Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Pics Now

My camera situation needs to me remedied soon. There have been a bunch of cool weather shots on the river and a couple interesting night shots of the castle. A few of the best shots I have missed are a dude in full Japanese jogging outfit plus a big-ass cowboy hat, a unicycle race on the river full of adults, and a homeless guy doing some crazy stretching over a park bench. Not sure what I am going to do, maybe just bring the older camera because I can't get these shots with my phone camera just takes too long and it is harder to be inconspicuous about it. Oh yeah and I feel a beer review on the way...... hopefully.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

War-N

I don't have a nice camera. The camera I bought a few years ago is pretty nice but too big to bring on rides with me. The smaller camera I have is really old and takes crappy pictures. Soooo I have to use my phone to take pictures when I ride which is a pain. I'm not going to go into the details of my camera trouble but, to transfer the pictures on my phone to my PC I need the cradle thing that came with it. I haven't used it in a while so there was some trouble finding it this week but I got it so here is a picture of my bike:

War-N-Jitenshya
So there's my bike. One of the Japanese words for bike is 'jitenshya' so that is sort of where the name came from. I have had it for about 3 years I think. I have had to replace the front break cable about 10 times (riding to fast), maybe 3 flat tires (junk in the road), new basket (bunny hops baby) and the kickstand recently broke (no idea how this happened). The breaks squeak something fierce but that just helps get people out of the way when I am riding. It has many stickers on it which might be hard to see so I will list them. The band stickers are TOOL, 3 inches of blood, Isis, Iron Maiden, Mastodon and maybe Opeth (I think this one has fallen off). the other stickers are Hanshin Tigers, Alpine, some king of smilyface thing, a shamrock and Rockstar as well as a couple of restaurants that I like. Oh and the last time I had my breaks fixed the shop put a sticker on without telling me.

The rides I think I will go into more detail once I take some pics and I haven't messed with posting the spread sheet yet so I will just give ashort update. I have ridden 312.42 Km which means I have 9687.58 Km to go. The longest ride so far was 48.34 Km in about 2 hours 45 minutes. Yup so I am just over 3% into this and not feeling too bad but my butt is a bit sore from all the riding. Hopefully i will take some pics next week for the next post.

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Hijacked!!!

Alright. I was going to use this blog to talk about beer and other alcohol I like and I am still going to do that. I had an idea for a second blog but I am lazy so I have decided to combine the two here. Like I said I am pretty lazy and in an effort to be more active I have decided to set a goal of...
10,000 Km on my bicycle this year.

Yup. It sounds like a bad idea and 3 days into the new year I can tell you it seems like I may have set the bar a little high. Oh well it should get me off my lazy butt more often at least and if people know I am doing it I am more likely to stick with it.

So first my bike. I don't have pictures yet but I will take some tomorrow. In Japan my bike is known as a 'mama-chari' which means it has a sweet basket in the front and if i was in America people would call it a girls bike because of the frame. I will save the description for a post with pictures.

So now you may be wondering how am I keeping track of distance? I set up a spread sheet (don't know how to post that but I will work on it). I don't have a computer on my sweet ride so for now I have to use this site http://veloroutes.org/
That site is pretty cool but for long rides can be a bit of a pain cause I have to remember every turn.

Next post will have pics of my bike and description of the first three rides of the year.