35mm film

    Felt the urge to shoot some film a few weeks ago, finally got around to getting them developed.  I went to CVS and picked out some Kodak 400 speed color negative film, the only choice they had, and took a Pentaz P3n out into the woods, the Meshomaisic State Forest to be specific.  The lens on the camera is a short fixed lens and I just went around and took pictures of random objects that I saw.  The woods are far to dreary looking this time of the year for any landscape shots.  While I was at it, I figured I'd develop on of many rolls of film that I had shot some time ago, several years probably.  The one I randomly selected had a few images of an old and long since abandoned factory out in the woods at an undisclosed location.  I think they came out sorta cool.  Brooks brand film, forget the speed, and I think these may have been shot with a Topcon Unirex.

Just for fun.

 

 

 

 

The other set of shots.

 

Some snow

 Last Friday morning, we were surprised with a nice dusting of snow, here in north eastern central-ish Connecticut.  I decided to take the scenic route to school and I took a few rolling shots.

Of course is all melted pretty much as soon as the sun came up, but it turned out to be a beautiful day and as it would turn out, the snow was just a taste of what was to come.

 

 As anyone on the East Coast already knows, Saturday brought a surprising snow storm, laying down over a foot in some places.  I had to shovel about 7" off my car on Sunday morning.  I didn't take any photographs of the carnage, but carnage it was.  It was an incredibly heavy snow, even on Saturday the branches on trees were hanging quite low, and by the time Sunday rolled around there were power lines down everywhere.

Here's a couple shots from early Saturday afternoon.

  Hopefully, and I say hopefully as an overwhelmingly small portion of the population around here, that this is a precursor to another snowy winter.  Realistically, an extreme event like this will turn out to be an outlier, and can't really be a means of predicting the winter to come.  I did some research though, and NOAA is predicting another moderate La Nina year (like last year) which results in cooler than normal temperatures in the north central states, and a wet cell near the Great Lakes which often translates to snow storms in the Northeast.  La Nina may also mean slightly higher than normal temperatures and lower than normal precipitation in the Southeast states, which I'm hoping means favorable conditions for my Appalachian Trail thru-hike in the late winter and early spring of 2012.  As far as snow in the Northeast goes though, the bigger factor is the Arctic Oscillation, which is less predictable, and can bring large snow storms.

 This storm, for me, has just been a big teaser.  I'm already dreaming about gliding through the fluffy white stuff on my skis.  Perhaps sometime, relatively soon, the focus of this blog will detract from the bicycle trend that it's been on.  The thought of starting another, bicycle-centric blog and naming it "Ride the Gamut", has crossed my mind.  For now, let's enjoy the rest of the fall.

Newbaum's

Somewhat recently, I've become a huge fan of cotton bar tape.  The look, the feel, the smell, the price.  There's nothing not to like.  It's been used for years on vintage bike's and French brand's have long since been available, but in limited colors.  It's also on the thin side and is often way to short to wrap a full size set of bars without going to extremes to minimize overlap.  It's good stuff and I've used it for several projects. 

Sometime early this year I stumbled across Newbaum's on Riv's site.  Newbaum's is a newish company that produces high quality cotton handlebar tape, of all things!  Made right here in the USA to boot, you can check them out here.  This stuff is thick, super nice cotton, it comes in a staggering variety of colors, and it's long enough to handle wide bars or if you like to wrap the cotton over cork tape or something like that.  it's nice and cheap so you can change colors often, or wear out one color nicely.  I decided to order a few rolls to re-wrap the Nitto Noodles on my Trek.  Classy stuff, I wish there were more uses for cotton tape, because this stuff is that nice.  Broom handles, steering wheels?  Hockey sticks definitely.

So rather than tear off the old stuff (also Newbaum's), I decided to wrap right over it.  I liked the idea of thickening the diameter of the bars a little bit, especially with the beefy Tektro/Cane Creek brake levers.  After much deliberation, I decided to go with medium blue.

I finished it off on the ends with twine, which I think looks swell.  It's a classy touch, much more appealing to my eye than the standard electrical tape.  I also decided not to shellac the tape, which is common practice.  I had done so to the layer of tape under this one, and while the look, feel and weather-proofness was nice, the bare cotton just feels so nice.  We'll have to see if I regret this decision down the road.  I suppose I could always shellac them later on.

Cotton bar tape, good stuff.

360 view

 Stumbled across this neat 360 degree view of this guys really messy shop. I thought it was pretty cool.

 Click on it for full screen, it's way better, and if you click on the 360 cities logo in the top right corner you can see more 360 shots.


George from Parts Unknown in Toronto

Here's a cool one from the Vrsic Pass in Slovenia.


Vršič (1737m) in Slovenia