An Inconvienient Ride

Blake Winton — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:32:51 GMT

I knew when I woke up this morning that it would be an annoying ride in. It was raining fairly hard, but there was a breakfast at The Bike Joint, and they usually have one of the better breakfasts. It’s the same coffee, muffins, bagels, and fresh fruit as filling. As it turns out, this year they got an espresso machine, so instead of the normal coffee, I had a very nice latte along with my chocolate chip muffin, but along the way I got almost completely soaked and tore a hole in the crotch of my biking jeans. The hole wasn’t a complete surprise; the other side had gone a couple of weeks ago, and I had patched it with some old t-shirt. I guess it’s time to re-do the patch, and extend it to cover both sides.

Anyways, I got there, had some coffee and a muffin, and as I got on my bike after crossing the street when I noticed that my rear wheel didn’t really feel right. I looked behind me and found that it had gone completely flat while I was standing around eating breakfast. I wheeled the bike back to the store, Derrick replaced the tube, and I was on my way just as it started to rain again. And then my front light fell off and broke into three pieces. Fortunately, that was easy enough for me to snap back together, and be on my way once more.

After all that, I ended up being late for the 10:00am Status Meeting at work, which was the cherry of annoyance on top of the annoying ride.

The rest of the day, so far, has gone much better. I listening to a not-particularly-interesting talk about bicycle touring at MEC, and while I was there bought a bell. My current bell works just fine, but it’s one of the ding-ding ones, and no-one seems to recognize it as a bike bell, so I got one that goes ringggg-ringgg, which is the canonical bike bell noise, and I hope that’ll help. Work is good too, if a little busier than I might like. And I finally got emacs working with Markdown pretty much the way I want, so all in all, woot!

(Update: The ride home went mostly well, although there were spatters of rain throughout the trip. Around Sherbourne and Bloor, my rear tire started to slow wayyyy down, and then stop. When I flipped the bike over, I noticed that it was jammed right up against the frame, so I loosened it, straightened it, re-tightened it, and kept on going. Still, that’s never happened to me before, and was pretty strange.)

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An Inconvienient Ride