Shek’s Footprint

Bajrang is up and running, smooth and nimble as ever. I brought it home Thursday night. On Friday, I bought a 40 Lb bag of dry dog food and a 12 can box of wet dog food, loaded it on Bajrang and we carried it as effortlessly as ever even with the load being unbalanced. I started off on a low gear but soon moved on to the normal gears and cruised home at 15 mph.

It feels like the free-radical was always a part of the bike and the bike was built with the free-radical in mind. The way it attaches itself to an existing bike is the most attractive feature of the xtracycle. You can go for longer rides and not feel any different than before the conversion. I rode it 10 miles to a friend’s house today and at times I forgot that I was riding an xtracycle. This is a genius invention and deserves a lot of credit.

I am Abhishek Mukherjee and on behalf of Bajrang, I approve this message.

By the way, I am looking for a name for my Dutch bike. Suggestions will be helpful. I do think it is a ’she’!

The particularly long box marked Xtracycle sat in the leasing office of my apartment complex when I went to pick it up. With the box in the trunk of the car and my Specialized on a bike rack, I set off on six lanes of concrete clusterfuck to Downtown Jacksonville.

Brooklyn at Cycledelic-Fixity has voluntered to be the only reasonable bicycle shop owner that will put it together for a reasonable price. His cool shop is around 14 miles from my apartment in the historic Riverside area of Downtown. He came out of his shop to greet me as I had started to un-strap the bike rack. He said that he recognized my bike as I am a celebrity thanks to these guys: link.

I browsed around his shop a little drooled on the fixies in various stages of completion. Some day after the car is sold! I did pop in at Jax Ebikes (link) but it was closed, so I decided to head back home. I have never ridden my bike from Downtown to home. Since I may have to do it tomorrow, I decided to give the route a shot in the car. I went up the Acosta bridge and then on Philips all the way south to Baymeadows (see route: View Larger Map)

The section of Philips between San Marco and Emerson is pretty desolate and sad. It is one slip away form being a ghost town. I hope the road is as less crowded tomorrow as it was today. Maybe I should have Brooklyn install a Katana holder while he is at it, a custom from Hattori Hanzo none the less!

As for the name of this post, well, that is the new name of my xtracycle-attched-specialized. The god of strength in the Indian mythology is the name of this bike which is my strength to go car free. In today’s car-dependent world, this bike is my Plan B and my extra set of bollocks! Eat this Big Oil!

“I’ve used up gas just looking for gas,”

 ”Right now, I’ll pay anything for gas,” Jenkins said. “I don’t care if it’s $5 or $6 a gallon. I need it.”

A quote from the recent gas shortages in Atlanta sounds very familiar to parts of the script of ‘Trainspotting‘. See news article for the complete story (article). 

I dont understand why people have forgotton the meaning of freedom. Freedom dependent on goods and services other than basic necessities like food, clothing and shelter is addiction. See more information on addiction here (link).

Does Jacksonville have a plan B if this were to happen here or are we going to be stuck in our SUVs? I am sure that Jacksonville will be worse off because Atlanta atleast has MARTA. Jacksonville has nothing. This is a list of Jacksonville’s illustrious projects (link).

The Car is up for sale. I am following sale techniques from here: (link)

I have put it up on Craigslist with a link to my sale site. Next in line is to put it up for sale on Autotrader, Cars.com and Cars4Jax. I will wait for a few days to see if I get any response from Craigslist though. Some color printouts of the sale site will go up on the apartment complex notice board and the break room at work too.

Update:

Cars.com ad: link

Cars4Jax ad: link

I have spent a lot of time talking about bicycling. That is not necessarily deviating from the topic of reducing my footprint because it involves removing a car from my life. Of the other things that I have been doing to save electricity usage is using a clothes drying rack in my balcony and the most recent one being switching off the water heater for a majority of the day. 

My plan is to switch off the water heater all day and switch it on at 6:30 am when I wake up. I shower by 7:15 am which is plenty of time to heat up enough stored water for the whole day, which involves another shower. The only problem is to remember to switch it on in the morning! I did not remember this morning and was left with low pressure mildly warm water to bathe with. Thankfully, the fall weather in Jacksonville has been pleasant, some what windy too so I did not have to scrub too much.

Not using the drier and switching off the water heater should reduce my usage significantly. 80% of the light in my apartment is CFLs. I know about the mercury problem and I promise to dispose of them safely if they ever go bad!

On a separate note, I am not tracking my carbon footprint yet. I understand the benefits of measurement but downsizing usage is a proven method of reducing ones footprint. I also want my footprint measured more accurately and not an approximate as provided by most websites.