I’ve had too many broken bits in the past to want to do all that full face, enduro gnarly nonsense.

However, although there’s still so many places I’d like to ride, I do appreciate that I live in Stirlingshire, and I’m surrounded by amazing trails. One of them actually starts about 20 meters from my doorstep! So, yes, I do get jealous when I see my mates flying off somewhere exciting (a bunch are jetting out to Morzine today), but that’s only because they are going somewhere different, and I get excited about different stuff. Jealous about the trails though? Nah, I rode Dumyat on Saturday and it was dusty, fast, techy and amazing. Quite happy thank you!

C. xx

Scampi and chips, plus a few pint of Pedigree. Pretty much going home now as there’s nowt much going to get done in the lab this afternoon. :-)

It’s Friday and I can see Tennents bar, on Byres Rd, from the office window. It’s calling to me….can you hear it as well?

Whatever I have for lunch, I suspect it’ll be washed down with ale and therefore I should get all my labwork done this morning….like that’s going to happen….because it’s Friday….and I can see Tennents bar from the window….

I’m based just outside of Stirling and ride a XL (20inch), Orange Four. It’s far and away the best mountain bike I’ve owned in 25yrs of playing with the things.

Happy to let you have a bounce around on it if you’re anywhere near.

C.

My favourite sci-fi has always been pre space race stuff by the likes of Ray Bradbury and Heinlein. When Mars and Venus were full of life before those nasty Mariner and Venera missions went and spoilt everything by showing us the truth.. Boo!

I’m also a huge fan of sci-fi short stories, (again because of Ray Bradbury’s mastery of that art), so I was really excited when I picked up a book of sci-fi short stories from my local library the other day title, Old Venus, edited by George R.R Martin and Gardner Dozois. It’s a collection of short stories by modern writers, set on the Venus that we thought existed in the 1950’s….swamps and jungles, seething with life. I’m only about 3-4 stories in, but I’m really liking it.

I know it’s not set in a Utopian future, but to me 1940-60’s sci-fi was the utopia of the genre…..see what I did there! :-)

C.

p.s. Read Ray Bradbury’s, ‘The Rocket’, if you want a quick bite of feel good sci-fi. I dare you to read it and not come away with a wee smile on your face and a bit of dust in your eye…that’s absolutely what happened to me….it was dust!

Oooh, I like the look of that suspension seatpost, Servo. It even comes in 27.2mm to fit my lovely, and currently unused Orange P7.

Think I’ll get me one of those and see if it’ll let me, and my dodgy back, play on the hardtail again. Thanks for the info!

Beagy x

Wow!I don’t drive a car, but if I did drive a car, that’s the car I’d want to drive.

Just to confuse you a bit more, a good friend of mine recently bought a Giant Trance 2. The fork failed on its first ride around a trail centre (Comrie Croft), and after sheenanigans from the bike shop, (the usual “it’ll be 2-3 days to repair” turning into “don’t call us we’ll call you when it’s eventually done”), he gave up, demanded his money back. He then ordered a Canyon Spectral (I think) in it’s place and is completely smitten by it. His verdict is that the Canyon is light years ahead of the Giant in fit, feel and confidence.

Might be worth having a look?

Lying in the hospital bed after breaking my back snowboarding in Bulgaria, the nurse walked over and laid a bedpan beside me. She pointed at it and said “Pishy, Pishy”….like that was going to happen. After about 10 minutes of her trying to convince me to go in this thing, (I was still wearing my full snowbarding kit, just without the jacket and boots), she and one of the cleaning ladies came over and shouted “Pishy Pishy” at me again. When this didn’t work, the nurse grabbed my tadger and started pumping my bowels like a bellow. That didn’t work either, so both of them rolled up their sleeves (no gloves), and fitted the tube.
A couple of days later and I was reeking to high heaven, still in the same clothes. I had a pack of wet wipes in my bag and had managed to convince one of the nurses to bring it over to me. When she saw I was trying to wash myself, she and a couple of orderlies decided to dive in and help. They stripped me naked, and washed me with the wet wipes, in the middle of the afternoon….in the middle of the ward…no privacy curtains…during visiting hours.
I think it was the same day that they decided that because I hadn’t done a No.2, it needed to be done there and then. So one nurse rolled me partly over, whilst the other one wielded a sort of shovel shaped cardboard bedpan, attempting to ram it under my arse cheeks. There was a lot of screaming coming from me at this point as it was all a bit hurty. That’s when one of the other patients came over, shouting at the nurses and orderlies. They went away and came back with a giant pampers nappy.
A day later, my insurance company finally got me transferred out of the state hospital in Sofia into a private clinic. As I awaited the transfer, one of the nurses came over with a pair of pyjama bottoms ( I assume to hide the nappy), as she turned away to speak to someone, I got a glimpse of the rear of the pyjamas with their yellow-brown urine/shit stained pattern extending down half their length. I was still wearing them, the same nappy, the same dirty catheter and the same dirty canulae in my arm when the air ambulance crew finally came and rescued me on the fifth day after the accident.
I was flown home to Edinburgh airport in a wee 8 seater Lear air ambulance then transferred to Forth Valley Hospital, a place of Angels and Professional, well funded staff.

I love the NHS and won’t hear anything said against it! :-)

Starting to see the funny side of everything that happened now though!

Hardly been a drop of rain here in weeks, even when the odd shower does pass by, the trails just suck it up and get dusty…..yes, dusty again.

C. :-)

p.s. I just thought I’d share that because staying in Stirlingshire it’s probably my only ‘once in a lifetime’ chance! 8)

I crushed my L1 vertebrae down to about 50% of it’s original height while snowboarding Feb 16. I was in hospital for 10 days then in a body brace for about 7 weeks afterwards. Once out of the brace, I reckon I was back doing gentle road rides within a couple of weeks. I was probably a good couple of months ( four months post accident), before I felt confident enough to head out on the mountain bike again. My back coped with it admirably, my mind not so well, oh and I was taking a rather scary amount of painkillers.

A year or so down the line and I’m riding the trails harder and faster than ever before, although a lot of that is probably down to the new bike I treated myself with once I was up and about again! Like someone said earlier, the only real problem I have is a slow build up of pain in my lower back when riding till it gets to a point where I simply have to stop for a few minutes. This is more evident on long draggy climbs when pushing hard on the pedals, where I quickly get to a point where the pain just gets too much and I have to stop. Brilliant excuse mind you. :wink:

In the long run, I’m riding my bike as much as I used to, and having every bit as much fun as I used to. I just have to take more frequent, short stops, to let the pain ease away.

Really hope you get well soon, and if you want to blether a bit more about this, my email’s in my profile…I think..I’ll just go and check! :D

Craig, the guy who broke himself trying the most awesome snowboarding trick ever…no really it was awesome…it wasn’t the snowboard equivalent of bumping down off a kerb, honest!

It honestly didn’t occur to me to phone the police myself maccruiskeen. I assumed everything was caught on the CCTV at the porter’s desk and as I was standing right at the entrance to the building when the guy legged it with the bike, I just went in and said “Did you see that!”
They seem to have coordinated with the police and dealt with it very effectively as the guy was caught trying to lift a second bike from the campus soon afterwards. I have to admit that’s probably my first ever encounter with ‘proper’ crime in all my 47yrs and I was just completely taken aback by how brazen he was. I’ll put crimestoppers on my phone just in case something similar happens again, if that’ll make you happier. :wink:

I’m a research tech. I supervise the supervisors whenever they decide to do some lab work….heaven help us! :-p

I work in the Wellcome Centre for Molecular Parasitology in the GBRC next door to the British Heart Foundation. :-)

Bonnybridge actually. UFO capitol of the UK, 1995!

C. :-)

Darned thing is too low in the sky for a decent piccy, but this was it last Thursday after a really cracking evening ride in dusty…..yes, dusty conditions!

I like the Moon, it’s my favourite moon.

C.

p.s. Photo taken with my mobile phone…..and Dobby, my Skywatcher 200p. 8)

Maeve = May-v, as far as I’ve been brought up to pronounce it.

There’s a wee girl in my wife’s nursery called Maeve. When chatting to the child’s mother, my wife was corrected on her pronunciation of the girl’s name. It’s “Ma – eve” apparently, and the mother gets very annoyed at people pronouncing it wrong.

My wife deals with this sort of thing far better than I ever could.

C.

I’ve got a new bike….I have no idea what sort of bottom bracket* is in it, except that I think it’s a ‘Boost’ one. Yep, I fell for that bit of marketing. I certainly don’t feel any extra boost as I’m dragging my fat arse up the hills! :lol: Oh, and my old hardtail has an Octalink BB in it. I think I’m stuffed.

C.

*To be honest, I don’t even know what sort of headset is in the darned thing and I’ve been riding, building and maintaining my mountain bikes for 30yrs now. Buying a complete, new bike, has left me hopelessly clueless now! :P

Aaah, forgot about the narrower chain as well! When I specc’d the bike I thought I was being brilliantly cheeky in getting a 30t front ring and an ‘upgraded’ 40t cog on the rear cassette. Being new to this sort of setup, I thought I’d be able to spin up anything with that. :P

Now I realise I’m either going to have to buy my way out of trouble by getting easier gears, or suddenly lose about 4 stone and get fit, something that I’ve consistently failed to do over nearly 30 yrs of mountain biking!

Cheers for the info!

C. :-)

Can I ask a related question?

I’m currently running a 1×10 Shimano SLX rear mech and shifter combo with a Hope T-Rex 40t expander. I’m thinking about moving to 1×11 in a desperate attempt to get a slightly easier gear for some of the big draggy climbs.

Will I need a new rear mech or will my existing one handle a 42t rear cog and the extra gear?

C. :-)

My stumpy wee legs and long body seem to fit Orange bikes rather well. Stuck with them for the past 17 years because of the fit. No complaints yet. :-)

I had one of those fall off mid ride due to an earlier… erm….maintenance error…. It was fine once I got it back to my garage and fitted the proper length bolt, rather than the stupidly short one I’d picked up by mistake, but I do recall that during the ride, the bike felt very odd as I nursed it to the pub…where I got decidedly odd feeling as I sat and waited for my mate to ride all the way back to her car and come back to rescue me.

Couldn’t you, or Orange, use the one on the other side as a rough template?

C.

We’ve got neighbours a few doors down from us who fly a St Andrew’s cross in their back garden and have two little flags for the front of their white van.

We refer to them as the local Scottish terrorists. They’re nice people, but I would leg it in a second if they started to steer the conversation towards politics, simply because I associate that sort of flag waving with bigotry.

It’s a bit sad, but that’s just how I see it nowadays.

:|

I tend to only drop my seat very low when it’s really needed, the sort of situations where I would have stopped and manually dropped the post in the past. Other than that I have to admit I’m quite forgetful and usually only remember to drop the seat 2-3 inches out of the way once I realise that things are starting to get a bit out of shape! 8O

The neck of the woods that I play in does tend to have a lot of quite long and techy stuff though, so I find myself up and out of the saddle quite a lot which plays havoc with my dodgy lower back. I’d like to say I get some respite on the climbs….but it’s even more painful when I’m sitting down in the same position for anything more than a few minutes!!!

I’d still say though, that with the type of back injury I have, having the dropper post allows me to stay on the bike longer and further between rest – stretchy – whimper stops because it allows me more freedom of movement on the bike.

B. :-)

I’ve managed to end up with chronic back pain as well, and actually find that with the saddle dropped out of the way on long descents that my back pain increases until I have to slow down, pop the saddle back up and have a wee sit down to rest!

Like others have said though, having the option to vary the position keeps me moving on the bike for much longer before I have to stop and stretch my back out to relieve the worst of the pain. Co-codamol seems to be doing wonders for me at the moment as well. Way more effective than the paracetamol/ibuprofen tabs that I’ve been chucking down my throat. :-)

Get one and give it a go. You know you want to. ;-)

First ride on my bike after I’d picked it up from the bike shop and both tyres flatted because the rim tape hadn’t been fitted properly, the gear indexing went to pieces because the cable hadn’t been tightened properly and the chain snapped….because it was a Shimano chain.

These were all minor inconveniences that I was able to fix in a matter of minutes, and which I kind of expected on it’s first ‘shakedown’ ride.

It’s also stuff that everyone really ought to know how to deal with when out on their bike. What happens if you’re on the summit of a Munro in January, in failing light and you snap your chain? Canyon aren’t going to help you there, nor I doubt will your bike shop.

Learn some basic mechanics. Is Zinn and the art of Mountain bike maintenance still a relevant book? I remember that being a really good maintenance guide.

I bought my first Orange, an Evo O2 Ltd, in 2000, after ten years or so of riding a series of Trek, Kona and Giant fully rigid bikes. Since then, I’ve owned a Patriot, two Fives, a Gringo and two P7s . The 2016 Four that I currently ride in XL/ 20inch size fits my 6 foot frame perfectly, gets a very appreciative “ooooh” from everyone who picks it up, and is far and away the most fun bike I’ve ever had the pleasure to own or ride.

C.

I actually had a very vivid and detailed dream about this! Like Northwind, I’d struggle without a steady supply of insulin. I actually dreamed that there’d been an apocalypse, and that I, very tediously had to come into work (I’m a research technician in a genetics lab), and produce my own insulin.

Seriously, I actually dreamt about doing PCR’s without a PCR machines.

:-(

…..Tank Girl wasn’t even there to help me. :-(

Whenever my old Five creaked it was either the rear QR or the shock bolts.

Awesome! Just nipped out from my lab and bagged a bottle of Auchentoshan (the only one they had on offer there), from the Tesco Metro in Byres Rd. That’ll be getting whacked into the hip flask for tonight’s ride. Which means an instant performance enhancement for my good self, as usually when climbing the view I get is of everyone’s tail lights receding into the distance. However, flash the old hip flask about at the start of the ride and suddenly I’m able to climb at the same speed as everyone and they get knackered at the same time as me! It truly is a wonder!

:-)

Jethro Tull’s ‘We Used to Know’ and Fairport Convention (Sandy Denny’s version), ‘Meet on the Ledge’.

Everyone in tears (if anyone turns up), job done.

C. :-)

Bypassing the fact that you should just buy and whack on a cheap replacement hub yourself ( I never knew you could get them for as little as £25!), too many years buying Hope kit I suppose. I can well believe that it could take a good few weeks for a specific part to turn up at a shop.

The number of times I’ve decided to give my LBS another shot over the internet, to be then told that the item I want will be in the shop in 3-5 days, to then still be waiting after this time….

I ordered a Genesis Croix de Fer from the shop local to my work a few years back (the bike was just out), and was told the lead time was 2-3 weeks. I patiently waited…and waited…and waited, all the time being told that the bike was on its way. Three months down the line and I eventually contacted Genesis myself to be told that they’d sold out of that model of bike almost immediately and would be shipping more in till the following year!

Last year, the shock on my brand new Orange Four blew, I waited two months for the bike shop to replace it and it was only after advice from here, that I eventually got the shop to get their thumbs out and sort it…within a matter of days.

In my experience, bike shops aren’t always as efficiently run or communicative as I’d like them to be.

So yeah, I can believe that the part specific part you’re waiting on has been ordered, but that it’s just floating around in a box somewhere waiting for someone to post it. I’d still buy a new one myself though and fit it so you can get the bike wheels down on the ground to enjoy the spring weather, whilst trusting on the good nature of the fella you bought it from to come through with what will be a spare freehub!

C.

Not very mountain bikey I’m afraid, but it’s a picture that I’m well pleased with. Taken with a video camera that slots into the eyepiece of my Newtonian reflector.

C.

Currently my desktop image, but that’ll probably change soon once I get out in the hills again!