A good week for riding--if you are immune to all of nature's pollution. My allergies are killing me. Eyes are itchy. Nose is running. Arrgh! And it is worse the more time I spend outdoors. Yet with the weather so nice this week I had to get out there. I need to figure out some allergy treatments that don't include drugs. I get so sleepy sometimes when I am on that stuff.

My commuter bike, The Mule, is set up as a 1 x 9. Front ring is a 42 tooth and the rear cassette has a gearing range of 12/27. When I had this bike set up as a singlespeed, my front chainring was still the same 42, but the rear had a 16 tooth. That worked pretty well. It hurt a bit at the tail end of my commute back home when I have to climb up a few mean streets, but not too bad. Riding singlespeed consecutive days though starts to build lower back pain. The pain would go away again if I laid off of the bike for a day or two.

Yesterday, Bridget and I bought ourselves a used Honda Odyssey in fantastic shape. We got a great deal on it too. We are super happy to not have to pack in our little Civic. We still have the Civic, but it now becomes my errand runner.Neither of these are the cool support vehicle the title of this post refers to.Neil of Cernitzbikes just picked up a Ford Transit. Check it:

Today started off by me being awake. At midnight I was still wide awake despite having to get up at 6am to ride to work. At 1am I am still awake and stressing about not being able to sleep. At 3 am Colin, the 17 month old woke up and I patted him back to sleep. I stayed in his room and slept on the small couch that we have in there. At 4:30 I woke up to see if it was time to get ready to ride. At 5:10 I woke up again. At 5:30, again. And at 5:50 I called it a night and got up. I had a little alarm set so why I kept waking up is beyond me.