monkeyseemonkeydo

Apparently George has got it!

I'm going to guess what that is but on that front not on that line at all: Speed walking. What the...? Who...? Just, just why?

It's something I check once every couple of years but that's my first 999. Life goals.

I know it's basically meaningless and it really shouldn't but this makes me happy...

These, but particularly the 'professional' ones that clearly have like several broadcast quality cameras etc. involved and you get awful canned laughter to boot. Another politicy one to balance out the Trump hate: Joe Biden wanting to be President. Trump's an arse but an arse who has spent his life trying to be as famous as possible and literally sticking his name on anything he can. Him wanting to be president makes sense to me. Joe Biden is a multi millionaire and 77 years old. He must have grandkids and maybe great grandkids but he wants to waste some of that last years of his life (when he should've already retired like 20 years ago on a nice healthy US government pension) stressing about viruses, global financial ruin and warzones. Mental.

So many things I honestly don't know where to start! On the vehicle front wings on drift cars, stretched tyres, anything that makes a car actually impossible to use as a car (stupid camber, stupid stance, stupid low etc.), pimped up cars and sports cars being driven slower than my nan, motorbikes that will refuse to filter through stationary traffic on a dual carriageway (for example)... Cyclocross. The Royle Family. Religion. Flat earthers. People who don't accept Donald Trump is a cunt. Marmite. The SRAM DUB BB standard. Mushrooms. Also most of the things already mentioned including but not limited to dancing, football, poetry, fishing, the a/effect thing... I could go on.

Oooh, look who's gone green, @Luke Rainbird!

[Googles Richie Jackson]. Sweet!

Banksy gone international?

Never even heard of them! Looks fun though!

Soda?

No, afraid not! This is what I mean when I say wheel tabs (though this may be an Aston Martinism...). Having said that I'm pretty sure 'defectors' isn't right!! That's from here: https://www.jvejournals.com/article/19210/pdf which shows a pretty significant drag reduction by just sticking 10mm tabs on.

Looks good . One big change I found when first learning was stopping having locked brakes so that I was effectively 'rocking' up onto the back wheel. The way to do it is to start in a balanced track stand (or small correction hops or front/rear wheel shifts) and then release the back brake and put a bit of power through the cranks to raise the front wheel and basically drive the rear wheel forwards to bring it beneath your centre of gravity in order to get into the backhop position. By doing it that way you're in full control and using the motion of the wheel to maintain balance. If you just rock up with locked brakes you're locked into judging where you end up by where your weight ends up and also fighting the left/right momentum that will throw you off balance. The timing is critical for releasing the rear brake, inputting some power into the cranks, pulling up with your arms and then finding the balance point and then applying the back brake ready to start hopping as needed. Trying to stay more relaxed also helps as being stiff will make it far harder to maintain balance and also tires you out far faster. Once you're happy with that technique it's only a small step to repeat the 'brake off, crank impulse, brake on' which is required to start forward pedal kicks. I think the important thing there is that you will want to allow the front wheel to drop just a little as a sort of preload so that when you put the pedal kick in the rear wheel is accelerated back underneath you and back beneath your centre of gravity.

Are you comfortable just hopping stationary on the back wheel?

Depends if it's a standard HG cassette or XD. I would hazard a guess you've got a normal cassette so should be fine. XD on the left (newer style introduced by SRAM to allow smaller teeth numbers) and normal HG on the right (what pretty much everything was until they started playing gear wars.

And front probably 100 x 15?

Just thinking in terms of water clearance they would tend to be run the way the front left is on. Granted they aren't symmetric about the centreline but in the wet you'd think they're designed to work one way. In other news:

Front right tyre is on backwards isn't it @Wrayvon?

Yeah that's basically what we managed first time out- I don't see any reason to move from here until the kids leave home and we don't want to deal with stairs anymore!! The extension was something we'd been thinking of doing for a while and we were lucky with timing in a way. The work started just before the first lockdown and the work continued all the way through so that we could actually get it all decorated and finished during lockdown. I think if it had happened any other year it would've taken years to actually finish it (I know what I'm like!). Also having the office was very useful for school work and when Mel was filming Oak Academy lessons.

We bought our first place back in 2010, a 1970s (I think) 3 bed semi detached place and toyed with the the idea of moving for an extra bedroom (two kids plus the requirement for a spare room meant sooner or later we'd like to upsize. In the end we decided to extend above the garage and utility room to give us an extra two bedrooms plus a shower/toilet room. We've effectively now got a 5 bedroom house though the boys are still sharing for now so we have an extra toy room and an office. The extra room is great! What's really good is that we managed to pay for the extension entirely from savings and with overpayments on the main mortgage we should be able to be mortgage free in just over 3 years which will be brilliant. I think when we bought we only looked at 3 or 4 others before finding this one which we were very happy with. We looked at a couple of new builds/more modern places but they were all small with white walls and beige carpets that would've been a nightmare to keep clean! This house just felt right immediately- it felt like a home when we saw it, not just a house if that makes sense.