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October 02, 2006
Astonished Head #52
A PleaLook, I know that Internet Explorer comes with your computer. I know that 59.4% of you fine people use it to view this site. But you just don't get the full Astonished Head experience when you use Explorer. Here's why: IE's idiosyncratic HTML rendering means that this page doesn't display properly. No, really:
Plus: tabbed browsing will change your life. That is all. October 04, 2006
Busted! Part Deux: Crowded BallsSo, I got the new hub on Monday, swapped out the innards, took it four times around the block, all was well. At around five today, I decided to squeeze in an hour's ride to nowhere. I rolled out of the driveway, shifted the new hub into 3rd, and was rewarded with a bunch of distressing metal-crunching noises. I put it back in first, headed back to the driveway, and opened up the hub. Several bits of loose metal fell out. One of the four small flip-out bits (called "pawls") at the non-drive side of the hub was broken into pieces, and the spring and retaining ring that held them all in place were mangled. I replaced the broken spring, the broken pawl, and the bent retaining ring using parts from the old hub, which I still have. No dice: the hub still makes unpleasant not-working-properly grinding noises in 2nd and 3rd now. This really kills the average lifespan of DualDrive hubs for me: before today, it was just shy of 1,000 miles, based on two hubs. Now, it's about 650 miles. I'm just baffled. Doing the swap was fairly straightforward. All the bearings seated properly, I didn't bang on it with a hammer or set it on fire or anything. It worked fine on Monday when I toodled around the block a few times. I might not be a mechanical genius, but I'm an OK wrench and I knew enough to study the way the old hub was put together before I started mucking about with replacing bits of it. Ian Sims, Greenspeed's CEO, figures that the first two hubs failed because of the caged bearings...sort of like these bearings right here. The eponymously-named bearings bear the weight of the axle, and in a bicycle hub, consist of balls sandwiched between two "races," which are sort of like tracks the balls roll in. "Caged" bearings have the little balls set into stamped metal ring-shaped cages, to hold the balls in place on the races. They make assembly easier, but they're not as strong: fewer balls, because the cages take up space between the balls, means a higher load per individual ball. So they might not hold the axle steady under load, see? The axle, as I toted my trailer up and down mountains for months, was twisting and putting strain on the hub's mechanicals that eventually cracked them. Twice. Short of spending $1,000 for a 14-speed Rohloff hub, the solution is to install what Ian called "crowded balls," meaning bearings without cages. That allows for more individual balls, less stress on each one, a stiffer axle, and longer hub life. I do feel the need to say "Oh, grow up" now...but only to some of you. You know who you are. Anyway: replacing the caged balls with crowded seemed like a doable thing to me, so that's what I was thinking about doing when I left for my fifty-foot ride this afternoon. Without, I might add, the trailer. So even though the explanation of the first two hub failures works, because they were both under heavy load for extended periods, today's failure makes no sense: no load, new hub. It is of course possible that I did something terribly wrong...maybe I missed a small broken chunk of the old hub innards that got stuck inside the hub shell, and it mucked up the new hub's works. Maybe I shouldn't have taken it apart and juggled the pieces while doing a little softshoe and singing I'm Just A Hub-Jugglin' Fool. But enough of this idle chatter! What to do? Write to Jerome, Greenspeed's U.S. rep again, that's what. And ask for another hub. Again. One of the great things about Greenspeed is that they're a small company...small as in "nine full time staff members." I cc:'d the CEO, and within half an hour he had cc:'d me a note he'd sent to Jerome, which basically read: I think we need to get this guy a complete rear wheel with a new hub that has crowded balls. Because he shouldn't be allowed to have a cone wrench, in the same way that a monkey shouldn't have a gun. OK, he might've thought that last bit, but he didn't write it. I remain fairly sure that a complete rear wheel with a new hub that has crowded balls will show up here within the next several days. And that's just fine with me. On the rare occasions when I actually tell people how much I spent on this thing, I always tell them what comes along with that high price tag: bulletproof support. Now, I actually set out to write the sort of thoughtful post-trip post I've been threatening to write since the journey ended, but I seem to have written this instead. So maybe I'll write that other post later. UPDATE: Of course, if you've read this far, you've already watched me stumble around trying to explain bearings, haven't you? October 07, 2006
Shower NostalgiaEvery so often, the most mundane things will send me back several weeks, to a time when I rode from place to place, carrying everything I needed with me. This morning, the mundane thing was standing on the drain in the shower stall in my mother's bathroom. I must've used over a hundred diffferent shower stalls of varying quality as I crossed the country, so one shower became much like another. When I closed my eyes this morning's spray, I could catch fleeting sensations of On The Roadness, as though, when I stepped out of the pleasing warmth and towelled off, I'd put on a set of triking clothes, settle down into the cockpit, and pedal away. In reality, the trike is in the space between the house and the shed under a tarp, its rear end propped up on an empty plastic kitty litter bucket, because it doesn't have its rear wheel on. I'm actually quite disappointed about that...the plan was to Keep On Riding here in Santa Barbara. I've got maps of bike routes all around the city, even a couple of big 50-milers with real hills in them that take you through wine country (as seen in the movie Sideways, but not by me). The new wheel's going to take awhile, because Jerome has to acquire the bearings to do the crowded ball conversion, so I'm hoping it'll be here by next Friday. I was planning to head back to San Francisco on Saturday, but I think I'll wait a few days after the wheel arrives, so I can get on the trike and ride it around here before I have to steel myself for triking in and around San Francisco. Yes, that's right: the trike will be my San Francisco transportation. After riding it into and out of the city, it the idea became more realistic, especially now that I've got twin six-foot flags, to which I've added two very brightly-colored 13x13 flags. So I'm not really any more worried than I was riding an upright in New York. In San Francisco, they rent these little bright yellow gas-powered three-wheeled cars to people, and they're not much bigger than the trike. Plus: hills are fun when you're not toting a heavily-laden trailer. October 09, 2006
Photo NostalgiaI spent part of the afternoon watching a slideshow of photographs from my journey, which made me miss several places of a beachlike nature. Among them, Patrick's Point State Park in California, where I camped on August 12 and August 13. So, in the interests of sharing more from the journey and of putting posts up that don't take too much effort, here's a bit of the past, captured in late afternoon off of one of the park's trails. Click on it for a 1.5MB embiggened version.  October 10, 2006
Video NostalgiaI miss the road. More particularly, I miss all of the things I couldn't really pay enough attention to, because I was in a weird place mentally, or because I was focused on getting to the next physical place I needed to be, or because of some other thing that kept me from being just where I was at the moment. Part of that was due to the newness of the experience, in its entirety: this was my first tour, and with that lack of experience came a certain nervousness born of just not knowing what to expect. The length of the journey began to wear on me, as well. The number of pictures I took dropped off over the last two or three weeks of the tour, as I focused on putting one pedal in front of the other, to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Now, I look back to the Oregon to California coastal portion of the journey and I can see myself doing it again. I look back to Virginia and Kentucky, and I know that, someday, I will ride there again. And west of Bardstown, Kentucky? It'll all be new, once more. Here's a bit of video from Patrick's Point (the same place I took yesterday's photo). Looking through these snippets of video and the photos...it's a strange, dislocating experience, putting me in places I've been, places so very different from where I am here, now, on this couch. Obviously, the "being present" problem remains unsolved. October 11, 2006
"NORAD Puts Fighter Aircraft Over Several US Cities"
From the NYT: An aircraft crashed into a building in New York City’s Upper East Side this afternoon, igniting several apartments of the residential high rise before pieces of the building crashed onto the ground, witnesses and officials said. CNN is reporting one fatality. They've got an eyewitness on a cellphone saying that it was in fact a small plane, not a helicopter, and that it made a "huge fireball" when it hit the high rise. Sadly, "huge," as an adjective applied to fireballs erupting from high-rise buildings, is relative these days. When I was pedaling along 2nd Avenue on September 11, this is what I was hoping the driver of the van meant when he leaned out of his window at an intersection and told me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Hopefully, this isn't a repeat of the 2002 incident in which wanna-be teen terrorist Charles Bishop stole a plane and crashed it into a Florida building for Osama. Homeland Security is already calling it a "terrible accident." As if they've already identified the pilot and searched his house for Islamofascist pamphlets and George Bush dartboards. Photo supplied by Astonished Head's New York correspondent.
UPDATE: Then again, maybe it was just a Yankee pitcher running out of fuel. Still doesn't rule out the George Bush dartboard, though. Lots of people have those.
More Video!I wish I'd been able to put these videos up while I was on the road, but once I stopped staying in motels, with their wi-fi and their phone jacks, bandwidth became an issue. So, what I've decided to do is put the videos up in their original chronology. Today's video is from July 20. To view it, click here. October 16, 2006
So, I Was Poking Around On The Internet......and I discovered that I have a blog! Apparently, I've been at it since 2002. Ain't that a hoot? Back in January, Vanx referred to this place as a "conceptual train wreck." This, he wrote, was a good thing. A few months after that, you may recall, I took what seems to me now to be a brief scoot across America, which turned out to be more of a scoot into, uh, me, if I can get away with writing that (or if you can get away with reading it). Right now I'm sitting in a recliner at my mother's house in Santa Barbara, in the period between That Thing I Did and The Thing I Will Do, a period which seems to consist mainly of reading, watching television, playing Lego Star Wars II, and not riding my trike. I'd like to ride my trike, but it needs a hub that works. And when it gets a hub that works and I'm riding it around, that still won't be much to write about, because this would be the sort of "out and back" riding that ordinary mortals do, not the Go West Young Man riding that formerly superhuman godlike beings such as myself did once, but don't now. So, what you'd end up with, were I writing on a regular-style basis, is day after day of stuff like this, which is virtually content-free, like popcorn. So you should be glad, I'm thinking, that I'm not writing regularly, because I'd hate to waste your time. Time that could be spent curing cancer, or saving babies from burning buildings, or inventing a palatable fat substitute that doesn't cause...leakage. See, that's where I'm at right now. Leakage. And who the hell wants to read about that?
That Is All October 18, 2006
Astonished Head #53
October 20, 2006
Oyez.
October 26, 2006
Well Well Well Well
Going out of my freakin' mind, that's what. I won't get in to the details, because they're boring. Suffice it to say that, as usual, I am not happy with my brain. Bad brain! No biscuit. On Halloween, I'll be heading to San Francisco for a couple of weeks, to do the whole jobseek thing. And to write a novel. There may or may not be be more words here, depending on all of the things that sort of thing usually depends on. October 29, 2006
Whabadang-ding-dong And...Uh...So On
All props to the adaptable idea of crapping in the woods at a discrete distance from the hallowed graves. But such problem-solving is limited in scope! It can't put bread on the table and hardware in the expansion slots! And so it is that on this Samhain I shall high-tail it back up north to the City By The Bay, there to convince some corporate entity that it'd be worth their while to give me cash money to sling words for them. Should be interesting. Entertaining, even. And hopefully fruitful. The plan, oddly enough, will once again put me in an Econolodge with my trike for two weeks, possibly three. This time, though, it'll be a purposefully long-term engagement, with proper clothing and everything. There will be resumes flung and interviews attended. Evening gatherings with people I actually know. So I do not anticipate a return of the motel malaise which so often bashed my head with its mute, sodden club. If'n you're innarested, stick around. Sod off, otherwise. BTW: I'm so crushing on Dr. Girlfriend right now. Ask no questions. And no, I don't care that she might've been a man. 
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Now there's something I never wanted to see on a CNN crawl again. Ever.
How very nice then. What, then, have I been up to, you may ask, and why not. 
Well chilluns and readers, I suppose it's time to bring this particular phase of the vast monkey cage pellet-dispensing experiment to a close. See, it's one thing to saddle on up and attempt the Great TransAmerican journey, but once you've ridden that particular horse until it drops dead because you've forgotten to water it and after you've staggered to your mom's house on a trike with shattered hubs, you finally end up with the sinking realization that you're pretty much back where you started, plus some added experiences (such as knowing what it's like to shelter in the shade of some trees in a weird cemetery atop a noonday Kentucky hill hoping to God a'mighty that you don't really have heatstroke, then discovering that although there is in fact an outhouse in the cemetery, and that said outhouse even has a roll of paper in it, it's full of wasp nests).