Minus Ten Review- 2009-6

Ten years ago this week on this blog I was yakking about a new tool that I was using to take images with. It was a big investment into what I was doing, for me anyway, and it kind of put me in a bad place financially at the time. Buying things like expensive digital cameras in February while on a bike mechanic's budget isn't very easy to do. But I did it........

But, since I was responsible for content on "Tweny Nine Inches" at this point, I felt it was my duty to up my camera game significantly. Up until this point I had been using a Fuji point and shoot which was "okay", but I felt compelled to make the leap into "serious" cameras even though this barely qualified as such a camera. Whatever..... It got the job done and I ended up using this camera for several years.

While the serious, "set pieces' were all taken with the new Panasonic, the Fuli point and shoot was still in play and I used it for a big portion of my photography until about four years or so ago when I dropped it at the beginning of a Renegade Gent's Race and lost the battery, of all things. I thought I broke the camera, because, somehow or other, when it hit the deck, the battery compartment ejected the battery then closed again, as if nothing had happened. When I retrieved the camera, it didn't fire up, and I figured it was completely dead. So, I didn't find out until later it was just a battery. But that's another story.......

The whole point of sharing the story of the Fuji's demise is that once I replaced that camera with an Olympus Tough TG-3, I passed on the Panasonic to my daughter, who still uses it. So, this camera, featured today, lives on, but not in my hands.

A "January Thaw" in February 2009.

The other notable thing was that it was ten years ago this week that the weather broke and we started on our march towards Spring. I was able to get out on a couple of late Winter gravel rides to get ready for my CIRREM attempt and I was using my Karate Monkey single speed to get into shape.

This amounted to the "last hurrah" for the karate Monkey for several years. By this point, the bike was six years old and had seen a lot of bad weather and at least four years of Winter commuting. The originally installed UN-53 bottom bracket was showing signs of giving up the ghost, so I was starting to think it was time to install a new bottom bracket. That was thought to be an easy job until I found out my bottom bracket was frozen into the frame, and then, well......it became a big problem. 

Since the website was taking up so much time and since I had 29"ers to be testing and reviewing, the old Karate Monkey ended up getting moved to the back of the "pile" and wasn't repaired for several years. This was one of the motivations for me to get out from under the 29"er website since I loved riding that Karate Monkey on gravel and I wasn't able to focus on that with the website duties.

So, this ride was one of the last gravel rides I had on the KM, and I missed it dearly afterward. That will be a big part in the future stories in the coming years.......