Studs on the Bike, Finally!

Put my studded tires on the bike tonight, finally! There was swearing in the garage this eve.

We really haven't had much snow in Anchorage so far this winter, but in the last week we've got enough to convince me that it's time to get the studded tires on.

My winter tires are SO tight for my wheels. It is literally painful to put them on. Imagine me on the ground in a UFC-style battle with these things - screams, things thrown, tire levers flying at rapid speed towards my eyes. Good grief! Anyway, I don't know what you were taught when you were a kid about getting tires back on after fixing a flat, but so hard is my heart towards these things that for that last stubborn eight inches, I press the edge of my shoe against the tire bead (literally standing on the tire) and ratchet the wheel towards the ground, prying the thing around the rim. Yeah, not very gentle, but whatever - it gets the job done.

Record Collecting

A year or two ago I was sitting at my kitchen table staring at my record player on the floor a few feet away, amidst a tangle of power cords and speaker wire, and decided I needed some furniture or something.

I find media cabinets very boring, whether they're boxy or curvy. I started thinking about what else I could do to get the player off the floor and keep everything a little more 'neat'.

Maybe it was the music I was listening to at the time - my mind was leaning towards something industrial but clean. Could I connect everything with pipes? Hide all the wires? I started sketching out some ideas, and the more I ran with it, the more I liked it. I could hook everything to this free-standing frame of pipes, so the speakers, record player and amplifier were all "piped" together with no cords visible anywhere.

It all worked great! I used black steel pipe and fittings and ran all the power cords and speaker wires inside the pipes.

A record player is by definition a more physically interactive piece of stereo equipment than most, and I wanted this design to keep that in mind. For instance, standing in front of it, the speakers and amplifier are all angled slightly upwards towards your ears and eyes. So, changing the record, starting it, etc, you're in the perfect position to also adjust volume, tone, etc, and get a good stereo experience from the placement of the speakers.

I originally started this post to talk about some records I recently found online, which have taken me years to find. I'll post more on this later. I haven't yet received them in the mail, so maybe I shouldn't jinx it all. :)