One of the best things about blogging is joining the community of other bloggers, finding people with shared quirks and interests, and following along as other people unfold their narrative, whatever it is. Today I though I’d introduce a handful of blogs I follow pretty religiously, especially blogs whose connection to cycling is less obvious than, say, the good folks at Ecovelo, Cycleicious, or Bikes and The City. Click through and enjoy.

Homegrown Evolution
Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne write Homegrown Evolution, an LA-based blog that explores a fast-growing new movement: urbanites are becoming gardeners and farmers. Kelly and Erik are the authors of The Urban Homestead. Here’s a quick link to their bike-focused entries.

Gurldoggie
A Seattle-based blog, Gurldoggie is like a baker of perfect little blog-entry treats about an artist, musician, or writer, always just the right length, posted almost daily. I can’t say enough good things about Gurldoggie’s rhythm of little tidbits. Daily inspiration on multiple levels.

Fat of The Land
Our friend Langdon is always out foraging, and has made quite a name for himself since the publication of his book Fat of The Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager. He’s opened my eyes to the bounty around me as I cycle the city and the countryside, and now I regularly stop to fill my panniers with urban-foraged fruit, berries, even mushrooms. His posts generally feature delicious recipes, and often seem to begin with a jealousy inducing phrase like “I’m just back from several days of backpacking,” or “When I was recently camping for a week…”

Northwest Cheapsleeps
For northwesterners in search of an inexpensive getaway, this is the place to start. Lauren hand-picks destinations in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia that are friendly, clean, cozy and under $100 a night. Her blog provides fresh ideas on a regular basis, while the Cheapsleeps Finder collects the bargains in a handy database.

The Tangled Nest
And finally, you know that my wife is the real writer and blogger in the family, right? In addition to writing book after book after book, she blogs at The Tangled Nest (and I post there from time to time as well), about “the urban-earthen home,” the twining of home, garden, food, craft, and co-existence with the wild, natural world.

Also regularly perused: ZeFrank, Kottke, Strobist, Notcot, White African, Koelle Art, Humanosphere, Poppy Gall, and Afrigadget.

Have you got other non-bike blog suggestions?

There’s big news in our house: the careful selection and late afternoon arrival of two much-anticipated gerbils as a back-to-school indulgence for my daughter Claire, who starts sixth grade on Monday. Precilla and Blossom are busily exploring the cardboard tubes and big yellow wheel of their new habitat, and as I write this Claire is supposedly asleep in the bed across the room from them, though it would not surprise me a bit if she were secretly peeking at them one more time.

Normally this rodent invasion would not be bike blog news, except for the coincidence that I ran across another rodent item today that is bike-related, one that unlocked a rush of childhood memories from some quarter of my brain sealed off at about age five and rarely accessed since.

If the image above clangs a bell in your memory as loudly as it does in mine, then you know I’m talking about the pig family, setting off in their orange convertible on a trip to the beach, in Richard Scarry’s 1975 classic Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. And it’s only a few pages into the book that the family encounters Officer Flossy on her classy red bike, chasing after all manner of traffic scofflaws.

While I absolutely love the idea of foxy Officer Flossy on her bicycle, tooting her whistle as she chases down the dangerous driving dingo, it may surprise you to learn that Flossy is not the subject of today’s post. No, today’s post is about rodents, remember? And the memorable rodent in Cars and Trucks and Things that Go is this little lady:

Mistress Mouse, up on the truck engine, is a tow truck driver who can “fix almost anything.” And she drives a super cute little pink tow truck (see it on the cover image, above?), which finally brings us to the visual punchline of today’s post, this amazing little eight second Vimeo glimpse of a girl whose loving father turned her trike into Mistress Mouse’s Tow Truck. It’s almost as cute as our new gerbils! (We want to see more of the Mistress Mouse Trike!)

Mistress Mouse from jeff hamada on Vimeo.

Officer Flossy is still chasing Dingo Dog, though! Can you spot him? Do you think she’ll ever catch him to give him that ticket? Faster, Flossy, faster!

All illustrations © Richard Scarry. Video found via booooooom.com

It’s been a bikey couple of weeks: Tour de Fat last weekend, and Dead Baby Downhill this weekend. Dead Baby Downhill is, as Gurldoggie put it, Seattle’s “annual race/party/ choose-your-own-adventure – billed with only gentle hyperbole as “The Greatest Bike Race the World has Ever Known.”

The Sprockettes were just one of many diversions at the after party in Georgetown, which also included something like 60 kegs of beer, bands on several stages, rides from Cyclecide, and tallbike jousting.

I was partly there as a roadie for my friend Shawn, who was debuting the new flame effect on his outrageous bike “The Bomb.” I’d say it was a success.

Meanwhile… I’ve been piling up links and notes to myself and Bikejuju to-dos like there’s no tomorrow.

For example: I keep meaning to tell you that the Rat Rod Build-Off is finished and it’s time to go vote for a winner from among the 65 bikes (!) that got built.

I can tell Burning Man must be coming up, because my Bikes of Burning Man 2009 post is suddenly getting traffic.

And there’s good news in that regard – I’ll actually be there, on the playa, for the first time this year. Will you? Let’s connect!

But enough about the freak bikes… I’d be remiss if I didn’t plug a few more great bike events coming up in Seattle:

• August 15 – Fiets of Parenthood, next Sunday in Wallingford – put your kid on that bike and show us your stuff!
• August 28 – NWFF Bike-In Movie at Cal Anderson Park
• September 11 – Seattle Bicycle Music Festival
• Check out the Seattle cycling calendar at GoMeansGo.org for more events

Keep riding! Take a lane!

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the next steps for Bikejuju, and am about to make some changes to sharpen the overall focus and direction of this site. Please take the 60-second, 4-question Bikejuju reader survey! (It’s totally anonymous). I’ll be wrapping up the survey in the next couple of weeks and rolling out some changes in September.

Here’s a quick interpretation of some of the results, with 83 respondents so far. Bear in mind respondents could select multiple answers, and this is me reading trends not crunching numbers perfectly.

As always, I also welcome your comments below, or by email.

Also, remember that you can follow Bikejuju on Facebook, subscribe to get posts by email, and be alerted to new posts (and very occasional other random thoughts and links) on Twitter.

I’m on vacation and offline. A few posts will appear magically on Bikejuju while I am gone, but in the meantime, why don’t you peruse some of these little gems from the archives?

• Cyclist: Adimire Tuma, Ice-cream Seller in Gaborone, Botswana
• China: Moving Goods by Bicycle
• Pic of the day: Blue Phoenix, Axum, Ethiopia
• India: An Amazing Multimedia Site Dedicated To Velowalas
• Dark Days Photo Contest Winners (Exactly six months ago! Remember how dark it was?)
• Cycling Around Lake Baikal In Winter (On The Ice): Gear Choices
• Craptastic “Hery Poter” Chinese Children’s Bike

Or watch this fun little video I made a few months ago:

Hi.

Thanks for reading Bikejuju. This blog started out on something of a whim, but readership has grown steadily, and it’s become more and more of a pleasure to create the site as more readers find it.

I have plans this summer to put more effort into the site, and into some Bikejuju spin-off activities.

To focus those efforts, I’d like a little more information about your interests.

Would you be so kind as to take an anonymous, four-question, sixty second survey?

I’d be very grateful. And I’ll post the results. Thanks.

This blog often has a global focus, but all cycling is local. Today is Bike to Work Day. I’m riding to work this morning, doing my best to avoid the danger spots covered in a front page article on the Seattle Times today, and thinking a lot about the commuter from my neighborhood who went under a car during yesterday’s commute. The Bike Fairy has her work cut out for her!

Meanwhile, a circle of Seattle bike bloggers has been getting together for monthly beers this spring and forming an informal little network, and many of them have great posts up today:

• Car Free Days posts about the Bike Fairy and biking to school.
• Totcycle is running a Kidical Mass (“fun, safe, and courteous”) kids/family ride from Ballard today (Friday) at 5:45. meet at the Bell.
• Seattle Likes Bikes has a wrap up of the unfortunately poorly attended Ride of Silence. Cascade Bicycle Club doesn’t consider this event part of Bike Month, but it should.
• Paul at Bike Intelligencer takes a look at the cyclists at F5 Networks, the main corporate sponsor of Bike to Work Day.
• Kent “Mountain Turtle” Peterson has an FAQ on his car-free life.
• Byron and the Bike Hugger crew are in Portland AND Seattle (leave it to them to raise the ante!).
• Biking Bis checked in at the Bellevue Commuter Station.

Ride safe, ride strong, and may the wind be at your back!

(Bikejuju’s main Bike to Work week post is here).

One rainy morning in November of 2007 I walked out of a hotel in Limerick, Ireland, around the corner, and up towards William Street. I was on a bit of a quest.

In my hand was a copy of an old photograph, taken in about 1929, of James Fitzpatrick’s pub at 18 William Street.

The picture, which was taken by my grandmother Agnes in 1929 on her one and only trip “back” to Ireland, shows the family pub that had been owned by her great-uncle and great-aunt, Nora and James Fitzpatrick. Agnes’ mother had come to America as an eighteen-year-old in the mid-1880s, and settled in Connecticut. You can see Agnes, her husband Bill, and a couple of relatives posed outside the pub’s door behind a cart. It’s one of a handful of wonderful images I have from that trip, showing the newlyweds kissing the Blarney Stone, meeting relatives, and touring Ireland.

In 2007 my mother and I were on our own tour, and we spent a memorable evening with relatives from the pub-owning side of the family, still living in Limerick, and still putting away pint after pint.

That day, I stood there for a minute, in the rain, in the middle of the street, taking pictures and trying to imagine William Street as it had been eighty years before.

And then I walked away, through the rain, and made my way back to America and beyond.

Immigrants waiting to sail to America, Cork, 1881.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.

I just noticed that Bikejuju is one year old. One year ago I thought I’d give blogging a try, and after waffling about it for a while, on March 13 I posted a simple post about Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel “readymade.”

Now here’s the funny thing – a year later, and against all odds, that first post is still a page that people find on Bikejuju and come to every single day! Apparently it turns up pretty high in the Google search results for “bicycle wheel Marcel Duchamp.“  Yes, out of more than a hundred posts in the last year, that and the posts about naked cyclists are still two of the the most frequently accessed pages in the whole database.

Not the monkeys or the tall bikes in Indonesia or the fixie in Lagos or the freak bikes or the bicycles of Ethiopia or all the other posts of amazing bike art. No, it’s Duchamp and naked cyclists that people seem to want. Weird, huh?

Anyway, it seems Bikejuju is here to stay, so at long last I’ve set up a Facebook Bikejuju page, and in order to entice you to become a “fan,” I’m giving away a prize: a Planet Bike Blaze one watt headlight left over from the Dark Days winter solstice photo contest.

If you become a fan of the Bikejuju page on Facebook before April 1, you’ll be entered to win it (if you have a US mailing address).

It’s that simple.

Thanks for reading. Stick around for year number two. It’s going to be fun.

This weekend instead of riding, or blogging about bikes, or even thinking much about bikes, I worked with my wife Lyanda on a big post for her blog The Tangled Nest about our chicken coop design. Enjoy!