THIRTEEN.MINUTES.TWENTY.EIGHT.SECONDS.

Great mother of glee that's right. Beverly and Baldwin to Queen and Roncey.
THIRTEEN MINUTES.
Breaking my record of fifteen minutes six seconds. I imagine this too shall improve once i can stop reminding myself every second "I'm attached to my bike now, be WARY."

I hereby profer a sincere thanks to SW, who helped me install cleats in my shoes, clipless pedals to my bike, and appropriate lingo into my brain, rendering me one with both my beloved velocipede and the cool-conscious echelon i have no doubt inadvertently bumbled into, as i sing the praises for my new STD, ahem, that's SPD pedals.

And even more thanks for the chivalrous restraint he showed upon my almost immediate realization that "installation" wasn't much more than, erm, unscrewing the old pedals and screwing the clipless ones in.

AND for not laughing when I nearly fell over (BUT DIDN'T, take note.) in a nearby parking lot as i got used to them.

So now I embark on a new SPD age, where the only conflict remaining is how my Extremely Fashion Conscious self is going to bear the footwear limitations, seeing as I will now be in need of cleats on a Daily basis.

colour recommendations for false legs.

So i was sitting in my window this morning eating a bagel, as one does, when i saw a man walking in the street below with a fake leg.
(That is, he had a fake leg. He wasn't walking alongside one. That wouldn't happen.)
It was plastic. Blue. A Blue Plastic Leg.
This led me to ponder.
Who decided to make it blue?
Who thought, "ah, we have this clever invention, this prosthetic leg here, now what colour should we make it. Let's say blue!"
Of course, I have only truly been a happy person upon acquiring blue bike tires, so I'm not disagreeing....

back-deck astronomy.

My dear friend Jody came over last night for a bit of dinner and some back-deck astronomy. She is owner of the finest grade telescopes and a wealth of brilliance in the realms of the stars, both the ones she clothes by day (wardrobe for film) and the ones that hover by night (wardrobe for the galaxy).
I do confess a bit of relief that the authorities were not called. It did look like two comfortably-dressed girls had set up what looked not unlike a superior-grade long-distance missile on a back-deck. And had it trained on first the neighbouring planets and then a highly unfortunate pair of curtains in a nearby high-rise.

Anyhow. See below amateurish attempts to archive for eternity. (SO.COOL.)
(Curtains in high-rise were drawn and not worth recording.)

greenCheeseMoon as viewed from my back deck.

Through the Looking Lens.

an accostation (sic) and a new clever project.

It was that time again, and I sent a quick email yesterday to Martin Helmut-Reis, aka Tino, aka Bike Lane Diary Executer and Guru to see if he might furnish us with any new photos for the next issue of Br**ck. He proffered this. Click on a date. Any date. SO cool. People do keep busy, don't they?

done and thank you.

The Coach House gents really are so very accomodating and so this posting shall begin with a thank you to them, for suffering me and my little work-time invasions every time i get it in my head to make another book, as gift or print-run.
It's that bloody great Gluer that I can't work on my own. It really is a Very Large Machine. It's almost amazing that it is so kind to my little books, as Very Large Machines go. Would that the publishing industry (another Very Large Machine) paid the same attentions.

Anyhow, I've left five new copies of perfect-bound One-Night Stands at Pages (and oh, how perfect they are!) , so you may (all) Rush Forth Hencewith (sic) to get one. The rest are reserved for Spring, Book Fairs, gratuitous bribes, etc.

(and yes, the art window is coming down soon. I have no idea what is going on in the grand master scheme of artist scheduling, (and quite frankly, it's a absolute blessing in disguise for book sales) but, as Coco pointed out, perhaps they shall have to rename the shop stef if those now-very-old drawings don't come down.)

Back to One-Night Stands(a second printing)

So, I've decided to forgo hand binding these books this time around, leaving that kind of Book Art Love to the experts. My second print run (21 copies) is going to be perfect bound, (thank you Coach House, for letting me exploit you so mercilessly, yet again)
Why a second print-run you ask? 'Coz the first one is SOLD OUT!! WOOOHOOO!! None left at Pages. WHO KNEW. So if any of you dear reader(s) are looking for a copy, I will, as of a few hours from now, have some new ones. I think I'll only put a few at Pages this time though, I'm cranking these out one page at a time and let's just say my Dr. Who scarf is at seven feet+ as a result of manning the printer. I'll have knit myself all the way to Pages at this rate.
The rest of the copies I'll sell at April's SpeakEasy show and the Waysgoose Book arts festival in Grimsby, and MoCCA in NY, etc etc etc.

time, the sneaky little bugger.

something has been amiss for the past week, and I can't figure out how i've kept it together. about a week ago, i sent an email to Coco at what i thought was 10.22am, what my trusty computer said was 10.22am, and then she wrote me back from 9.38am on the same day. Now, she's an extraordinary lady, so this was not completely unfounded, as extraordinary things go, but still I found myself baffled. She does tend to live in the past while I go about my modern geeky ways, but somehow I assumed the chasm of our respective nostalgias spanned more than an hour at any given time, if only to keep us from bumping heads in our respective temporal reveries.
Anyhow, we never quite figured it out. We did agree, (I think) that in some aspect of the universe that didn't involve email, we were in sync, and this was wholly satisfactory.
NOW.
This morning, as i bustled about preparing my second print run of One-Night Stands for binding, I felt very competent as I checked my clock, 9.53am, thinking I would be at Coach House in about 20 minutes, which was only about 13 minutes after I had initially planned to be there.
I picked up my cell phone ([audible sigh]Oh the endless gadgets) and it said 8.53am. Hmm. Perhaps I didn't move the clock forward (THREE WEEKS AGO, or whenever it was). No, i remember moving it forward, and thinking, much as I did above, "[audible sigh]Oh, the endless gadgets."
I checked every clock in the house, including my faithful wind-up clock (which I rewound last night with predictable accuracy) 9.53am. And yet, this 8.53 niggled, oh how it niggled. Finally I checked the, ahem, time-honored internet, and lo and behold, according to it I am here right now (as far as I can tell) at 8.58am in the blessed morning. Packed and ready to go, almost a full hour early. I have somehow had an hour of my life returned to me!
And according to this blog, it's only 7.47AM!!!
I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT IS GOING ON.
Too Roo, nonetheless. Nothing a cup of tea and some useless blogging won't fix.

beyond the 1-mile radius of my sofa.

In an attempt to coerce in the springtime and escape the threat of queenWest-hipster-deadbeatdom i cycled out to Riverdale Farm today (24minutes6seconds4redlights)
I could have sworn they used to have a mini-zoo out there, you know, emus, shaggy wildebeests, two-toed sloths, but I guess I confused it with High Park zoo. **
Or maybe Queen West.
Anyhow. The glut of Strollerbabies (one word) was not remarkably different from the Strollerbabies on Roncesvalles, but the quality of air was refreshing, and I certainly couldn't boast of seeing baby goats up Ronceys way.
Also noteable were the unusual bits of architecture and sundries, which hearken back to what seems like a significantly more interesting time.

retro bicycle mit Implement.
bricKollage.
old-style hipster living.

all this, some stewing over the new comic, AND the Jet Fuel, too. Indeed.

**ed. note: have received two confirmations that the mini zoo still exists. Praise be.