Everything’s Coming Up Milhouse!

Yesterday was an unprecedentedly great day. I mean, it was probably hands-down my best day since finishing my diss draft in June. Not only did a bunch of stuff not go badly, it actually all went really well, and there were even some very pleasant surprises. First, I finally had a two-hour phone conversation with my diss advisor, who thinks a defense by March should be quite possible. Woo hoo! Not only does my diss not suck, it actually could be finished within a quarter! That’s crazy!

The rest of the stuff sort of pales in comparison to that, but it was all really good: 1) the bike shop got the stuck pedal off the Runwell finally; 2) one of the readers of my Old Bike Blog sent me this incredible poster he made; 3) I finally won an eBay auction (even though I swore on this blog that I would never eBay again) for a replacement handlebar/stem for the Huffy/Raleigh at a really good price; and 4) some long-awaiting microfilm arrived by inter-library loan. By the end of the day, part of me wanted to explode with glee, while the other part kept looking over my shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’m still a little worried that the universe is just getting me in a good mood ahead of some epic disaster of cosmic proportions, but hey, even if that’s the case, I’ll take the good stuff while it lasts!

PS–If you don’t get the title of this post, please hand over your credentials and exit the blog without incident. We don’t want any trouble.

November 30, 2008

The end of another month always seems like a good time to take stock and check in with the status of various personal and professional projects. Several recent conversations in our household have highlighted the necessity of me finding some sort of paying work, even before the dissertation is complete. We’re finding our budget stretched a bit thin lately, and upcoming conference travel and tuition is going to take a toll. I’ve put out a few inquires about random jobs in my area, but I need to get more serious about it. Having the diss almost finished has been a convenient crutch for me to say “I’ll just wait until it’s done before I get serious about a job search.” Well, as the economy seems to worsen, and we start to wonder about our future, it’s looking more and more necessary to get a bit more serious with myself about career direction. I still want writing to be my main focus and I’ve got loads of article and book projects in the work queue, including some forays into fiction, but those things don’t pay off for a long time (and not often in loads of cash).

That’s really where the bulk of my energies are going to be directed for a while-finding something that brings in some extra money. This will have the added benefit of making my own work/writing time all the more precious, and hopefully spurring me to make better use of the time spent at my desk. At the same time, I have this new bicycle restoration project, which is going to be a long-term one, and which will give me something to use my hands and brain in a different way. I’ve definitely found this to be necessary for my work style; having something that I can do physically and that has an immediate, tangible result is very satisfying after puzzling over a sentence or a paragraph or a concept for an afternoon. Academic work is so nebulous when it comes to actual production. What IS an academic product? A book? An article? An idea? A chapter? A paragraph? A sentence? A word? At least with an old bicycle, I can make a real change, a visible change, in the course of an afternoon’s work. Progress is physical and evident, and thus easier to measure.

Anyway, so I’m working towards a few new things for me: coming to terms with what I expect from my work; understanding that “my work” and “my job” are going to have to become two different things; and actually trying to redefine or tweak how I actually think of myself, both personally and professionally. Ah, personal growth. Why does it have to be so hard?

1955 Huffy/Raleigh Sportsman

This is my new winter project: it’s a 3-speed Huffy Sportsman, but was actually manufactured by Raleigh, one of Britain’s most well-respected bicycle manufacturers.

I’m not sure why Raleigh chose to market under the Huffy name in the U.S., but Huffy apparently used to have a better reputation than it does now. Today, Huffys are low-end department store bikes, not very good quality, but this bike was quite nice for its day. As you can see from the photos, it needs a lot of work, and probably a good deal replaced, but I think it’s a solid bike under all that, and it should fix up nicely. I hope to make it a cargo bike, with racks and baskets, but it’s probably going to take me a few months at least to get it ridable. Hurray for projects!

Lots more photos at my Flickr photostream, and I’ll be blogging regularly about the restoration at my Old Bike Blog.

November 26, 2008

It’s so easy to get led astray from our best intentions. I initially started this blog to help me keep a sense of balance in life. I typically go from long periods of intense work to long periods of intense inactivity, each of which is accompanied by its own set of stressors. The idea behind blogging was to write something every day about life, work, balance, or just whatever, to help keep everything in perspective. Almost immediately, I started second-guessing myself, thinking “oh, I don’t have anything interesting to say today,” and not making a post. That tendency has gotten worse, until I only post occasionally when I feel like I really have something to say. Well, I’m going to start trying to do it every day again. We’ll see what happens.

So anyway, here’s a few of the things that have been going on (in no particular order):

• It rained really hard all night last night, the first time in a long time here, and now it’s cool and cloudy and wet and like a proper fall, finally.
• I finished some articles and got them sent off to journals (see previous post).
• The left pedal is stuck on the Runwell and I’m worried that I’ve mangled the spindle so that it won’t come off the crank arm.
• I’ve sent off inquiries to two part-time jobs I found on Craigslist.
• I finally signed up for eBay to bid on an old bicycle in my area, lost, and disliked the experience so much, I will never eBay again.
• I turned 29 years old.
• I started two new articles.
• I finished reading Herman Melville’s Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1854).

So yeah, I’m going to try to write about stuff like this more often, hopefully every day. I don’t care if nobody reads it really, it’s more for me than anybody else.

Bougainvillea Time!

Here’s to counteract the last post. I was feeling so pissy after that, I decided to take the Runwell for a ride around the ‘hood, since just throwing a leg over that fabulous machine makes me happy. Here’s what I found:

The Runwell Finished

I actually finished this a while ago, but somehow neglected to post a picture. More photos here and here, too. It rides wonderfully, and is extremely comfortable. I’m totally smitten.

Phoo…

Despite all the drama, we now have everything settled: a check from insurance, a new car, and a loan from my father. What would we do without family? It’s not a big family, but it’s a good one. We can finally take a deep breath, get back to life and work, and stop getting all worked-up about everything. I’ve got some fine tuning to finish on my recently-finished bicycle project, then I’m looking forward to a big excursion around the city with it, hopefully tomorrow. Yesterday involved just tying up a few loose ends with the car dealer, insurance, etc., and then I indulged myself and took a bike ride around the neighborhood, cut some shelves for our garden stand out of some scrap wood I found in the alley, then made some lemon orzo soup. It felt good to do good things, rather than deal with insurance people and car salesmen (two bad things; sorry folks, I’m sure your families love you, but I don’t care for your functions).

I’m also ready to get back to work in a big way. I probably would have gotten started last week, had it not been for all of this non-sense with the car, so I’ve got a whole extra week of enthusiasm and energy stored up and waiting for me to unleash it on Monday. In the meantime, I’m going to take this weekend and just relax.

A New Job of Work

This is what I’ll be spending most of my free time on in the near future: a 1920s or 1930s Runwell bicycle from England.  I’ve already put in a few hours getting him cleaned up, and will probably have to spend many more. I’m keeping track of it all at my other blog, the Old Bike Blog. 

This comes in the midst of a vacation that doesn’t seem to be letting go of me.  I’ve been “back” for two weeks now, and haven’t really accomplished much.  That’s the problem with being your own boss, so to speak: you don’t often get yelled at for not working.  So, I’m going to give myself the weekend to geek out and work on the bike, then really hit the books again next week. I’ve known this for a long time, but work has to be all-or-nothing for me when I’m left to my own devices. I can’t just do a little work each day, but have to devote myself, body and soul, to working. This can really take a lot out of me, and maybe I just haven’t been ready to get back to it.  Well, now I’m feeling like I might be, so look out!

By-see-kell

That’s how I used to say bicycle when I was a wee lad, just learning to talk. My parents thought perhaps I’d been switched at birth with a French-Canadian baby. Pretty cute, no? Well, this weekend was all about the byseekells.

On Friday night while we were enjoying a cup of tea at our local coffee house, the monthly Critical Mass ride went by with probably 500 riders. It was pretty neat, since I’ve never been on a CM ride. After actually seeing it, I’m seriously considering doing it next month. Although there were a lot of riders without lights on their bikes, which is incredibly dangerous at night, and some other fairly stupid behavior, there were also a lot of normal-looking people on every size and shape of bike. There was even a guy bringing up the rear on a unicycle, which was fairly comic. The whole thing was pretty inspiring, actually, even for a recovering cynic like me. With gas at about $4.20 here and sure to keep rising, my wife and I wondered if this, perhaps, is what the future might look like.

Much of Saturday and Sunday were spent either working on or riding our bikes. Because our bikes are older (from the 70s, all of them), they need some care and patience–the former I always try to provide, the latter sometimes runs short. Both mornings were spent working on the bikes, and the afternoons riding them. It was a nice balance of #$%&@! and great fun. I think it must be equivalent to people who swear-off golfing forever one weekend, then go right back out the next. The benefits ultimately seem to outweigh the frustrations.

Since I started working on old bikes about two years ago, I’ve learned quite a bit, the most important things being 1) that I will always have a lot to learn and 2) that getting angry at inanimate objects doesn’t really do any good (in truth, I’m still working on that one). It all started when my fancy mountain bike was stolen from the front porch of our house. I’d had that bike since I was sixteen, and when I got it, I was inordinately proud of how slick and new it was. That bike went with me to college and to grad school, where it carried me around the mean streets of Chicago for three years. After my wife and I moved to a small town in Washington, I’d just started riding it again when I carelessly neglected to lock it up over Memorial Day weekend while we were away. We came home and no bike. I was actually kind of devastated, since I’d done a lot of growing up in ten years with that bike, and had some nice memories with it.

I knew I couldn’t afford a new bike, since my wife and I were both grad students and living pretty well below the poverty line, so I started looking online for a used one. As I thought about it, I decided that I really wanted an older one, a classy English-style bike that I could ride around looking gentlemanly on. I found one on Craigslist near my dad’s house, and asked him if he would mind going to check it out for me. I told him to go ahead and buy the thing if it looked serviceable, which he ended up doing. It was only about $70, if I remember rightly. I picked it up the next time I was down there, and immediately got to work getting it cleaned up and beginning my investigations into the mysteries of bicycle mechanics. And I’ve (almost) never regretted it.

The really terrific and rewarding thing about working on that old bike, and the two others we’ve since acquired, is that doing your own work, while often frustrating and frequently discouraging, can also be a source of self-confidence and fulfillment. Although I suspect my wife is beginning to think that the bicycles have brought out some heretofore undiagnosed bipolar or anger-management disorder in me (and I wonder too, sometimes), the truth is that I do really enjoy working on the bikes. If nothing else, it helps me develop a deeper patience with myself, and with the task at hand, whatever it may be.

Of course, I say that now that they’re all working, more or less. Talk to me again next week.