Christmas Bike Lights

It has been a very cold and somewhat snowy weekend. The front passed on Thursday and the temperatures promptly dropped thirty degrees. We’ve had a couple of dustings of snow, each about an inch, too much to ignore, but not enough to enjoy.

On Friday night, we partook in Maplewood’s Christmas Tree Walk. Sponsored by the local Chamber of Commerce, it was an opportunity to cruise through some of the boutique shops along Manchester. The wind was pretty icy that night and as Anne was at no loss to point out, “You should have worn your long underwear.” We shopped at ‘tiny little monster’, a t-shirt shop of ‘Stick an Arch on It’ fame, across from the Fantasy Shop. We also stopped at Kă·kā·ō  for chocolate. They offer a service where they specialty mold chocolate bars with your own design on them. I’ll have to remember them for next year.

I can understand why Anne wanted to do this event, because you wanna be where everybody knows your name. We couldn’t walk ten feet before someone who Anne knew appeared. Eventually, we ducked into Las Palmas for dinner. We were eating, when a large party was seated next to us. When served, one of the women exclaimed that she didn’t want salt on her margarita. The waiter obliged and whisked it away, but instead of taking it back, he offered it to me, for free. Later he also offered us a free dessert. He probably recognized Anne as one of those teacher types. They can be especially good customers at happy hour, because they get off at three.

Not much happened on Saturday. Oh wait, Michigan State beat Ohio State for the Big Ten championship. You wouldn’t know it though by reading the Saint Louis Post Dispatch. The paper was chock full of Mizzou’s loss to Auburn, with articles and headlines galore, ‘Au-burned’, ‘Defense-less’ and ‘M-I-Z…N-O-D’. The only coverage of the MSU vs. OSU game was an AP wire article that gave the Spartans rather short shrift, “No. 2 Buckeyes get bumped”. By whom I might ask the Post’s sports editors?

Sunday, there was a flurry of Facebook activity, I guess because it was still too cold to go outside and do anything. Paulette alerted us to the Copenhagen Wheel, a wheel that coverts a conventional bicycle into an electric bike. In this vein I would like to offer up Shark Wheels as the next new, new thing in bicycle wheels. So far Shark Wheels are mainly being looked at for skateboards, but can bikes be far behind?

Barefoot in the Snow