Do your kids love their BMX bikes? Love reading? Double whammy! @katdefalla

How to take care of your bike

By : Peabody Cleveland O’Neil

Age 12

 

I ride BMX bikes. A lot. I love riding my bike. But what most people don’t know, is that you have to take care of your bike for it to work good.

Things you’ll need:
1. Two adjustable wrenches
2. Socket wrenches
3. Allen wrenches
4. Pliers
5. Flathead and Phillips Screwdriver

Here's a pic of my bike!

 

 

6. WD-40
7. Bearing Grease
8. Rags
9. Spoke wrench (if you have spoked wheels)
10. A mallet (depending on your crank set)
11. Spare brake pads
12. Air pump (for tires)
13. Turtle Wax (to shine up bike at end)
14. It’s also good to stock pile old parts in case you need anything. Your parents won’t like the mess in the corner of the garage and if they are like mine, they’ll yell at you for it, but it’ll be well worth it when something breaks!

First off, make sure to bring your bike into the garage or house every night. Rain on your bike can make it rust and I saved up a long time to buy my frame and fork! Also, don’t forget to wipe off your frame, fork, and handlebars if they get wet.

Here are some things I do for my bike every two weeks (when I’m riding hard every day):

If you’ve been riding hard core in mud, make sure to spray it all off with a hose first! If you’ve been riding a long time in mud and wet weather, you should take apart the crank and take the wheels off and take apart the front and back hubs (axels) and take apart the headset and take the fork off. Then you clean off all the bearings and parts and then re-grease all the bearings with new bearing grease. Then put it all back together and clean the chain off and oil the chain. Spray WD-40 on all the brake lines where the break grips are. Make sure to check the brake pads and make sure they are not worn. Before you put the wheels back on, make sure to check that they are straight and true. But it you are like me and have Skyway Mags, you never had to worry about that! Then check the air in your tires and make sure all the brakes and hubs and cranks are working properly.

Now you’re done! You’ve cleaned and re-lubed and checked your entire bike so it will work perfectly the next time you ride it!

AND THAT’S THAT!!! You are now ready to ride, so RIDE ON AND BE RAD!!! 

Also, I found a video on how to do that bike stuff if I made you confused…

Flying Mutant Zombie Rats

by

Kat De Falla

Summer vacation is almost here! And Pea O'Neil is stoked to try out the new local BMX track which is finally open. He and his gang of friends can ride all summer long!

Buy now!

 

 But when Pea tries a back flip, he unwittingly opens a portal to another dimension and hordes of flying mutant zombie rats are unleashed upon the city. 

With the help of an otherworldly talking cat sent to help prevent the demise of humankind, Pea and his friends must hunt down the hungry mutants and send them back before the portal closes.

 

Author Kat de Falla was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where she learned to roller-skate, ride a banana seat bike, and love Shakespeare thanks to her high school English teacher. 

 

Four years at the UW-Madison wasn’t enough, so she returned to her beloved college town for her Doctor of Pharmacy degree and is happily employed as a retail pharmacist where she fills prescriptions and chats with her patients. 

 

She is married to her soulmate, classical guitarist, Lee de Falla and raising four kids together ala the Brady Bunch.

 

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5 Reasons Why You Absolutely Should Not Read Black Bear Lake

 by

 Leslie Liautaud

While I could go blue in the face trying to convince you of all the wonderful reasons to read Black Bear Lake, I thought, in fairness, I should be honest about why you should NOT read it. And believe me, there are plenty of reasons.
 

1. There are NO vampires in Black Bear Lake. None. Not a one. No Werewolves or Zombies, either. The only remedy I could come up with would be to make the Walleye morph into Vampires but it got tricky. I mean, how did they become like that? Usually, when you bite a fish, it’s already been fried up in a pan, so how do they get turned in the first place? And what if they transformed into bats when they were still underwater? Instant drowning! I even thought about maybe turning them into Werewolves until I realized how much shedding would be taking place in the lake and it just freaked me out. I can’t even handle hair in a bathtub drain.
2. It’s SAD! People die, animals die, baby deer get left alone in the woods without its mother, there’s cancer, there’s divorce…I mean, come on! Who wants to read that? Isn’t there enough pain and suffering in the world??
3. There are typos. I mean TYPOS! No matter that I read through the manuscript a bajjilion times. No matter that my editor, bless her, read through my manuscript a bajillion and one times. No matter that I had many, many friends, family and colleagues read through the manuscript. NO MATTER. At the end of the day, you can read through Black Bear Lake and still mark it up with a red pen. I’m smacking my forehead every other page.
4. It’s dated, old, practically the Dark Ages…there are no cell phones in my book. No iPods, no Kindles, no laptops. None! You might think it’s because the story takes place in the middle of the Northern Wisconsin woods. No service, right? Wrong. There are no personal devices because the bulk of the story takes place in 1983. No personal devices invented yet! In fact, 1983 was the first year cell phones (which were huge and weighed a ton) were commercially available. So, forget about the characters texting each other. They actually had to trudge around in the woods searching for lost kids! How boring is that…
5. There’s no soundtrack CD in the back of the book. But there should be!! There’s so much great music mentioned in Black Bear Lake! Like “Helpless” by Neil Young and “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd. Not to mention all the other great songs referenced! “Jack and Diane”, “Edge of Seventeen” and “Everything She Does Is Magic”… If you grew up in the 80’s, they will rock you! And if you didn’t, look them up…they will rock you!