love at 40th & locust

i went to the bike church for the second time tonight and i am SO glad that i did. it was like shahrzad was saying last night, sometimes there are periods of time where everything seems to just fall into place perfectly.
ok, from the top. some facilitator folks were talking about having the bike church start selling stuff, like tubes and tires, etc, but the attendant problems of keeping track of inventory and such. this guy Dave (grew up in Pittsburgh, incidentally) had made a rudimentary spreadsheet to do it, and i immediately volunteered my services to help out with it. so now i'm kinda in charge of making the spreadsheet and i am super-excited. there will be a sales log sheet and an inventory sheet and a sheet just for reports and graphs. it will be SO awesome. i just need to install a bootleg (cmu site license, shh) copy of MS Office on that computer because despite my support of OpenOffice, i really need excel.
so like i said, Dave grew up in Oakland and knows Erok and Andalusia, but moved to Philly two years ago, back when Free Ride was still next to Roboto. Janet who i met tonight has wanted to visit Pittsburgh forever, she says, so i proposed driving out there together some weekend in October, so that will probably be awesome. maybe we can take Dave with us, so he can see how much Free Ride has grown since he was last there. even though i never volunteered there as often as i should have, i've grown increasingly more and more proud of it as one of the really great things Pittsburgh's got going on.
another Neighborhood Bike Works person i met today was Andy Dyson, who is actually the Executive Director of the thing, and he told me about the RIDE fitness program that they run at Sayre HS for Hamilton Elementary kids. i think it happened to come up because he's subbing for the regular teacher at tomorrow's class. so i definitely think that we can set up the same after-school program at Penrose. as he said, getting bikes isn't the problem, so he could totally hook us up with the equipment, as long as we have some place to store them. it's a match made in heaven--he has the equipment but doesn't have the staff to expand and we have the staff but don't have the money for equipment. also, Faith, the instructor, already has lesson plans that she wrote in conjunction with doctors volunteering from the Community Pediatrics Advocacy Project, which would be be perfect for Bob's whole "let's not reinvent the wheel" thing. if this works out, who would have thought that we would find the wheel in our own back yard?? so even though they don't have the bikes set up yet, i'm going to help out with the class tomorrow after school. i even got a free Neighborhood Bike Works tshirt out of the deal, which is pretty sweet. i really want this to work out though, because i am many orders of magnitude more excited about starting a cycling-related fitness program partnering with the local bike project than i am about walking, even with the newly found pedometers.
Andy forwarded me the email of Faith's lesson plan for tomorrow and when i told him my gmail address, he was like "oh do you have a zebrakenko?" and it turns out that he used to work at a bike shop that was an authorized zebrakenko dealer!! after knowing next to nothing about my bike for all those years, here was an expert, in the flesh! apparently, despite being a very small company, the reason why the shop owner carried them was because Zebrakenko had a 17" size with a sloping top tube, back when sloping top tubes were taboo. he also talked about how since it was a Japanese company, all the models had weather-related names that were just a little bit off as bike names. like Storm, and Thunder. for some reason i couldn't remember the name of mine but i got home and went to send him a photo of it, it was labeled Zebra Tempest.
such a productive evening. i love you, bike church.