Geoff Casey (previously of Baron Bicycles) left our beautiful and sunny city for his dream job down in Santa Cruz last year. He is certainly missed by many. At the very least, I’ll always remember the smell of his coffee and bacon at our local cyclocross races.

At this last year’s Single Speed Cyclocross World Championship in San Francisco, I got a chance to meet up with Geoff again for old time’s sake.

He approached me about a design for a line of apparel and various other products. They wanted the look to be an older style union badge. It should feel like it could be stamped on the side of a wooden crate or cardboard box and not feel out of place. I think we got them there.…

You might be seeing a few of these posts this year. I’ve somehow happened across deals, trades and barters that are in the process of increasing my stable of bikes. I’m going from 2 bikes (down to one after my accident last year) up to a potential 5 total. To the average bike nerd this is actually a pretty low number still, but to my wife, it’s a whole lot of bikes. Please don’t leave me, Honey!

I received an offer for a gently used demo bike (had been to trade shows and the like) from Raleigh’s “Sally” about a month ago. It was a steal of a deal and I’ve been wanting to get a mountain bike for a long time now.

He promised to email me the week after the Seattle Bike Expo to trade it off with me. That happened to be my birthday week on top of everything else. I didn’t hear from him right away as he got busy so I pestered him all over the internet (sorry, Sally!) until he got back to me this Monday.

The bike was dropped off at my house that night and I squealed like a little kid. Jane sent me a text saying basically “Neat! Don’t hurt yourself!”. I would never…

I did a couple of jumps off of our deck though. You know, product testing.

Josh Cohen sent me a message that night asking if I wanted to christen the bike with a ride along the Thrilla …