It's been awhile since I've posted here so I thought I would give everyone out there a glimpse of the last week or so. Autumn's bike got some new shiny parts installed that she was not expecting (see facial expression in photo) and she rolled out the door one happy individual. As soon as the ankle is healed up she will be putting this bike in its place.

Yesterday it was like four hundred degrees outside. I may be exaggerating a little, but it sure felt warm. We've been used to 50 degrees and rain for the last six months, and then we're thrown into a record high day without any adjustment period, it makes people crazy. Crazy enough to decide to do a 30+ mile mountain bike race. Liz and I are heading to the bear springs MTB race tomorrow. I remember how much that race beat me down last year, and here it is again... time to suffer. And I just checked the forcast for next week... rain and 50 degrees.
In the signal shop, we got Autumn's bike back from Coat and it looks rad! All white with red logos and this is the first painted bike with our new dropout. The paint really highlights the little scallop on the chainstay, it looks good. real good. The bike is going to get built up next week and we'll post more pictures then.
We finished up Pete's singlespeed cross bike during the heat wave 2008. It's got the swoopiest s-bends we've done yet. You're sure to see this bike on the front end of any cross race this fall. Pete is one of the most modest guys you'll ever meet. He'd never brag about how fast he is... so we will. He's fast!

You kind of have to squint a little, but yeah Michael Jordan won the raffle at the Brett Jarolimek memorial fund raiser. Of course this MJ is not quite as good at dunking a ball from the free throw line, but he is very excited about the whole process of having a custom bike built for him. It sounds like we're going to make a cross-ish city-ish bike. We're going to get him all fit up and get a cool bike built. Lucky guy...

I got a call on Friday from Jay Graves (owner of the bike gallery). He told me the top secret news that Portland was going to be named a platinum level bike-friendly city on Tuesday. He asked me if I could put a trophy together for the event to use as a symbol of the award and I said "of course!" As soon as I hung up the phone, I thought "why did I agree to that? I've got no time to do this." So I went to work Saturday at the bike shop, picked my parents up from the airport Saturday after work, hung out Sunday with mom & dad, Then began to work on the trophy Monday morning (Monday was my birthday...happy birthday to me). I ran to goodwill and picked up some metal things, swung by the bike shop and picked up some more metal things, and went to the garage and started to stick them all together. I think Nate found all of this to be pretty entertaining. I was obviously stressed out and as the trophy emerged out of the junk I collected, it started to crack me up how ridiculous this whole thing was. Somewhere in the middle there the trophy fell on the concrete floor and broke in half. I used that opportunity to braze a signalcycles serial number on the underside of the award. When It was all done, Liz came home and I showed her the "platinum" trophy, we both laughed. I was pretty embarrassed, but felt like I had to give it to Jay, because I said I would. The next morning I ran to the store and got some moss and turned it into a planter. Jay picked it up around 9:00 and said he liked it. I apologized and said that he could use it, but that he didn't have to if he didn't want to. The next morning I picked up the paper and saw a photo of the funny little trophy. It didn't look quite as bad as I remembered...