Warning: This (freakishly long) post is about me, my bike, an omelet, and my mom.\u00a0 If you’re looking for geekery and music stuff, skip this post.<\/p>\n
Middle of last week, I had a terrible ride home.\u00a0 I had driven a CAN<\/a> car back to Rupert station, which is outta my way by quite a bit<\/a>, but I was sorta looking forward to getting to see a different part of Vancouver, and riding North\/South across Burnaby instead of East\/West that I’d done for a year while at EA.\u00a0 Somewhere at the 1\/2 way point of my ride, my back sprocket sorta freaked out, my rear derailer wouldn’t hop the chain into any higher gears, and my back tire started rubbing against the fender.\u00a0 Were I a richer person, I would have thrown my bike into the nearest dumpster, and cabbed home.\u00a0 I didn’t.\u00a0 I managed to limp myself home while stuck in 3:1 (3rd on the front gear, 1st in the back), and locked up the bike.\u00a0 Took way too long.\u00a0 I’d gotten cold.\u00a0 I’d gotten hungry.\u00a0 I felt wobbly and somewhat pukey after having my legs pumping around so fast for so little mechanical return.\u00a0 Worst time ever.\u00a0 55mins or something.\u00a0 Longer than my very FIRST trip to our new home, some two months ago.<\/p>\n I’d also accidentally learned that Mary-Anne Hobbes Dubstep show on BBC Radio<\/a> is a terrible<\/em> thing to listen to when you’re just trying to get your late-30s beleaguered self home on a broken bike.\u00a0 It’s the inherent bleak sadness in so much of the genre, which is attention-grabbing when you’re feeling good, but bad when you’re ACTUALLY having a crappy time.<\/p>\n After a frustrating evening of having my hybrid<\/a> (which sounds cooler than it is) bike upside-down in the middle of the living room floor (my understanding and long-suffering wife is truly a Saint), and trying to convince my rear tire that it didn’t really *need* to have a little “play” at the axle, and reaching some sort of position that would mean my:<\/p>\n Much like the holy triangle of IT<\/a> (cheap, good, fast: pick any two), I could get EITHER the brake to grab, but not to let go, or to grab AND let go BUT rub against the fenders, OR I could end up with the gears go psycho again.<\/p>\n I thought I was done. Everything seemed to be spinning smoothly, and I had some halfway decent grip on the back brake that would be capable of stopping me suddenly if I needed to. Excellent. Only 1am. My hands are all greasy (I’m not sure why, but we have a verbal tic in our house of having to follow the word “greasy” with an overly enunciated “grrreezee” instead of what everybody actually says, which should be spelled “greecey,” but I digress), and I’m only slightly worried about not having enough sleep before my ride tomorrow, so I crash out after reading a few pages of The Wee Free Men. Next morning, I wake up at not-much-past the break of dawn and get dressed, mumble morning things at Arwen and the kids, mutter to myself, pack my stuff, get some water together, grab a granola bar, find my various nefarious keys and security fobs and thumbdrives (I’m carrying two these days, and I have no idea why), and scoot out the door.\u00a0 Okay, feelin’ good.\u00a0 Here we go.<\/p>\n I can see my breath – s’gonna be a chilly one this morning.\u00a0 No ice yet, so I can still go for it on the way down the big hills.<\/p>\n Wrestle my bike out of the garage, check that I still have my brakes and everything in the right places, hop on, kick my pedal back and…<\/p>\n BRRRRRRRNNNNNNNN….<\/p>\n The tread is rubbing against the fender, and the brakes aren’t squarely hitting the rim any more.\u00a0 What the hell?\u00a0 I don’t have rear shocks or anything, so there’s no way<\/em> there should be that much change in placement on the wheel between me working on it last night, and me sitting down on the bike this morning.\u00a0 I know I’m a solid “240lbs of grunt” on top of this thing, but c’mon, the bike’s been fine since I bought it.\u00a0 Some, uh… let’s see.\u00a0 Three years ago?\u00a0 Four?\u00a0 I think we bought it right after I found out I was going to be working at EAC (the “MotherShip”) as opposed to EAX (“Blackbox”).<\/p>\n ANYHOO, the bike’s not gonna get me to work this morning, and I don’t have the time to fix it now.<\/p>\n So a bunch of mental leg-hold traps snap shut at once.\u00a0 I go from “Whoo, chilly this morning,” to the following crappy ways to start your day:<\/p>\n So I (literally) dropped my bike into the garage, burst back into the house, did a quickchange, found some change, and flurried myself back out the door.\u00a0 I pouted for a bit.\u00a0 I read Twitter feeds on the way into work, and once I got there, tried to do something useful with my brain.\u00a0 That part went well.<\/p>\n The next morning I was going into work a little later than usual (10am) so I hauled my bike onto the CanadaLine, which (brilliantly) has bike spots on every train, so I don’t have to try to muscle people out of the way.\u00a0 This is Canada, so a little plastic sign is all the authority people need to acknoledge that they should maybe move outta the way.\u00a0 Made it downtown, and limped the bike over to the folks at Bicycle Sports Pacific<\/a>, where I’d bought the bike in the first place.\u00a0 The woman who checked it out said that it just needed a tuneup, and that my tires were good, brakes seemed fine (I should hope so: they were both less than three months old), and that everything would cost “about 80 bucks or so.”\u00a0 Okay.\u00a0 Fine.\u00a0 I removed my under-seat toolkit and lock, and I traded my bike for a little slip of paper, and wandered out into the brisk Fall morning.\u00a0 Now what?<\/p>\n I was feeling like this was $80 I didn’t have, on TOP of the $5 in transit per day I’d be spending, but still, this is okay, we’ll figure it out.\u00a0 I walked up to some weird mom & pop greasy (everybody now: “greeeezzeeee”) spoon cafe with six wobbly tables and a drinks cooler that made an egregious amount of noise, and bought myself what passes for comfort food at breakfast time.\u00a0 Too-hot coffee and a ham and cheese omelet.\u00a0 What better way to celebrate health and fiscal responsibility than buying myself breakfast?<\/p>\n Then I emailed my mom, who’d asked last weekend if I needed a new bike.\u00a0 “Naaaaah,” I’d told her, “there’s nothing wrong with the one I have.”\u00a0 Famous last words, I know.\u00a0 Pretty much asking for trouble from that point on.<\/p>\n\n
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