There’s only one thing better than blogging and that’s blogging OUTSIDE.  Every once in a while I have a little timewarp moment where I remember the old dial-up modem that hissed and spat, and I realize I’m blogging:  OUTSIDE:  and I have to pause and just pant a little bit because technology is so cool.

I’m also enjoying the properly warm June weather and the fruits of my gardening labours, which have been sporadic at best this year.  I sowed some “Grand Rapids” lettuce, rainbow chard, and “King of Denmark” spinach in the hopes of having a little mesclun patch I can shave off every so often and conjure a salad from; we added a beefsteak tomato plant to our offerings of “Sweet 100″s, San Marzano and Romas; I planted some kale in the shadier box in the hopes that that too will give some greeniness to pastas and soups here and there, and some nasturtiums where the heather used to be before the snowy winter killed it.  We’ll see.  If I can get M to sow the white beans we’ll have our full yearly vegetable complement back again for ‘09.

Also, as the post title implies, June is Bike Month and my poor old girl has seen better days, maintenance-wise.  I had a cunning little apparatus from MEC that was supposed to help clean the chain, and the chainguard is too big so I had to sort of jerry rig it with twisties and bungee cords, besides which my snootier cycling friends sneered at such acoutrements and told me just to use a toothbrush.  So that’s what I did.  She’s 5 years old, is my lovely bike, and she’s almost customized:  she’s got an internal 3-speed hub which was not standard issue, and some monstrous tires that are really too fancy for her, ditto pedals.  She’s also got a handmade metal basket that M created from some spray-painted jobsite scrap that, before it started to get all banged up, was the envy of my fellow cruisers.  I took her out on the deck and wiped her down, toothbrushed her, and then used the garden watering hose to polish ‘er off.  A little White Lightning goes a long way.

If I was really my father’s daughter, however, I’d have an annual ritual where I took the whole durn thing apart, every nut,

There's life in the old girl yet

gasket and O-ring, and soak it in little aluminum pie plates of degreaser, whereupon once all the bits had been defilthed to my satisfaction I’d put the thing back together again, with one extra bearing or washer every year.  In this way I would contribute to the annual joke, which like great humour concepts everywhere increased with teh funny year after year:  that one day Dad’d be biking along and the whole shebang would collapse underneath him, having been losing parts annually for well over a decade.  It was a Peugeot, that bike, IIRC.  I think I’ll just wipe my bike down with a ShamWow.