Bikes &Home 03 Dec 2006 06:38 pm
Christmas tree
Josh and I went down and got our Xmas tree today. I’d seen an announcement in some email from Seattle Tilth: it turns out that the UW Forest Club grows noble firs organically in power line right-of-ways. They were taking orders until Friday, cut them yesterday, and sold them today. My eco-hippie sense went all a-tingle.
I would have mentioned this before, but in addition to being a lazy blogger, I kind of figured that they’d probably tend to be a little, let us say, natural-looking. You know, rustic. What with UW students not being experienced, professional Christmas tree farmers and all. We biked out at a very cold 8:15 a.m. to pick up the Flexcar and zip down to the Center for Urban Horticulture in time to be one of the first in line and get the pick of the bunch. But damn if they weren’t the best-looking trees I’d ever seen; every one looked great. I waded in, grabbed one, gave it a good look, said, “Good enough,” and we strapped that sucker to the top of the Flexcar.
It was a nice scene down there, too. Friendly folks in line, with sort of a Mountaineers Club vibe. It was nothing at all like the manic, sharp-elbowed crowd that I remember from the old days buying cheap trees at Chubby and Tubby.
Maybe next year we’ll be able to get our tree home on a bicycle trailer for the Quadruple Hippie Score. This year, no. It’s all uphill from the CUH, and I had my fill of hills yesterday. We took a trial ride up to the View Ridge PCC on the tandem, and got a pretty good idea of where our reasonable limits are when it comes to hills. Severely short of that, is where they are. But we’re getting obviously stronger; in a few months we’ll give it another try.