wd40

and I'm ok with that

ha. your wife even attempts to coil a hose. that's rich. for my wife, that simple task is just one of the many things under the heading of Not Her Job. those seconds that could otherwise be spent surfing houzz or facebook are too valuable. I taught my daughters how to properly coil a hose on the ground, and they do it. my hope is they won't suddenly lose the ability when they get married. 'course then it'll be someone else's problem.

saw a dude pulling a 5th wheel camper as big as that, with a fucking pontoon boat hitched up behind the camper at Navajo Lake SP some years back. can't remember what his truck was...Dodge dually, I think. but not what I would have expected to be lugging around all that in the mountains. anyway. here's mine (on the left).

yeah, the digital zoom on my old SE isn't great, but the head was not flattened out irl. the first thing that struck me was how stubby the tail is, compared to (other) water snakes I've seen. not as fat as (other) mocs I've seen, but not slender at all. and that keeled dorsal area...dunno. google searches and comparisons are inconclusive, to me. didn't kill it. we were on a boat dock above it. it watched us for a while, then slithered on into a hole under a rotten tree stump. feel free to stick your hand in there and find out for sure, Swayze. upper end of the lake, Hate. little ways south of the Canyon of the Eagles LCRA park, off a private road.

not so nice, dese ones Lake Buchanan, today.

good call on SLX. at least when it originally came out, it was marketed as having XT reliability without all the weight shaving (we're talking fractions of grams), and so less expensive. but what I came back to post was to watch for the frame size. mtbs are not as sensitive to this as road bikes because you're moving around on the bike a lot more, but you still need to get a bike that fits. you can google up the OEM size chart for the year and model of most frames you see on pinkbike to check this. imo, if you're in between frame sizes, get the bigger one. stretching a bike by putting a longer stem on it is just begging for an endo, and will fuck with the handling.

oh. you asked about brands. doesn't matter too much when you're talking about hardtail frames. what matters most is what kind of component package you can get with it. in the used market, I would look for Shimano XT level drive train and brakes. I think the SRAM equivalent is X01. but some compromises can be made, especially if you're mechanically inclined and can do your own upgrades later, if necessary. above entry-level, drive train stuff is much easier to tune now than it ever used to be. this example here looks pretty good, for the money (again, my Kona bias). 'hardly ridden', but chromo lasts forever. and Honzo geometry is awesome. https://www.pinkbike.com/buysell/2704818/ XT brakes. pretty good fork. NX drive train, which is pretty decent, and came stock on my current bike, iirc. it worked well during demo and (briefly) after I brought it home before swapping it all out for my 'old reliable' SRAM X9 1x10 stuff I have hoarded. I put it on my old bike to sell it as a complete and it worked fine. almost plugnplay, since I moved over the whole shifter/cable assembly. cheap stuff is hard to tune, and doesn't stay that way very long, even if you can get it set perfectly.

all of what 2x said. I mean, you could ride what you linked, but in AZ, I'd be thinking about cactus, which means tubeless, and I don't know if what you have there is tubeless-ready. I would talk to your buddies and see what they ride. at a glance, with that old school square bottom bracket, there are probably some other old school parts that will limit the upgradability or even repair (straight-gauge stem/head tube preventing a meaningful fork upgrade, etc.). also, my wife and daughter have entry-level bikes with the same chinesium crankset/bb which has riveted chain rings, which means replacing the whole crankset when the teeth wear out. but they don't do dirt, so it's not a big deal for the resident bike mechanic, who happens to have a bunch of serviceable but old upgrade parts to swap in there when the time comes. bottom line: it's an entry-level bike, built with the expectation you'll dump it for something better if you get into riding dirt at all. newness doesn't mean a whole lot. and internal cable routings are not a feature. they're a fucking beating. hit gdh again today, and again pussied out on that creek jump near the bottom. 8 feet, and it'll really hurt to case it. decided I'm gonna build landing ramp to mate with my existing practice ramp in the backyard, and get over my mental block about gaps, progressively.

you wouldn't want it to happen again, would you?

tell the last part first

that shit is bananas

a little Trappey's jet fuel for my lunchtime ride.

The conductor sings his songs again, the pedestrians will please refrain...

it's an approximate bahn mi. I butterflied and portioned out one of those small pork tenderloins, marinated it for a few hours in soy sauce, black pepper and crushed garlic, and cooked it on the grill pan. my kids love pretzel buns so I went with that instead of a traditional baguette.

I put the squirrels back into the biosphere.

my heart just skipped a beat. I just saw the pull tab from my wife's halfnhalf carton in the trash can, and not milk-side-down on the countertop, as per SOP. of course, it was precariously balanced on top of a bunch of other stuff she suddenly decided we didn't need anymore, along with her used coffee grounds, so I was able to breathe easier in the knowledge she's still a she.

is it the meat or the bread crust that defines it? if the bread, then you just eliminated half the posts in this thread. if it's just because it has an alternat name, well, ok then. anyhoo. since reposting is ok today.

you're on a 29er, right? those tires, and modern (slacker) geometry will bridge a lot of those bumps and holes, making some drops easier to ride than walk. it's hard for us old farts to learn to trust the bike, esp if most of your experience is on old school geo with small wheels and short, twitch bars.

besides safety, the other problem with solo riding is spending too much time in your own head. you are much more aware of your fatigue, for one thing. and that first 15 minutes before you're warmed up can just kill your motivation for the rest of the ride. I'm speaking from my own experience, but I see from some of the remarks above, it's not that unusual. it's also extremely difficult and unsafe to push technical limits, solo. I only do it when I'm warmed up and feeling really good. when things aren't going well, I generally won't try anything big/stupid/new. then I end up in the habit of bailing, and that sucks. with time schedules being what they are, I get it: it's the only alternative, much of the time. in that case, I suggest ear buds. just loud enough to quiet the brain voices and let you shift more of your focus to the trail, and as far down it as you can see. manual machine is paying off already. wheelied about 50 feet up my driveway, yesterday. normally, I wouldn't even try it on pavement. of course, I only managed to go that far one time. but in general, I feel a lot more in control than I did before.

because...you graduated from it, or it was ineffective? I was pretty sure someone had tried one of these, but I couldn't remember what page it was on, or who it was. nice bike, btw.

but yeah, 50 is not the ideal age to try to learn all this stuff, esp with zero BMX background. kids just learn it so easily, and some are just freaks of nature. probably 12 years ago, I remember heading to a ride on 2222 and waiting at the City Park Road light when one of the OG Austin mtb badasses wheelied all the way around the turn with the traffic making the left off CP road onto 2222. just ridiculous. dude is still shredding.

I think the deal is it's a lot easier to 'pop a wheel' when you're rolling, especially on a 29er, because you can pedal it up. can't do that with the back wheel fixed. it's much more upper body and throwing your weight back. there's also flexing your knees that changes the dynamics. you don't even notice how much you're also lifting your body weight during a manual until you get on this thing. so it's very different from real trail conditions, where you have a lot to manage quickly, beyond these background details. my goal in building this was to find and learn to hold that balance point. I definitely suck at that. I'm good for 5 or 6 pedal strokes on a wheelie. and clipped in, over-rotating can really suck if you forget to cover the rear brake. I've always thought of it more as a show-off move, than a practical tool for trail riding. we'll see how much use I get out of it, but I'm enjoying the process, so far.

fixed