Jump to content

wd40

Legacy Members
  • Posts

    1011
  • Joined

Everything posted by wd40

  1. and all the immigrants who don't know any better. dago, please be sure to re-sod with St Augustine as soon as you move in. maybe Lobo will have an aneurysm and fucking die. addition by subtraction, as they say.
  2. made carnitas on Monday. used some of the leftovers to make my version of the Cubanito. I guess you could say it was the Cubanito-lite, since I didn't have any ham or bacon. still have some LOs, so I made a more traditional cuban sandwich for lunch, today. also slammed, etc.
  3. punching Dan Dierdorf in the face for declaring such, upon Joe Montana's return from injury on MNF.
  4. so the butcher at my HEB told me last week when I asked him for some, that due to the beef shortage, even when he does get any in, he's not allowed to sell them that way. has to cut them up into those little 3"-long chunks I drunkenly raged about a some time back. the Korean braised thing is good and all, but that's not why I built my smoker.
  5. the other night, I was digging the grill pan out from under a stack of other cast iron gear, so some noise, but not a lot. as I'm doing this, wife comes breezing through the kitchen and tells me to make sure and do some obvious task I can't remember, now. she was out of the room by the time she finished her thought, so I said nothing and continued about my business. she returns and repeats it at elevated volume and intensity. I'm like, 'yup, got it'. her: why didn't you acknowledge me before? because you left the room and I didn't figure you'd hear me. her: tone
  6. agree on the name. the whole bug motif is corny AF, imo. I've ridden them both ("cleaned" isn't the right word..."not-dabbed" would be more accurate), just not on the same lap. at least not that I remember. usually, the guys I ride with are all about the jump lines, so we hit Rotor Smoke once, maybe twice the whole day. this makes the second time I've gone there solo and it was closed. went there once on a Friday and the lift line was non-existent. actually felt I could afford a couple water/snack breaks. I wonder what a Covid Friday would look like. would have to be after a Tuesday rain event. that place sucks in the dry season.
  7. get there early. holy shit it got crowded, starting around 10am. I guess Stinger is the double-black; aka, The Artist Formerly Known As Rotor Smoke. yeah, I was dissapoint. really wanted to hit that one. the upper part is super fun. it's really just that one rock garden, and the spot that drops onto that wooden thing that you have to not panic on. you just come around a bend and are suddenly faced with this big expanse of biggish boulders and ledges you have to pick a line through.
  8. I think it's also sold. this was the chronology, as I remember it. I think 27.5 became a thing with the rise of Enduro as a sport. it was a way to keep the long travel and mythically better "flickability" of 26" but get some of the benefit of bigger wheels. then they came up with 27.5plus, which was trying to make a 27.5er into a 29er by putting balloon tires on it. meanwhile, 29er geo has been making room for longer and longer travel, to the point now where it can compete with the little wheels. ---------- and I would agree with Braf on the components, esp for newer riders. It's hard to look back on those days and remember anything but the times I had problems with it. I've also learned over the years that that the real problem may be somewhere else; such as a bent der hanger, gunked up cable housings, etc. all that being said, I did briefly have a GX rear der. first gen from when they rebranded everything away from the X.x series. the B adjust had this janky-ass rubber grommet holding it in the der frame that would get out of alignment. never realized how important that screw was until then. before ultimately replacing the whole thing with a ebay closeout find on an X.9, I found a bigger screw (a coarse-thread sheetmetal screw, iirc), removed the grommet and force-threaded it in there. I also dremel'd a notch on the B-adjust plate to make sure it didn't slip out again. but that was a long time ago. hopefully, they're done with that shit.
  9. you can see on the youtube thumbnail screen two paper wrist bands on my left arm. the normal day pass is the one with the barcode, currently $50 for unlimited rides all day. they scan it with a handheld at the bottom of the lift to make sure it's good, just like any other ski resort that hasn't switched to RF. you can also buy an annual. I heard those were going up, but last year they were $400. I don't go often enough to justify even that. with Covid, they also supposedly put a limit on users by numbering red bands with a sharpie. I was #20 for the day, and at some point it went up to about 100. they put those bands on when they scan you at the lift, the first time. on one trip, I heard the bottom scan guy say over the radio that they were at the limit for 'retail', which I assume are the day-passers like me. double-black was closed due to mud, but it seemed like mostly rookies out there anyway. fortunately, they seemed to mostly stick to the greens, which limited the crowds on the trails I was interested in. but it made the start area a total clusterfuck, coming off the lift and dodging through the big groups standing around or taking off in train.
  10. Spider reopened, this weekend. got there about 8:30, bailed around 11 when the line got insane. experimenting with volume levels to bring the trail sounds out more.
  11. and I'm ok with that
  12. 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.
  13. 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).
  14. 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.
  15. not so nice, dese ones Lake Buchanan, today.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. you wouldn't want it to happen again, would you?
  20. tell the last part first
  21. that shit is bananas
  22. a little Trappey's jet fuel for my lunchtime ride.
×
×
  • Create New...