Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Makeover

SPORKIES!

One of the many, many fun things about our cargo bike has been decorating the cargo box. We've made detachable signs for it and then, last summer we discovered that removable wall stickers work incredibly well. You can find a number of fun designs at craft stores or on the web; they are hardy enough to withstand bad weather; when you grow tired of them, you can peel them off and start again.

We decorated the box with multi-colored polka dots for the big guys' birthday and then changed to robots on Halloween. The boys have been begging me to change the design for some time, but I held off because I loved the robots from Blik and thought we should get full use out of them. I also kept thinking I wanted to customize stickers, creating text that would read something like, "Stop texting. Keep us all safe." or "A car is not a phone booth." However, the boys didn't seem to like this idea much and P was hesitant as well, worried that we might antagonize some already bike-hating crazy drivers.

Instead, a few weeks ago, I got on the web with my four-year-old and we started looking at new wall sticker graphics. Site after site, we couldn't find stickers we could agree on when suddenly I pulled up this one photo and F yelled out, "Sporkies!" Now those of you who don't speak F may not know what this means. Our F, you see, tends to be Suessian with his language at times, randomly creating words that pretty accurately describe what he means. One of his long standing words that the rest of the family has adopted is "sporky." F first used it when he went to kiss his dad after P skipped a morning or two of shaving. "You're sporky!" he called out when he rubbed up against P's whiskers. Sporky was also recently used when I got my hair cut extremely short and came out of the salon with it spiked in all directions. My hair, you see, was all sporky. So when F looked at these stickers and cried "Sporkies!" with delight, I knew we had a winner. While the company may have called these creatures "Fuzzles," they shall be known in our home-- and in our bike, of course-- as Sporkies. A cool thing about this site was that it had a huge color palatte so F also got to choose the colors he wanted the sporkies to be.

And so now let me unveil our newest cargo box design: multi-colored Sporkies. Since he was the visionary behind the design, F also wanted to be integrally involved in adhering the stickers.
The spikes were a bit tricky to get off from the backing without ripping so I took on the Sporkies' bodies, while F became the "eye man."
Design completed. One proud four-year-old.
No, these are not jazz hands you see. These are three fellas doing their own imitation of Sporkies!

Front view. Sporkies all around.
Joy!

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Another Box Bike in the 'Hood

We spent a fun long weekend hanging in NYC with friends and family, riding subways, visiting the lemurs at the Bronx Zoo, running around parks in Brooklyn, and a highlight, for me anyway-- spotting Ira Glass coming out of a Vietnamese sandwich joint. We arrived back in New Haven tired but satisfied, and were just finishing an early dinner when the doorbell rang. I looked out our front windows and immediately got jazzed, commanded all the guys to throw on their Crocs and get outside, and grabbed the camera.

And what to our wondering eyes should appear, but a new Joe-Bike boxbike with two helmeted cuties happily strapped in the cargo seat. Check out our friends and their brand new spanking cargo rig:


We are most excited that another bakfiets has hit the city-- even though this crew will be moving to Nashville this summer. The box is shorter than our long box so when I took Joe-Bike's version for a quick spin around the block, two things struck me immediately: 1. how light it was 2. how much of a 'regular' bike it felt like when riding. Mostly, it is just heartening that families looking to get into family bike riding have ever more options from which to choose

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Even Our Minivan Proudly Proclaims Our Bike Love

Most days when riding home from school with my fellas, we see a car parked around the corner from our apartment with this bumper sticker: We decided that our family's one car needed to be equally adorned:

Except, we decided that we needed to customize the bumper sticker just a bit:

Monday, March 22, 2010

Happy Spring

I hope to be back blogging our bike adventures on a more regular basis. It wasn't so much that we weren't riding these past months so I wasn't writing. We actually were able to bike commute throughout the winter, only with two weeks (not back-to-back, thank goodness) where we didn't ride at all. There were some weeks we were only able to commute to school by bike only once or twice, but I have to say that we were on bikes more than I anticipated we might be this December through February and it felt good. Our Bern winter helmets and later, ski googles for the kids ,were investments that served us quite well. Instead the quiet on the bloggling front can be attributed more to the peak-season-at-work variety of things and this little blip of simply buying our first house EVER. More to come on that in the coming month since it will change our school/work commute quite a bit, but we are determined to take it on....

I will simply start the spring with this simple shot, taken Sunday night after an amazing weekend of lots of sun, lots of bike riding, an amazing amount of time outside in real outdoors at two separate farms (here in a city, which just makes them so cool!). There was one *slight* incident where a very irate man downtown screamed at us at the top of his lungs, "Look at you, you absolute R*TARDS!" clearly disagreeing with our choice to bike with our children on city streets, which left me both shaking and fuming, but P let roll of his back. But let's not dwell on that. Instead, we'll focus here on the positives: the flowers are just starting to bloom, and we saw loads of folks out on bikes, and my youngest decided that my helmet needed just a bit of flourish to celebrate the new season.


HAPPY SPRING!

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

People for Bikes


You've gotta check out People for Bikes.

No matter how small I make it, the video still gets cut-off on the right.
But go ahead, make this one full screen. The resolution is good
and it is worth it!