i'm a sissy with an STI shifter

saturday i went to ed litton's shop in point richmond to pick up my bike. he was very nice to fix it for me so quickly - and such a nice man! he said i didn't need new dropouts, so that is good and just bent it back. he also bent my frame, cause he said it was crooked and out of line (yipes!!!)

the coolest thing, though, was seeing all of his bikes. he was way cool and spent a long time teaching me some bicycle history. he even let me ride a bike that was made in the 1930s or 40s! the bike belonged to a man named Oscar who opened American Cyclery bike shop in SF. the Olympia (?) bike was way cool--- all stripped down and it had something called cambio corsa shifting. it works like this: you pull up the top lever, this pretty much undoes the quick release on the wheel. then you back pedal and move the bottom lever, which moves the chain to a new cog. then you lock your top and bottom lever up and forward pedal. voila! sound easy? it's not! i think i spent two or three minutes just trying to shift once in while riding around the parking lot, swerving all over the place. i can't believe that people used to race while doing that!

the derailleur gods must be pissed off at me, cause when i got home from picking up my road frame (which went in because of my derailleur hanger), i went for a ride on my cross bike. i guess my 10,000 falls have caught up with me cause my derailleur is whack, so i had to cut my ride short. (i think that it might be bent too. i need to learn to fall to the left side) after tinkering around for a couple hours, i was so mad i almost threw my bike against my wall. i couldn't deal with shifting frustration anymore, so sunday i took my track bike out and had a wonderful ride not messing around with that shifting shit.