2 sweet things...

Recipe of the weekend:

Wicked good hot chocolate
1 disc of Ibarra chocolate (check at the Mexican grocery, though some normal supermarkets will have it)
2.5 cups of milk (skim, whole, whatever - I don't think soymilk would work out, though)
1/8 tsp ground red pepper
1/2 tsp cinnamon



Again, this recipe is for you pathetic bachelors and bike geeks who have trouble with pop tarts - it's dead easy. Take all the ingredients and put them in a pot, put the pot on the stove, and heat *slowly* until everything is dissolved and nice and steamy hot. Don't boil the milk! Pour into a mug and drink! Trust me, you'll never want regular hot chocolate again.

And here's the second sweet thing... Sarah was working late last night (ok, she was partying with the other "scientists" at a "poster session" with free beer and food... man, it must be hard doing science). So anyway, I got bored and Fuentes and I were sitting the garage drinking tea (yeah, Friday night, we're cool...) and I was just puttering around cleaning up and packing up Steve's bike (see you soon Steve!) So eventually Fuentes asks about the big box of titanium tubing that's been sitting gathering dust for like, I don't know, a year or two? It's generic 3/2.5 .035" ti tubing, nothing special, but nothing to sneeze at either - and I have probably 100 tubes worth of it. Loads of ti. I always say I'm going to build some bikes with it, but I've never gotten around to it (though I've got everything I need - rod, big funky cups for the welding torch, backpurging equipment, a big jar of acetone, etc) due to the backlog of orders for steel bikes, and all the other projects that I have in the queue (you'll hear about the new DH bike soon, I promise!)



Long story short, I decided to start building something while Fuentes talked with his better half on the phone from Albuquerque. So my tea got cold, but I managed to do a decent job building a ti front triangle. Here's a picture of the BB/DT/ST cluster. Given that I've never welded any ti before last night, I think it came out pretty nicely, and the color and penetration are great, so I'm thinking it should be rock solid. We'll see, I guess - I'll get some dropouts from Paragon this week and try to finish it up sometime after I get back from vacation.

Will I be selling ti frames? Well, I don't know yet, so don't pester me about them just now if you're looking for one. I have a bunch of ti that I want to use to build bikes, but I'm thinking I need some saddle time (and another half dozen frames under my belt for my idiot friends and team members) before I commit to selling them to folks I don't know from Adam. It's certainly neat stuff, but it's also hard to justify from an environmental and cost perspective. I'm a steel man, really, but this ti stuff could win me over if my philosophical objections to expensive, energy-intensive materials can be overcome. It's awful nice not to have to paint the darn things... and I did spend a couple of years racing for Dean back in the day and really liked my ti bikes. Then again, they were free, so I had a lot of incentive to like them.

Hope everyone's having a great weekend - we're off to ride Green Mountain and the Dakota Ridge tomorrow, then we'll probably visit Sarah's mom to make some dinner. Gotta love springtime!