Seems that has been the better part of my week. I can fob it off as stress and chafe over Alana, but with Bette around to help out and Beckie on leave, the finger points to this:

My thinking went something like this:   i will not get to ride anything->i know what i want but i can not find out what it is->there are a lot of good   bikes->there is no perfect bike->i have analysis-paralysis->i hate orange->$3800 is a lot to pay for uncertainty.

The Bianchi was about the easiest bike I’ve bought.   It fit all our needs and was a tremendous value, I’m still not sure I love it but I think Beckie will, in time if she doesn’t already.   It feels a little like a marriage of convenience, but maybe knowing there are a lot of good bikes but no perfect ones has made me realistic. Is romance dead?   I had a little 6th-grade crush-from-afar on   the Sugar 3, and its drive train blew apart from Day 2.   I   fell in love with the Blur on paper, and plunged headlong into making the most expensive bike purchase I’d made at the first hint of cleavage. But 6 years later its still getting lots of mileage.   I tried to make a sensible decision with the Heckler, but became so overwhelmed with the new minutia of bike geekery that I finally married the first girl i kissed, as it were, and bought it on spec and customized it on spec, and it became the most expensive bike I’d purchased, and it is my favorite bike ever.   Yesterday we rode Holbert, 4 years after trying it on the Blur, and giving up .25 mile in swearing I never needed to ride something that ugly ever again.   This time I rode all but one tight rock passage about 2/3s down past a mortared rock bridge.   I had many dabs and get-offs and repeats, but was amazed by what i rode and with no blood.   Then Bob and I climbed the road, nailed the Spine and the hi-line on Bermuda, and generally flung ourselves skyward like spring-loaded rabbits on the descent whilst elevated by the warm glow of our gnar-smiles.

There are many ways to fall in love with your bike, but I fell out of love with the Salsa Big Mama.   it wanted too much commitment, without letting me know enough about it.   This instinct for self-preservation must explain why i have never gotten myself truly over my head with a woman, no matter how hot she was.   I did not want to stretch 4k that far into the unknown, into the potential of it being a light AM bike that handles snappishly.   It might have, it could have been beautiful, but   i wanted to be sure I got an Aggressive XC bike not a light All Mountain bike.

Enter the Hei Hei, at an ’08 closeout price of $1800 complete.   Doug found a good line and hung onto it like the pitbull he is, eventuallhy convincing me that on this topic he was in fact brillaint.   i did make him promise we would go with different color-schemes so we wouldn’t be stupid twinsies.   Upgrading some parts and selling some others would leave me with a sweet kit out-the-door for   $2500, and a frame that cost me only $500 but was realistically a solid 1k.   How wrong could I go, when I also made a few hundies in value on the kit?   I don’ think I can go that bad, like a mail-order Russian bride with a great photo, a soft mouth, and a sweet disposition.

I’m making her look hot too!

I built this pretty nice, so even if the frame sux it wound up costing me about $500 and I have a nice kit, both of which will move into a better frame.

WAIT! here is the best part! (thank you Kurt Vonnegut)   Beckie was bemoaning how this is not going to be her bike if i pick out my saddle and my seat position, and while true it is also true that i ride like 438% more.   Meanwhile I was bemoaning the meager $45 i might hope to recoup on the heavy stock seat and post, which are list around $80.   So for $45, she gets her own cockpit (mostly) which is way cheaper than $2500, I get to lose almost half a pound and have a saddle horn merge with my choad, and we never have this fight again

This effectively represents the last of the Becticia2 projects – ths list of shit Beckie and I felt needed to get done to move into the post-Alana, or is that intra-Alana, phase?   We’ll just call it the conAlana phase of our lives.   It sounds like salsa.

dammit.

There is no such thing as the perfect bike.