Been busy feeling sorry for myself.

      So where did the time go?  A week or so of wrenching on the bikes between some rather long commutes and teaching assignments and guess what?  I got miserably sick.  It happens every few years, I catch a common cold.  The problem is I suffer from any illness so rarely that when I do get sick I suffer as much self pity as physical discomfort.  I know people who seem to get sick for a hobby.  How do they survive?  I catch a sniffle and feel totally incapacitated.  I think I turned the corner, but have also been working on a couple of other projects.
     We are here, there are some chilly mornings ahead but it is time to pedal our butts on the streets.  Find your favorite corner and get started!  I have to make some mileage the next couple of weeks because I am taking an early April trip again this year.  Unlike last year, I'm going to do what I can to make this one both downwind and downhill.

     Between now and then I have had a couple of equipment updates to play with.Not a real important component issue but an interesting way to modify the Surly front rack I bought for the Hunq.
Soren Hansen, a reader from Denmark had told me how to add a couple water bottle cages to the rack to accommodate a couple extra things.  This sounds dangerous.  I have managed corporate offices, retail stores, restaurants and construction companies (if this makes me sound old, just deal with it, it's not something I discuss).  My point is; extra room tends to fill up.  In the case of a railroad office a few hundred thousand dollars can be pigeon holed pretty easily.  That's nothing.   A little room on a touring bike becomes 5 extra pounds pretty quickly.  That's serious.  Soren's suggestion was a little different.  Just adding a couple cages to the rack would make more convenient places to put the fuel container and tool roll.  So I gave it a shot.

 I like the Salsa stainless cages because they can be bent and will accommodate damn near any bottle or vessel.  I went to Lowe's, got a few L-brackets for a couple of bucks and started bolting them together.

It looks really useful.  The fuel canister has a place and

I can use another to mount the tool roll or another bottle.

Hopefully this will simply make the front bags a little less crowded 

and I won't replace the volume with weight.