Accessorizing

I had a free half-hour between finishing my work for the day and having to pick my daughter up from daycare, so I ventured over to the local bike shop, Revolution Cycle, just a few blocks away and did some accessorizing. I don't mean girlie-girl shopping for shoes and fashion scarves, I mean accessorizing my poor naked bike. Who I shall name Mike.

My poor naked Mike has had nothing but his birthday suit since the day I brought him home, and it was about time I finally got some of those things that'll make commuting easier on me. Here's a breakdown of what I bought:

Something to raise my handlebars = $25
A bell (it's the law in Edmonton) = $6
A set of front-and-back fenders = $50
A bike rack = $25
A pair of panniers = $80

All told, with tax, I spent just under $200 accessorizing. The good news is that I can use the bike rack and panniers to store my stuff so I won't get as much of that sweaty-backpack-back going on. It'll come in especially handy when I actually start work and will be hauling a change of clothes, lunch and snacks, water bottle and coffee mug, and whatever else back and forth every day. I'm also really excited about the fenders, because I've had the pleasure of riding in the rain twice already and it left . . . unpleasantness . . . up the back of my pants and all over my backpack. Good thing I wasn't going through a field of manure (luckily, we don't have too many of those in downtown Edmonton).

I still have to accessorize further once the colder weather hits - I'll need good gloves, probably some waterproof pants to wear over my work pants, front and back lights for the bike, and I'll probably invest in some studded tires, too. Then I'll get to deal with the fun-times awesomeness of changing bike tires. The skinny ones, at that. Sigh!

The easy part was buying the stuff, especially with help from the good employees at Revolution Cycle. The hard part was putting it together. It wasn't physically difficult, it was that I had no idea what it all was supposed to look like, and whatever instructions I had (just for the fenders, nothing else had instructions) didn't include pictures of the whole bike. So I was running back and forth between the front porch, where Mike lives, and my living room, where my computer is, constantly looking up pictures of what fenders and bike racks look like properly installed and trying to recreate that on Mike. It took me two hours to do everything, and by the end my hands were very greasy - somewhere between chips and KFC kind of greasy (though I suspect that dipping one's hands in a large vat of oil will still result in slightly less greasy hands than after eating KFC).

My camera is broken so I can't take a picture of Mike, now that he's all dolled up and rarin' to go. As soon as I've got a picture, though, I'll be sure to post it here! Now I can't wait to try him out tomorrow . . . yeeee-hawwwww!

UPDATE: A helpful person at BikeWorks suggested I check out Mountain Equipment Co-op next time I need to buy something for the bike, as it's less expensive there. Also, in lieu of a photograph, here's some video of Mike accessorized.