"Pour tous le scyclotouristes"

My much-anticipated Grand Bois Cerf 28s arrived today, and I have the following to report. First, there is definitely a typo on the label, and maybe also a grammatical error: should it be "toutes"? "Pour tous" would mean "for everyone," but with "les cyclotouristes," I think it needs a feminie "toutes." It definitely loses any utopian assocation, and also doesn't make much sense: "For all the cyclotourists."Anyway, this makes me happy, as it totally defeats any possible snobbiness these tires might have attempted otherwise.

The other thing that makes me happy: on my Mavic CXP33 rims, these measure not the 29mm they do on MA2s, but 27.5. That is totally ideal for my clearances, and will also allow me to use the Tektro 521AG brakes I love, because their quick release will clear them. (For those of you familiar with Toronto, I paid precisely 99 cents for those lovely plastic calipers at none other than Honest Ed's. They seem to work just fine!)

The Cerfs also look nice, and feel nice, and will presumably ride nicely.

I will get to test this sooner than I had been anticipating. Apparently my decals will be done tomorrow, and Noah will be done painting the frame by the end of this week. This is exciting. (Also frightening: I hope the colours end up the way I want them to, and they look good together.)

On the topic of anodizing and polishing: I gave my hubs a light polishing while mounting the tires. They looked pretty shiny before I did this (I'd been riding them for a year or so...), but they looked really shiny after Simichroming them. On the BOB and CR lists, it's been pointed out in response to yesterday's post that polished aluminum doesn't stay lustrous for long. Some say it gets "foggy" in as few as a couple of weeks. That's not my experience — those hubs stayed shiny for a year. And I do think Simichrome does somehow leave a protecting something on the metal after polishing. The hubs even seemed to have a "darker" polish to them when I was through with them today... But anyway, I think I'll put some car wax on everything just in case.

So: Niles arrives by Friday. So many preparations to make!