We’ve been getting a taste of burning Arizona timber lately thanks to the Wallow Fire, which at last glance had scorched more than 120,000 acres near the Arizona-New Mexico border.
Could be worse, I suppose. We could be living in the path of the sonofabitch, which shows no signs of petering out thanks to high winds and a wealth of fuel. Or we could still be living in Santa Fe, which has been seeing ash fall from that fire and four homegrown conflagrations.
Come to think of it, it wouldn’t take much to set Bibleburg alight. It’s been drier than a popcorn fart here, so much so that local officials are conducting fire drills, and as you know we are not exactly lacking for small hat sizes. A smoldering butt flicked out of an SUV window, an unattended campfire or a live-fire exercise gone wrong at Fort Cartoon and we won’t have to worry about those beetle-killed pines anymore.
Mad Blog Media 
Weather is perfect here in Duluth. 75 and a very light breeze, great night for a walk with the Mrs. on the Western water front trail. Deer wading in the St Loius River, very few bugs – fabulous!
Boz, Boz, Boz … you’re killing me. We went straight from winter to summer, as per usual. The tulips never bloomed, the trails look like BBs in talcum powder and tomorrow could bring a record high of 90 or thereabouts.
You know what’s kilin’ me? The MTB trails are dry and in primo shape, but I don’t have a ride. I sold my 26″ Rockhopper this morning and headed to my favorite LBS to buy a 29er. I’ve been buying skis and bike there for 41 years, all at retail. They would drop the Rockhopper Expert one cent. “Maybe in August” was the reply I got – with a straight face. What, can’t Specialized supply any more? Looks like a Motobecane, more bike for much less money. I like to buy local, but WTF?
That is wouldn’t drop the price. So pissed, I can’t write!
Boz, that sounds penny-wise and pound-foolish on your LBS’s part. Old Town Bike Shop here in Bibleburg routinely cuts me some slack on purchases (both product and service), though I’m hardly their best customer; I have been shopping there since the mid-Eighties, though, and I try not to be a dick, which has to help.
Were you dealing with one of your usual people there, or was this a new guy?
It was with their most senior salesman, a guy I’ve ridden with and skied with since we were kids. The same guy I helped out with repairs on his Jeep many times w/o him even asking! Seemed like professional courtesy. I just don’t get it.
Fire? Not around here. We’ve got one of the other sure signs of the apocalypse going on, namely flooding. The Colorado River hopped over its banks a few days ago and flooded (gasp!) a couple bike paths. No houses are threatened; this area learned that lesson the hard way back in ’84 during the same spring runoff that almost washed Glen Canyon Dam down to the Gulf of California (so close, so close…). The river won’t top out for a few more days so they say, and with warm temps on tap for this week the river ought to be roaring soon enough.
So if you got a body or two to get rid of now’s a good time. I can promise it’ll look like an accident.
Keep the kayak close to the back porch, John. And I do have a few bodies to get rid of, but they’re not local and they’re still ambulatory, more’s the pity.
Perhaps you could suggest that they join you on a Fruita mountain bike adventure so that they willingly make journey. Then you could arrange an “accident” while they are here, which ought not be too hard. This way they could stroll willingly to their own demise, like a Democrat on Twitter.
We hear from folks back in Iowa of 500-year flooding. Will our house and stuff be there when we return at the end of July? If not, maybe we’ll hang around until our lease starts down in Sicily. Here in Monferrato, Italy an hour from the MXP airport, it continues to rain. Luckily for us, our Vineyards to the Sea tour doesn’t start for a few days…though a co-op group of US cyclists are also here and they got rained on yesterday…and it looks like they will again today if they venture out. For us it’ll be a lazy sunday watching MotoGP and whatever else we can find on Italian TV, while generating an appetite for another wonderful dinner. We’ll keep our fingers crossed you don’t go up in flames there Patrick!
Here’s hoping for good weather for you, too, Larry. Send a little of that fine Italian rain this way. Our trails need a bit of moisture for proper compaction. Plus you just know that some tool is gonna start shooting bottle rockets on the Fourth and set the Air Force Academy on fire or some shit. Never underestimate the power of human stupidity, as Heinlein noted.
Boz, to answer your question: the big red S probably can’t supply their bikes until the new model year comes out in August. It is not the shop’s fault. Back when I was working at a LBS we got word from Mike Sinyard’s lackeys that they were not going to be able to ship anything from Taiwan after April because of “supply issues.” Maybe if they produced their products in the US of A then they would not have 90+ day turn-around issues….or such inexpensive bikes. Except for their $9900 carbon bike of course.
Chalk it up to “supply and demand” and I don’t fault the shop for not lowering the price. Especially on a bike with such low margins. Maybe if they were selling at keystone then they could haggle, but most bikes don’t sell at a large markup to begin with so I don’t see the problem. They are trying to compete with the mail order places and this is the LBS way to do it: limit their overhead and their discounts until they can blow stuff out the doors.
I dunno, as a former bike shop mangler I always thought of the three rules of business. 1. Get the money. 2. Get the money 3. Get the…
How much of a deal were you trying to score? Sinyard and Co don’t give a s__t about how much the dealer gets for the thing, they just want it out of the store so they can replace it with another one. My response if you’d made an offer would have been, “if we can sell it at that price, will it be cash or credit?” then go to whoever decides these things and present my “done deal”. Can you tell I also was a used-car salesman?)
Only an idiot would turn that down (unless you threw out some insane, low-ball price of course) especially in today’s economy. Who cares if Sinyard’s out of those, SOMEBODY (if not Trek or Giant, Jamis, Scott, etc. ) will have a bike with the same specs and price to replace it for the next customer! Serves ’em right if you buy a bike made in the same Asian factory, but with a different sticker on it, for a lot less and leave them out of the deal entirely! What are they running there, a bike shop or a museum?
Jeez! Interesting weekend to ride in Santa Fe….I rented a cross bike and did the forest area outside of Canada de los Alamos, and the next day did Pacheco Canyon. I could barely open my eyes on the way back into Santa Fe they hurt so bad from the smoke–which isn’t good while descending Hyde Park….