back from the real world!

I have not been sleeping well lately. Last night I woke up at 2 a.m., like most nights in the last few weeks, and could not shut off my brain. I was thinking about bicycles, of course. I spun in bed like a stuck pig in a blanket with a lot of ideas boiling in my head. "You should blog this stuff, bro," my conscious intoned. I considered the phrase "my conscious intoned" and decided to time-stamp that gem. 3:49 a.m. My eyes are burning under their lids, but still no asleep!

You can't will yourself to sleep. I find that if I am fixated on something, that persistent jerk in my head won't let go. (Who is that guy, anyway? Get out!) I finally got some sleep, but not before I outlined some objectives to write about to get this blog rolling again. Hopefully my findings will be of some help to other riders and mechanics.

To bring readers (all 4 of you) up to speed, I was working at an independent bike shop about this time last year. The general state of disarray of that shop was my inspiration for this blog. I combined my past experiences of what was good about past bike shops and juxtaposed it to all things that were wrong and unfixable with that shop and started writing.

I worked at that shop for one month and it was a letdown on several fronts. Providence smiled on me a few weeks in when someone from a newspaper company called me about a job. I had been working in bicycle shops for the past six years (minus a 6-month foray as an apprentice commercial electrician, which was a hoot!) after being laid off from a magazine gig at the beginning of the "great recession" in early 2009. I loved the bike shop jobs, but, as I have written, it's generally a low-paying career choice and I wanted my Journalism degree to count for something. For the past year, I have done some writing and proofreading for publications.

This is a trajectory for my career that makes sense, pays more (but not much), and gives me weekends off and enough time in the mornings to squeeze in a short bike ride. It's not as fun a wrenching on bikes, and I don't have ready access to deeply-discounted bike parts like I did, but it all comes out in the wash. Nitpicking newspaper pages is actually very satisfying to me.

I was not surprised to learn that, less than a year after I left my previous bike shop for the newspaper gig, that bike shop went out of business. It's sad to see another independent bicycle shop go, but I saw a lot of issues there that I knew would have that result. Those issued inspired me to write in the first place, so we have that. I hope everyone previously involved in that shop is doing well.

I have a few ideas in the hopper so stay tuned. Coming soon:

• review of the Soma Double Cross Disc and the limits of cyclocross bikes
• review of the Soma Juice I have been riding
• more retrogrouch ranting
• thought experiments (and actual ones, hopefully) in mountain bike fit and geometry