Mountain biking outside Boulder

My dispatcher had a couple of days off, which meant that I was on office duty up in Boulder. It being my favorite time of year in the Foothills and emboldened by my recent return to mt. biking, I brought the fatty tire bike up both days and took advantage of being next to some great riding.

On Thursday, I cut out of the office a bit early to catch the 4:40pm bus up to Nederland and got in 2hrs of really fun trails in the West Magnolia zone. My most recent trail day up here ended up with me in the hospital, so it was a victory of sorts to revisit my old trail haunt that I've ridden so many times since moving to Boulder--- 8 years ago. Sadly I forgot to pack the camera, and that's especially sad because it was perhaps the most electric and vibrant neon aspen colors that I've ever seen in my life! Sections of these trails duck through full canopies of young aspens, and it felt like a Disneyland ride to pedal through a fully encompassing tunnel of screaming neon yellow.

Friday I pedaled out from the office up to the Batasso Loop just a couple miles up Boulder Canyon, eager to check out the newly built Benjamin Loop addition. Got a late start, rode slow, and found the new spur to be longer than I'd expected. Luckily I had packed my lights and ended up pedaling the last hour in the darkness. This was my first proper singletrack in pitch black with only a headlight, and it was kinda fun. Kinda nerve wracking as well....


Started off well enough with a nice sunset ride outside of town....

But the last hour turned into this....  (Boulder city lights way down below in the distance!)
Made it home safe and sound, very very carefully.... ~4mi in the pitch black, a mile or two on technical singletrack.

"naked" fixed gear

I've been riding my fixed gear track bike for work with the aid of a front brake all summer while my elbow heals. I've managed to not use the brake even once (I've ridden without a brake for about 10 years now) but it's a nice piece of mind knowing it's there with my weaker left arm. However, the front wheel I was using snapped a spoke today at work, so I put my old track wheel back on and took the brake off. Figure if I can ride a mountain bike for 3 hours on the Colorado Trail, I can do without the brake. Every step closer to my old self feels like a big accomplishment.

back to the mountain bike!!

April and I packed up the car and took off for some rustic car-camping outside Buena Vista along the Collegiate Peaks in the Sawatch Range of the Rockies. We found a nice quiet campsite near the dead end of a dirt road in the National Forest and had a fun night by the campfire.

My elbow's feeling stronger and more stable so I brought my mountain bike along to have my first go at riding trails since my accident in June. The Colorado Trail passes through this area just a few hundred yards from our campsite and on Sunday I rode south for a couple of hours to Sand Creek before turning around and heading back to camp. Autumn foliage was spectacular and the aspens were peaking! A really beautiful weekend and a major hurdle cleared in getting back into the woods on my bike. I'm not at 100% by any means, but felt pretty solid once I got into the groove of mountain biking. I can't wait to get back to the trails soon!

Sunday afternoon, April hiked the Colorado Trail north a few miles to Mt. Princeton Hot Springs, and I finished up my bike ride and met her over there with the car. A relaxing soak until dusk came upon us, then stopped off in Leadville for our favorite bargain dinner of filet mignon at Quincy's.

City O' City- installing the chandelier

First off, for a much better expose of the finished work at City O' go to Randy's site!

Last of the major work at City O' City is transporting the custom chandelier (and it's 1000+ individual strands of delicate fiber-optics) from the workshop to the restaurant, and then hanging it from the ceiling beam. It was built while hanging from a custom wooden frame, so we modified that to keep everything in place and then late at night trailored it to City O'.

It made the trek without incident, and we had a team of good guys to help move it into place and install it hanging from the ceiling beam above the large community table in the center of the restaurant.

The finished product resplendent in full effect!

View from the table directly underneath the main chandelier- this is only a small portion of the whole apparatus, but you get an idea of just how much tedious work April did to individually hand-build each and every strand of fiber-optic string.

Chicago!

In a gem of perfect timing, the very next day after City O' City opened for business, I had a flight booked to Chicago where I met up with April. She had been seeing her family in Kentucky, then flew up to Chicago for a few days back in the city that was once both our homes. Perhaps from the delirium that I was recovering from now that I could finally sleep for more than 2 hours a night, I basically forgot to take any photos while in the city. Whoops.

lunch along the annual Renegade Craft Fair

CTA stations no longer offer the amenities they used to

new bike shop along Milwaukee Avenue

After a couple days in the city, I took the train down to Indiana to spend a few days in Saint John with Mom & Dad & Maggie. Again I totally forgot to take any photos but we had a nice time catching up and getting some work done. Dad put me to the task of helping take down a huge limb that had broken in the backyard poplar tree. I miss yardwork like trimming shrubs and trees, so I had fun spending a day with a saw and clippers tidying up the landscaping

more City O' City work

Some critical crunch-time maneuverings with the City O' City project. With only a week until the scheduled opening day (the restaurant has been closed for 6 weeks during the remodel/expansion) Randy and I were working a week of consecutive all-nighters. Weekends we'd be working in the restaurant space from 7pm until 7am. It was a fun routine to experience the city (and Capitol Hill neighborhood in particular) go through it's transition from daytime to dead of night and then back to life as daybreak came to a pair of weary craftsmen. Weekdays I still had to work at the couriers, and never in my life have I managed to survive (barely) on just a couple hours of sleep a night (and sometimes none at all) for almost 2 weeks straight. We got most everything done, and all of the critical things needed to run a restaurant. Still some finishing touches of various degrees to tackle in the coming week or two.

Some photos of the progress:
This will be the coffee service area behind the orange/brown metal. In front will be one of the large barn-beam countertops I've been working on. The metal in the following pics in the sheet metal skin taken from a 1946 semi-truck trailer that Randy bought from an old junkyard and repurposed here as the interior finishings.

The kitchen bar service area will have the second barn-beam countertop and allow patrons to eat while watching into the open kitchen. The wall light fixtures were also salvaged from an old warehouse and retrofitted with ultra-efficient LED bulbs.

Transporting the finished barn-beam coutnertops from Randy's workshop to the restaurant on the top of his old Volvo wagon. I was terrified that they'd slide off en route, dashing my dozens and dozens of hours of work perfectly finishing the antique wood.

Today I learned to use a cut-router! Safety glasses did their job.

Opening night!!!!

Still need to hang the custom chandelier and matching fiber-optic light fixtures, and a few finishing touches. But all the major things got done, the city health inspectors passed our work and there was a line out the door all night long. And I learned an amazing amount of skills from Randy; this has been one of the most rewarding and interesting opportunities I've had in a long time. I'm very grateful to have had the chance to work on this project.