I was after a shimano groupset so not expressly excluded. Not buying now anyway. Probably.

I got the email but it isn’t working for me. It’s advertised on their site anyway so I’m not sure how that would fit with it being targetted users only.

I surprised myself by giving away a bike recently. It was an old hybrid that used to be my only bike. Then I got better bikes and stopped using it.

The last time I used it was when my road bike was written off in a crash and I commuted on it for a week or two before the insurance money came through. I then bought several more bikes. I finally realised that if my new commuter was written off I have at least three other bikes I’d prefer to commute on than the hybrid, and none of the parts would be any use on any of my current bikes.

I got rid of it mainly to free up space in the garage rather than because I thought it was worth anything so was happy to give it away to someone who would use it.

On a similar subject I’m just looking at 6800 to replace sram force. My fairly pathetic excuse is that I need a new shifter so may as well upgrade the whole thing. I already have 11 speed compatible wheels. No-one seems to have a bad word to say about 6800, correct?

I’m relatively zen, I think the most I usually manage is a shake of the head or sometimes an arm raised in a “what was that?” sort of way. My main commuting mantra is “bad drivers are better off ahead of you than behind you – let them go” so if I’ve had a close pass I rarely filter back past them, I’d rather take my time and steer clear of them.

I think I’ve only once had a verbal exchange with a driver and she started that (coming to a t-junction on a descent. I was braking and correctly positioned on the road so didn’t indicate. She didn’t have enough space before the junction to go past me anyway so I’m not entirely sure why it mattered which way I was going to turn as I’d have been stopping at the junction with her behind me either way. She had a go at me for not indicating and I relatively calmly reminded her I needed my hands to brake. I bet she wouldn’t have batted an eyelid if a car hadn’t been indicating…)

I got plagued by PI calls shortly after I had an accident and went as far as confirming who was calling and sending them a subject access request/request to stop processing my data. The information they gave me just told me who the middle man was and as the calls stopped I never followed the trail back to the source.

I was actually surprised at how effectively it stopped the calls – I had assumed that other people would have got my details from the same place but it all went very quiet. I still get texts from time to time although I suspect that they are just random number generators (certainly the amount of compensation that’s been put aside varies each time :lol:) and I get less of those than I used to.

The ones that really wind me up are the recorded messages as I always hang up and then wish I’d held on to the end so I could try to find out who to speak/write to. Being on TPS and being relatively anal about checking the DP wording on forms doesn’t stop them.

I don’t actually mind it when I get a real person because I know far more about the DPA/PECR than they do so I can make them squirm 😈 This usually provides plenty of entertainment for my OH or my colleagues who enjoy listening in…

Road cruisers on my commuter – front puncture at 2300 miles, rear at 2515 (typically this was on Tuesday which was my first dark and wet commute for months).

My winter bike is more than just a winter bike. It’s also my bike with mudguards for summer rain. My bike with lower gears for particularly hilly rides (it has a triple rather than a compact and a bigger cassette too). My bike with spds for days when I want to ride somewhere and walk around. I’m less bothered about locking it up to do that too. My reserve commuter when my main commute bike has a mechanical. My reserve road bike when my good bike has a mechanical.

I use them both, and it justified a new bike 😉

I have a revolution track – think it was under £300.

I have an Edge 800 which I use for long rides or rides where I want a map/to be able to follow a route.

For my commute I just use my Forerunner 310XT. I don’t need to know where I’m going, don’t really need it to be visible (I wear it on my wrist rather than using the bike mount) and it has separate cycling and running modes. Saves bringing the more expensive bit of kit into work.

I know that junction and tend to sit in the middle of the lane to avoid that sort of move. Have seen much worse than that one though!

Just got my m&s renewal through too – about £600 and I should still be on the old policy. We have lots (can’t be arsed to count right now but approx 10 between us) of bikes but none over £2k.

On my good bike I have a compact and 12-27. That gets me up most of my local (Yorkshire) hills and most of a ride I did in the Peak district too.

On my winter bike I have a triple with 30 on the back. Last winter I did use the smallest gear (mainly because if it’s there I end up clicking down into it) but I’m not so sure I’ll need to use it this year. It’s what it came with and a bigger cassette than I would have chosen but I’ve never got round to changing it.

The bike I use for riding up mountains in the canaries* has a triple and either 27 or 28 on the back I think.

Oh, and the fixie is 44-16 I think.

*my parents live there, and so does the bike.

I like Mogan more than the other resorts but it’s more of a faff to get anywhere, particularly by bus it’s very much at (or beyond!) the end of the line for most of the bus routes. You may well end up getting the 1 back to Playa (or beyond) to get anywhere other than Mogan town. With a car it’s no hassle as the motorway goes that far now, and there are some nice road bike rides too (not so sure about MTB)

Tamarindos isn’t a bad call – although I’d say that’s San Augustin rather than Maspalomas. I wish I’d gone to Clinica Roca with my broken ankle – ended up at the hospital in Las Palmas who made a right pigs ear of it.

I usually stay in my parents house so don’t have any experience of actually staying in any of these places but have snuck in to use some of the pools…

The £1 voucher is still better than anything my employer is offering, sadly!

I’ve just been outside and wandered past the bike racks – they seem no fuller than normal. But given that the only advertising I’ve seen has been on websites I look at because I’m already a cyclist that’s possibly not a surprise.

Most days are cycle to work days for me. Can’t say I saw that many extra cyclists even though there were road signs warning drivers (!). Shame they’re not reminded to watch for cyclists every day…

I think some people automatically think they need to put 2 wheels on the footpath to be properly parked.

I’ve noticed this. My OH’s parents live on quite a narrow close where everyone parks with two wheels on the pavement. There isn’t much traffic (motor or pedestrian) going along it, only people who live there or are visiting people who do, and the pavement is wide enough to still leave room.

We usually park on our drive at home, but recently we had a skip on the drive and parked on the road (incidentally I’m still trying to work out the logic behind having to pay for a permit to put a skip on the road when you can park on the road for free – my car is a similar size to a skip and given that we both cycle to work, it doesn’t move much more often either). My OH instinctively put two wheels on the pavement before I asked him what he was doing – the road is more than wide enough for cars to pass each other even with cars parked on each side. I guess it’s just what he’s used to and he doesn’t think any more.

The one time I’ve had a parcel go missing (other than the useless company who took a month to admit they hadn’t posted it before refunding it) was in the run up to christmas. It had been left in the garden with no note as to where it was. At that time of year I am never in the house during daylight hours during the week, and I suspect I’d been away at the weekend so wasn’t around during daylight then either. So I simply didn’t see the parcel for a couple of weeks until after a replacement had been delivered 😳

Reading with interest.

At the moment I have a cateye TL-LD1100 permanently attached to the rear rack on the commuter. I also have a smart lunar 35 on the front (one light and a mount on two or three bikes so I can swop it over quickly) and a smart R1 which I can clip onto saddlebags as either a back up light on the commuter or a rear light on the other bikes.

I’m thinking I need some upgrades this year…

The front light is OK as a being seen light but I’m not confident venturing away from street lights. I can cope with that if I stick to roads within the city but it would be nice to be able to venture further afield. Not epic night rides, more likely to be short stretches between lit sections, unlit cycle paths/towpaths or when a ride takes me longer than I think and it starts to go dark before I get home.

Looking at the Volt 300 for this, I think although open to persuasion.

The cateye rear light is great but I can only use it on the commuter as it’s permanently attached, and I’d like something I can clip on/off my saddlebags on my road bikes. The smart light is far too temperamental in rain for me to really trust it particularly when it’s my only rear light.

Wiggle do do a pack of the Volt 300 and Volt 50 but I don’t think it would work because the shape isn’t conducive to being clipped onto a bag. So I’m still looking for inspiration for this!

Too far to head over after work for me. My nephews are on one of the illuminations though so we’ll be heading over to see it in the next couple of weeks 🙂

My sister thought that gabriel would be a unique name for her son. I hated to point out that two of my friends had already had that idea.

Which meant she tried even harder for her second. He is still the only otis I know.

We had a skip delivered yesterday and have already had someone asking if there’s any scrap metal in it. It’s now full so no chance of other peoples’ randomness being added to our random bits of wood, carpet and ex-tree.

I do like the law, the problem for me is that I don’t do that much of the hard interesting stuff, and instead I get to deal with piles of dull paperwork with the occasional interesting issue, and as an added bonus the internal politics of working with other lawyers. Technically I’m fairly decent (Legal 500/Chambers ranked, for what that’s worth) and I can get away with a charge out rate in the region of £300 + VAT, but I know that to make it to partnership I’d have to turn into the sort of person I don’t want to be. I’d need to prioritise arse licking and spending time outside office hours with people who would benefit my career rather than people I like spending time with. I don’t want to be told that I have to check my blackberry when I’m on holiday. I’ve seen the crap the salaried partners have to put up with from the equity partners. I don’t want to be consumed by the job – I want to be able to do a good job but leave it behind when I leave the office.

At one point I was probably considered to be on the partnership track, but I’ve made it pretty clear that I don’t want it. I’m quite happy to forego the job title in favour of it being slightly less all consuming, particularly as it would have no impact on the quality of the legal work I get to do (and indeed given that I like the legal work rather than the management side of it, that’s another reason for staying where I am). Except… having reached the limits of where I can get to on a non-partnership track I’m depressed by the prospect of just doing this forever, or being forced out as younger blood comes through the system. At the moment that’s unlikely to happen because of some of the fairly specialised and valuable to the board stuff I do but never say never.

In house would almost certainly be an improvement, but I have been trying to wait for the right in house job rather than applying for anything and everything. As time goes by I may rethink my strategy. I do have another idea but that would require me to be braver and actually sit down and make proper plans (I really quite enjoy data protection advisory work and I can see that in theory I could head down the route of non-regulated data protection consultancy work. No real need to be SRA regulated for that, and its a growing area. But the marketing side of it and actually finding enough clients to keep my head above water are what scare me. Which is probably why I became a lawyer in the first place ;-))

11 years qualified and I’d get out if I had a viable plan of something else to do.

I have a 1.6 petrol multispace, an amdro kit* and and a towbar bike rack. When we just need bikes they go inside. When we want to camp we use the amdro. And when we want to camp with bikes the bike rack goes on with the amdro inside. We toured round Ireland for a couple of weeks quite happily using an awning to dump stuff in while we slept.

Not a looker, not smooth and not quiet. But I wouldn’t swop it for anything.

*cash rich time poor pretty much sums me up at the moment. I know it would have been cheaper to come up with a DIY option, but it would have taken years to find the time to actually do it.

90 mile road ride. There was some rain, some of it heavy, but only in the second half of the ride.

Some apocalyptic sounding stuff overnight though!

Whereas I managed to injure myself at a relatively good time – I broke my ankle on the way to the airport to come home from holiday. Which meant I had to relax in the sun for a few days longer while my insurance company got me a replacement flight.

Must have got lucky – everything I ordered arrived within a couple of days. Although maybe there was less demand for the ladies stuff?

Pump in a saddlebag with tubes, levers, multitool and an emergency gel for me. If I’m out on the bike I don’t tend to be in a massive hurry to get anywhere so I’m happy to take the time to pump it up.

And I break the rules in so many ways that a saddlebag is probably the least of my worries 😉

My goodies have arrived – £23 for a windshirt, a winter jersey and a base layer. And a bottle of ice tea.

There is an account from Nick Roche in the Irish Independent (I think) that makes sense.

He crashed on the descent. This is the big crash and the one the other riders are talking about. Roche gave him his bike and waited with contador’s first bike to get a spare from the car. I do remember seeing a reference on the text feed to Roche waiting for a bike.

Contador rode a short way then stopped for medical attention. I don’t think (but could be wrong) that he crashed again at this point, just stopped for bandages to stop the bleeding and to get a new bike and shoes from the car which had caught him up. This is why Roche’s bike is at the side of the road.

While the car was getting from Roche to contador the bikes got caught on the belkin car and the spare bike got broken.

He then swopped Roche’s bike for another spare, carried on for a while then withdrew.

I think.

I have the revolution track and really like it. I think mine is last year’s model but it does everything I need it to do. Running it fixed at the moment (although I haven’t ridden it much since the end of winter).

I *am* a lady, just hoping all the bits and pieces fit now!

Best few days ever 🙂

Had the build up in Leeds City Centre all week, and good stuff like Otley Cycle Races then it all kicked off on Friday – I had a ticket to the Eve of Tour gala dinner, had a fantastic evening and have photos of me with Chris Hoy and Bernard Hinault 🙂

Saturday we had any number of potential plans but got selected as Tourmakers which made the choice for us. We ended up on Scott Hall Road within 2 miles of home, and didn’t have a great deal to do to be honest. But that meant we just got to watch the roll out and got home in time to watch the stage on tv and marvel at the pictures 🙂

Then we drove out to Oxenhope with our camping stuff and camped at a campsite on the climb with a view over to the descent off Penistone Hill too, and a bar with a big screen in a marquee. Good choice 🙂 Did a bit of cycling round in the morning (up Haworth main street and three ascents of the Cote d’Oxenhope Moor), bumped into some friends and watched the race with them then watched the finish in the marquee.

Today we were still off work so did a loop up Cragg Vale and back via Ripponden and Sowerby Bridge before heading home.

Still buzzing.

A helicopter memory. Near the top of oxenhope moor there isn’t much cover and as a woman wandered away from the road across it for an all fresco comfort break she got chants of “we know what you’re doing”.

Then the helicopter arrived and hovered over her…

Good – so many people on bike or on foot, football games on dual carriageways after the race had come through, fantastic weather, atmosphere, racing. Everything.

Bad – struggling to find food in Haworth yesterday evening (we were about 10 minutes too late it seems as everywhere stopped serving at 8), midges, bar on the campsite running out of beer with about 20km to go yesterday. But nothing major.

Day 1 – tourmaker at Scott hall road fan park

Day 2 – cote d’oxenhope moor

Day 3 – off work but sleeping it off/watching TV rather than heading down south.

Scuttler – I don’t think the badger will make it to Huddersfield because he’s having dinner with me tonight. 😀 Or at least we are both at the eve of tour gala dinner.

My boss was one til about Tuesday but I have (finally!) won her over.

My office window overlooks the media/reception Centre.

Half of France seems to be out there and there is a stream of teams doing their pre race press conferences. OPQS have just gone and sky are now here.