A carnival of technology

So, that bike thing. I guess it’s been nearly a month, so I might as well post some of my thoughts.

It’s exhilarating. There’s a real freedom and thrill in traveling out in the elements that a car just can’t capture. Biking was a lot harder than I remembered starting off, and the one leg is still a little skinnier than the other, but I think I’m back close enough to where I was before. There was a moment on Monday a week or two ago when, even though I’d awoken from too little sleep after my usual Sunday-night insomnia, groggy, a little nauseous, once I got on the bike I felt like I could go forever, I piloted the bicycle up severe inclines with unflagging speed, cooked Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes and performed all manner of other feats. For that little moment on a gloomy Monday, I felt alive, and that’s what really makes it worthwhile.

It’s terrifying. I got over my fears of the cars quicker than I thought, but I have a lingering uneasiness about the road itself, much like after that wreck back in January. Maybe it’s because I’m riding more at night. I’ve found that unless I want to fork over the cash for a light the size of a basketball, night riding is in part a matter of memorization, and there are a few types of roads that are especially frightening: the ones that I know suck and have potholes everywhere (e.g., Hammond between Peachtree-Dunwoody and the Dekalb border), the dark ones that I don’t know super well, and the clean roads that the city paved over this month. Sandy Springs recently repaved Glenridge between Roswell Road and the Cingular building (or AT&T building, I guess), and even though there aren’t any more surprise pieces of missing road (I’m pretty sure they make machines to pave roads that you can run behind the machines that tear up roads, but no one ever uses them. To be fair, though, the whole process was super quick for an Atlanta road project. They even had a sign about halfway through the washboardy part that appeared to depict someone on a Vespa riding over a zigzag, which I thought was kind of funny), it’s still an inky mystery to me when I ride it. The only bad spots I’ve found so far are a couple of blotches of extra asphalt west of that one road with the stop light. They’re not anything huge, but they’re kind of annoying, and I’d prefer to dodge them.

I’ve also noticed myself taking turns a little slower than I could. I can’t remember the last time I lost traction due to gravel or sand or any of the other stuff I look out for, but I guess some lessons stick with you. Maybe that’s good?

During the daytime a couple of weeks ago I was instructed by a police officer to “get out of the road.” I didn’t, since I was about 100 feet from the MARTA station and he was going the other way, but it upset me enough that I sent an email to my city officials and that guy who writes the “View from the cop” column in the AJC. The mayor assures me that it was a misunderstanding and that Sandy Springs supports bicycles as part of the solution to the ever increasing problem of traffic congestion, and Lt. Rose said he’d say something about bicycles and mentioned that Peachtree Dunwoody is kind of busy. The police officers doing traffic control in the evenings haven’t given me any dirty looks as far as I’ve noticed, so maybe I didn’t piss anyone off too much.

It’s cold. The weather has been kind of erratic lately, but it’s dropped back below freezing this week, so I wandered into my favorite bike shop today to see what I could do. My face is the only part left that’s not covered, so I figured I’d try to cover that up and then figure out what else needs work. There was an older dude at the shop (the owner? I can’t remember seeing him before) who had all kinds of suggestions for hats and jerseys and shoe coverings and chemical warmers, and he convinced me to buy a balaclava before biking off to lunch. That’s such a weird word. I always think it says “baklava,” which would be delicious but probably not keep me warm. Merriam Webster says it comes from the Crimean war, so I guess I can thank the British for not picking a better word. I haven’t worn it yet (it warmed up a good bit this evening), but tomorrow morning doesn’t look too promising, so I’ll probably try then to see if I can wear the thing without fogging up my glasses or making anything think I’m about to rob a bank.

Today was my first day playing in traffic again. I found aspects of it terrifying to consider, but probably not the aspects I should really worry about. Riding uphill in heavy traffic doesn’t worry me hardly a bit; it’s going downhill that I find concerning. I get going pretty fast when gravity’s on my side. I could get hurt! I made it pretty alright, though, and zooming downhill through traffic is actually quite exhilarating. While actually on the bike, there were a few spots with a lot of cars turning that had me worried at spots, but that was about it.

I took on that stupid hill northward on Sandy Springs Circle on Sunday, and I made it up to the Kroger, about the ? point before just completely giving up and stopping for lunch at some new Italian place. Apparently it’s some local chain that started in Norcross. They have more pictures of celebrities riding Vespas than I have ever seen in one place. They also have two actual Vespas parked out front, though I don’t know what they plan to do with them. They make a pretty good calzone. The stretch of Roswell Road between my green valley and Glenridge isn’t that bad, but I still ended up using some gears I didn’t know that I had. Oddly enough endurance doesn’t seem like too big an issue?I wasn’t huffing and puffing nearly as bad as when I originally started this crazy habit, and I didn’t have to stop completely at the top of the hill like I used to—I just can’t push as hard. Not pissing off the traffic that I’m blocking behind me is a big concern when I’m riding, so falling short of my old speeds is a bit distressing. Also, I can’t keep as straight at lower speeds, so there’s the worry that I’ll veer off into someone’s fender. I hope that this gets better soon, but I seem to be pretty quickly becoming reacquainted with all of the old feelings. I’ve even started dragging my shoes to make up for my shitty brakes without even thinking about it. I really should have bought cheaper shoes.

The MARTA ride went off without any unusual bumps. The Breeze gates are still as crappy as ever. It took three taps in the morning to get into the station, and on the way home I helped tap someone through at North Springs whose gate didn’t open because he was standing in the way of the beam like you would think you’re supposed to. The buses have replaced the card readers, or at least the face plate on the card readers, with fancy looking blue things in the three or four months I’ve been gone. The new readers have a grey rectangle on either side of the card target, and I’m not sure if they’re buttons or if they’re just hiding bolts. It still took my card without me having to do anything extra, so I didn’t ask. I didn’t see anyone today without a Breeze card, so I guess the transition went pretty ok. I still think it’s dumb that you need a Breeze card to transfer to rail but can’t buy one on a bus. Someone pointed out on a mailing list that Amtrak, about the only way into the city that doesn’t have a MARTA rail station, is especially troublesome. I would say that no one uses Amtrak, but my own Amtrak experience seemed crowded enough. So everyone gets to pay an extra $2.25 as a reward for using an inconvenient means of transportation. I don’t really like the Breeze cards.

I bought a new pair of shoes. Payless only had like two in my size, and they both sucked, so I ended up following Baseball Mike’s recommendation and going to Fleet Feet, which I think is part of the same chain as that running shoe store my mom goes to. It seemed like a good idea; they at least pretend to know what they’re doing as far as fitting shoes, so I figured I could walk in and give them the big pile of shoe requirements from my therapist and see what comes out.

Dang these shoes were expensive. I guess I’m used to buying the cheapest pieces of worthless junk I can find as far shoes go, so a three-digit price was a bit of a surprise. Oh well, at least they feel pretty nice. They’re New Balance. They don’t have that curve that most shoes do, so they look very large. They are also very shiny. Besides the reflective surfaces, all of the white parts look like they could glow in the dark. I wonder how long that’ll last. The laces are kind of weird. They’re lumpy, which is supposed to help keep them tied by forcing the knot into the grooves. You can kind of see how they look in this picture. They also have those two straps going through the ‘N’ in the side logos that attach to the middle lace loops. They’re supposed to stabilize my foot or something, but after relacing them for bike riding and wearing them super-loose, I don’t think it’s going to do me any good. Wearing a shoe on my right foot is one of the stranger sensations I’ve ever felt, but it’s starting to go away. I think that if that stupid boot weren’t five pounds or so, it’d make a really comfortable shoe.

I rode the bike today from that Publix next to the Silver Comet to the Paulding county line. The normal trail part is about 13 miles through that segment, plus another three-quarters of a mile or so of that extension up to the Publix and a little more for where I kept going into Paulding county, looking for a bench where I could eat lunch, so in all it was a little under thirty miles round trip. It’s a lot harder than I remember. I figure I’ll try challenging that awful hill on Sandy Springs Circle tomorrow.

Ok, so I tried the horn while taking out the trash. It’s not quite what I expected, but it’s pretty respectable. The tone it generates is relatively high pitched, a little under 2600 Hz. This is a bit higher than a car horn, and I guess I was hoping for something big and deep, like a train whistle. The high pitch makes it sound a little weak, but it does have enough volume to get someone’s attention. Now I just hope I won’t need to.

One of the more minor problems faced by bicyclers is how to keep pant legs and shoelaces out of the chain. Chain guards are decidedly uncool and have a non-zero mass, so without those everything’s just kind of swinging around down there right next to the drive train. For shoelaces I use one of the creative lacing methods at Ian’s Shoelace Site that leaves the bow on the outside of the shoes. It has the extra benefit of making the laces nearly impossible to trip over when untied, which is a frequent problem because I wear my laces too loose. It’s too bad that all the velcro shoes are either sized for kids or really ugly. For the pant legs there are several solutions. The simplest, the scene kid rollup, is simply rolling up one pant leg to keep it out of the chain. You can also tuck your pant leg into your sock, wear a rubber band, or even wear a fancy reflective strip specially designed for pants leg holding that you can find at a bike shop near you. Like so many things I do, my solution is the one that hardly anyone even remembers anymore.

My mom gave me a pair of clips when I started riding while at home one summer, and I’ve been wearing them since. I lost the original pair—I really don’t know what happened to them; they’re probably in a gutter somewhere—but I managed to find someone on ebay selling a bunch of junk a bike shop found in the back, among the items a few pairs of “Terry trouser bands.” I haven’t been able to find anything about this mysterious Terry. I don’t know if they even exist anymore. All of the clips I’ve been able to find are goofy reflective things that repel bears and make your coffee, and I don’t want any of that. They seem very inelegant; I just want to keep my pants out of the chain. I don’t have the legs for those goofy shorts. My pair of clips or trouser bands or whatever has been sitting on the coffee table for over three months now. I hope to use them again soon.

I bought a horn. I don’t even know if it’s legal to use. I bought it from some website in Hong Kong, and though it looked like a perfectly legit site and they exchanged my cash monies for a product without any difficulty, I can only assume that they’re up to something sketchy. I guess all of those bootleg DVD stories have made me a xenophobe. Did you know that the Hong Kong Currency is the dollar (HKD)? I didn’t. I guess I assumed they’d be on the yuan now, and maybe the pound or something before that. I was a little surprised when my $3 shipping charge turned into $23.50 worth of stamps. The Honk Kong dollar is worth about .077 USD, so I still came out on top according to the Internet, just not by quite such a shocking margin. And it’s good to know that it doesn’t really cost over $20 to ship a pound of whatever between here and Hong Kong.

Anyhow, I have a horn. It runs on 9V batteries and it claims to have a volume of 115dB. That’s 5 dB short of a jet engine and 15 dB short of a Manowar concert. I haven’t tried it out yet, both because I didn’t have a charged 9V battery handy and because I don’t want to upset my neighbors too much. The website I’m pulling these made up numbers from puts a car horn at 110dB, so it’s probably not shockingly loud apart from being honked by a bike. I hope it works.

To recap, my last doctor visit showed that my foot is still kind of broken but not very broken, so I can walk on it now. The schedule the doctor gave me was two weeks at 50% weight (boot plus one crutch), two weeks with just the boot and two weeks in a sneaker before I get x-rayed again, but, since he knows I had already been cheating, he said I might as well skip the first step. Today marks the end of week two walking around in the boot with no crutches, and the therapist suggests I wait another week before switching to sneakers again. I figure I’m close enough and I’m going to try getting back on the bike this weekend and see how far I can go. Bikes don’t use much of the heel, and I’m getting impatient. If anyone wants to join me, I’ll be on the Silver Comet; I’ll race you to the county line.

For those of you just tuning in or who don’t care enough to remember all of this mess (I know I’d rather not), let’s start with a quick recap. I broke my heel when, while on my bicycle, I lost a fight with a car. I’m out of the cast and in a heavy, goofy-looking removable boot, and I will continue to wear this until everything’s signed off by the bone doctor. I see Dr. Newfield again sometime in October, the twenty-somethingith. October twenty-somethingith doesn’t have any memorable tragedies associated with it like my last appointment, so I’ll probably call midway through next month if I don’t find that little appointment reminder card by then. I can put some weight on my foot now as I walk, and I’ve been seeing a physical therapist twice a week. There are no lawyers involved yet, and I’m not eager to hire any based on the free advice of some guy I met in the police station and readiness so far of State Farm to pay any claims I throw at them. I had been popping Vicodin like candy for a while, but once I stopped out of fear that I’d be buying painkillers in the Love Shack parking lot for the rest of my life my foot didn’t really ache much more, so I don’t guess I’ll be going back to them. I have some leftover if anyone wants to make an offer.

And now, the rest of the story.

I got my bike back today. Kat was in town for the day for some anime convention, so I enlisted her help in picking the bike up. The final total ended up being over $600, so I’ll have more fun with copying machines and faxes submitting the rest of this claim. I’m not even quite done with it yet. I realized after I got home that I didn’t get the fancy extended warranty on this new set of wheels, so I have to talk with Raul on Monday to sort that out.

The new crank is a Shimano Ultegra, which I’m told is way better than the worthless pieces of junk Schwinn installs at the factory. Both the crank and the bottom bracket are chrome colored, whereas the old ones were both black. It still fits with the three-color scheme of the bike, so whatever. The new bottom bracket says “DO NOT DISASSEMBLE,” written in the same ominous font and tone as “REFILL ONLY WITH KIKKOMAN,” so I guess that means the new one is a sealed assembly and the old one probably wasn’t. So that’s a nice improvement. The wheels have some different markings on them, but they’re the same model, so I guess it’s just a new model year. The new rear rack is the exact same one I bought at REI a few months ago.

As far as the healing process goes, my therapist says I’ve been making a lot of progress, and she keeps finding new ways to torture me in our semiweekly sessions. Though the ankle is still a concern, things have been moving on to getting the rest of my leg working again, and that hasn’t been really very pleasant. Apparently my bone should be pretty well healed by now, but it still hurts a little bit to put a lot of weight on it. While at the bike shop today, I decided on a whim to hop on and coast the fifteen yards or so from the door from the car, and, while beginning to instinctively dismount on the right side, I got a feeling in my heel that, though I didn’t hurt myself, I was about to do something really stupid. I quickly corrected with no damage done, but I still found that concerning. If the bone is healed, why does weight make the heel hurt? The heel’s not a muscle, so it’s not like it’s been wasting away or anything. My foot is also still all swollen and gross, though, so maybe that has something to do with it. I hope that goes away soon.

I dropped the bicycle off at the shop today, and they gave me an estimate for repairs. The rear wheel is all busted up, and that particular brand can only be bought as a set. The crank is messed up, I’ll need a new bottom bracket to fit the new crank, and the rear rack is bent.

Total estimate: $578.

I got hit by a car.

Ok, that’s out of the way. Friends and family, please calm down. I am not seriously injured, and I will attempt to answer the questions now burning in your minds forthwith.

As you can probably understand, I generally try to stay off of Roswell Road, but sometimes it’s just so damned convenient that the temptation is too great. I don’t think it’s a bad road in the right frame of mind. Those freaking drainage grates are some serious hazards, but I can keep up with most traffic when traveling south from north of 285, so I have no qualms about taking it in light traffic and riding in the middle of the lane. I learned my expensive lesson, and I don’t mess with those grates. Those things are bad news.

So I was riding home tonight, and I took Roswell Road. It was late and dark, so I thought this the best decision. My alternate route, winding around through Sandy Spring Circle and that terrifying downhill run on super-narrow Lake Forrest or whatever it’s called, besides being longer, I thought would be more dangerous in these conditions; it’s poorly lit and has that longish stretch down a crowded two-lane road. Roswell Road has lots of light and lots of lanes, so I take that, I get home quickly, I don’t get run over and everything’s copacetic. That was the plan. I actually had a bad experience on Mount Vernon earlier in the same ride—some douchebag in a gray Suburban tried the old pass-and-turn-right trick on top of me, and that used up all of my swearing. Wide Roswell Road looked pretty appealing.

I was cruising along Roswell Road around Hammond when some prick in a BMW (I don’t actually know if he’s a prick, but he does drive a BMW and he did hit me) turned into the Whole Foods parking lot. That’s great and all—Whole Foods isn’t really my thing as I’ve mentioned before, but if that’s what you like then go for it, man—but he apparently didn’t look very hard, or else he would have seen my headlight coming along down the road. Seriously dude, I was wearing a safety orange shirt, riding along a well lit stretch of road and had a big white light on my front. I understand that I should view every event as my fault in the interests of my own survival, but I’m not sure how I could have handled this one better other than having an intense distrust of any cars in the turn lane. I thought he had stopped, so I didn’t have time to brake when it became clear that he hadn’t, and dude hit my rear wheel. I went tumbling out into the road, hit quite gracefully (no scrapes!), and, still moving with my downhill momentum, rolled over (breaking that stupid blinking light on my belt) onto the sidewalk. This was where I found that I couldn’t walk.

The BMW pulled into the parking lot and got out of his car, and two people nearby also stopped to help. One was a man dressed in a suit who looked kind of lawyerish. I thought maybe he was an ambulance chaser or something just based on his clothes, but he didn’t offer me a business card or anything, so I suppose not. Maybe he just likes to dress fancy. The other part in this scene was played by a nice young woman who asked all the questions you’re supposed to ask when you find someone lying in the road and offered me a cigarette. Mr. Fancy Pants called 911, Ms. Nice Lady tried to comfort me and ensure I wasn’t in any immediate danger, and I was fuming and cursing and discovering, as well as demonstrating, that I couldn’t put any weight on my right foot. The car came at me from the left side, so I guess I messed up my foot on the way down. I’ve been keeping the clip on that foot (my non-chocolate foot) tighter lately, so I probably gave it a good twist. Meanwhile, Mr. Prick got me an ice pack and tried to figure out what was going on. I don’t know why he had ice and ziplocks with him. He was dressed like he just came from the gym.

911 was slow to answer, but the police were very quick to respond. Yay incorporation? Senior Officer Joseph Simone arrived at the scene, took everyone’s information (Ms. Cigarettes was not a witness to the event, but Mr. Fancy Pants was and seemed delighted to repeat that I was keeping up with traffic), and very kindly waited with my bike while I went to the hospital in an ambulance and Sean (thanks again, Sean) came to pick it up. I hope he didn’t have to wait too long. I think I’ll get him some kind of gift card after I regain some more mobility.

The experience with the paramedics was a little bit weird. An ambulance showed up at about the same as the Sandy Springs Fire & Rescue truck, and the EMTs shooed the first responders away after I answered a couple of questions and made it clear that I wasn’t about to die. Things were pretty casual after that. One EMT wanted some kind of splint with a foot piece, but the other EMT said they didn’t have any like that, so they mangled something together with a piece of a foam-coated cardboard and a couple of ace bandages. It was up to me to awkwardly scrabble my way on and off of stretchers while someone held up my bum leg. I think one of the guys was a trainee. Portly experienced EMT dude stuck an IV thingy into me (after complimenting my nice veins) in case the hospital wanted to inject me with something (they didn’t), and trainee dude tried to insert the catheter. He didn’t do a very good job, so portly guy finished it up and gave trainee a lecture on catheters on the ride to the hospital. I was asked which hospital I wanted to go to. There were no sirens or flashing lights, we obeyed all of the traffic laws, and I was pushed into Northside as a casual code 3.

After signing my name to three four different forms (sorting out the insurance on this one is going to suck), I got x-rayed, waited around and wondered about what parts of the pain scale my foot was passing through, and eventually got examined by some doctor who poked me and prodded me and listened to my heart and did all of those doctory things. He started out the conversation by asking if I’d had any trouble with that foot before, which I thought was a bad sign. Turns out I broke my ankle. Maybe. A little bit. Doc wasn’t super-sure, but it looked like some kind of fracture and I have a splint and crutches just in case along with a scrip for some Vicodin which, if it’s the same stuff they gave me in the hospital, isn’t going to do a damn thing. I’m supposed to see an Orthopedist to get this all sorted out. My foot still hurts like hell, mostly around the heel, and crutches really suck. I have no idea how I’m going to get around anywhere.

Mobility is going to be hard. I’m taking off work tomorrow since I can’t drive very well or sit down for a long time (this entry is being written in multiple sittings, honest injun). I tried driving down to the mailboxes, but that didn’t go very well. It may have been because I had the parking brake on. I need to go the UPS center tomorrow to pick up a package before they send it back. This one is my external Seagate hard drive that decided to fail about three months into its five-year warranty, and I waited until now because I bought some new shaving supplies again (an alum block and some Proraso cream, which is super-nice), but UPS left those latter two at my door instead of leaving more notices. I might just call a cab. I hope I can get some sleep.

I broke another light today. Boring, I know, but I thought the circumstances were funny.

The state of Georgia requires, sensibly, that I use a white light visible from 300 feet in front of my bike or something like that when I ride at night. Summer doesn’t have me riding home in the dark much anymore, but who knows when I might do something different or stupid. I’ve gone through a handful of lights, which I believe I’ve chronicled here. My problem has always been the mount: I’ll hit a bump and the light will go flying off my handlebars and never work again. The last one I had was pretty nice in this regard: the mount seemed to hold the light much better (I was never afraid to leave it on when I rode the bus), and the light itself was pretty tough. I dropped it on the pavement a few times with no troubles other than a few scratches.

My last light was a Blackburn Quadsomething. It had four LEDs, the aforementioned sweet mount (with swivelling action and kung-fu grip), a waterproof seal and a nice battery life. That part about the sweet mount? The mount actually kind of sucks. It has a more solid grip than things I’ve used before once the light is actually in there, but it’s hard to get it in there good, and it’s hard to tell whether it is in there good until I hit a bump and it goes flying. I took the light off this weekend to clean the bike, and I did not put it back on good. It came flying off on Mansell this morning while I was trying to dodge cars passing me to turn right and looking for enough of a gap to cut across traffic and turn left, and I think it survived the impact. Then the Hummer behind me ran over it. There’s no obvious damage, other than a scuffed and now slightly cracked case, but it won’t turn on anymore.

I decided to spend the extra couple of bucks this time and bought a Cateye EL-5something. It’s supposed to be pretty nice. And when it’s all the way in the handlebar mount, it clicks.

Wow, it’s been three weeks since I last made a bicycle post. Let’s do one of those.

(I would first like to apologize for the title. Using song lyrics or any phrase that happens to pop into my head from three degrees away from the topic is a bad habit of mine, I know it’s confusing, and I apologize. I’m trying to evoke a sense of the sound of gunfire.)

I’ve had some people suggest to me that I get tubeless tires. My boss has long been extolling their virtues, though not very successfully (the sole argument is usually that tubeless tires don’t need tubes), and more recently someone at work, who, though car inspections pay his bills, has a good deal of experience with bicycles, suggested them to me with some more attractive points. Traditional bicycle tires are, granted, kind of weird; they take a hollow circle of rubber, the sort of opened toroid with which any tire might begin, and then stuff some more rubber inside of it, a huge butyl doughnut, all hole and not at all delicious, making the tire itself not a container for pressurized air but rather a kind of shield, separating the more delicate pneumatic cushion from the world’s harsh terrains. You don’t see that sort of thing much in other types of tires. Is this an obsolete holdover from days past?

I guess tubes have the greater history of the two tire types, but they do have some advantages. Tubeless tires have less rolling resistance, are usually more resistant to puncture and can operate at lower pressures, but, for one, they’re more expensive. The main concern for me, though, is that you can’t easily fix a flat tubeless tire. If I get a flat on the road, I can just pull out the old tube, slap in a new one and, after five or six hours of inflating everything with that goofy little hand pump, I’m back on the road. I’m not even sure how one would fix a busted tubeless tire in an emergency. I assume it would involve some kind of patches. All I know is that I don’t want to mess with that junk while sitting on a curb. Once the tire is damaged, that’s pretty much it. These hard-soled shoes weren’t made for walkin’, but they’ll have to do.

My ignorance about bicycles is astounding. Despite bicycles being one of the seven simple machines, acts of maintenance are strange and difficult processes involving specialized tools and, in the case of fancy road bikes, tight tolerances. A year ago I didn’t even know how to change a tire. In an effort to reduce my dependence on bike shop service, I’ve been trying to acquire as much knowledge as I can—through books, the Internet and that one class I took at REI—but knowledge is not experience. Changing tubes is one of those actions that has a simple process but a lot of opportunity to screw up. One of the things I remember from that REI class was the three ways to blow out a tire. Each one means that you messed up, but two of them mean that you messed up real bad. Let’s review:

1) The first is the thing that’s not like the others; the damage to the tire is done beforehand, and there’s no earth-shattering kaboom, but the final product is the same: a rapid loss of pressure and a damaged tire. If there’s a hole in the tire where part of the tube can peek out, it’s eventually going to get punctured or just give up on its own, and you end up with a sound like letting the air out of a balloon and a sudden difficulty in pedaling. These aren’t actually too bad—you can usually patch the hole with a dollar bill—but it’s something to watch for.

2) This is the funny one. Pumping tires is hard, so some people get the idea to use the free air at QT. Bicycle tires have higher pressure than car tires, but much lower volume, so that couple of minutes you spend filling a flat on your Toyota becomes a few seconds and POW! At least there’s a pay phone nearby. Don’t fill your bike tires at a gas station.

3) This is the annoying one. When replacing a tube, it’s easy to stuff it into the tire such that, rather than being the perfect, pliant doughnut of its design, it becomes pinched against something: the rim, the tire or maybe a scrunched up piece of itself. It’s hard to catch these, and the tube won’t necessarily fail right away. Maybe it’ll take five minutes, maybe it’ll take a week, but eventually the pressure in all the wrong places will take its toll and BANG! there’s a new hole in the tire.

I have committed sin #3 exactly twice.

I’ve already written about my first time. That was my first attempt at changing a tube, and inexperience was my downfall. Since then I have learned a new careful technique, and I have had no trouble except with the usual hazards of the road. An extra minute or two of examination as everything falls into place back on the rims can save a lot of trouble later on, and I’ve learned the movements well enough that I can quickly replace a tube without fear of blowouts. Except today.

Earlier in the week I picked up a tiny puncture of the weaselly sort that doesn’t release a steady stream but can drain fifty pounds of pressure over the course of a day or so. After refilling the tire a few times and denying that I had a problem, I finally got out a bucket last night and found those tiny, intermittent bubbles. I think it was glass again, or maybe some grit came in through the old glass hole. Whatevs, I patched it up and put the tube back in. I got cocky. I gave the TV more attention than the tire, and this afternoon I was greeted with that sound I won’t soon forget. While my first blowout just put a hole in the sidewall that probably could have been fitted with some kind of patch, this time the sidewall actually tore away from the bead, leaving a strip of bare steel and a flap of rubber that refused to stay inside the rim. Crap. How am I going to get home? Walking sucks, but I can’t use this thing. Can I? Could I have been better prepared for my own mistakes? I’m not about to carry a spare tire with me everywhere. This blows.

I probably could have gotten another couple of miles out of the tire by switching it to the front. I don’t believe I’ve ever had a flat front tire, probably because it doesn’t carry much weight, but I think my brain subconsciously vetoed this idea. It would have been a lot of pumping. Instead I tried riding on the bad tire where it was, using much less pressure than I should to keep the bulge from looking too bad and sticking to coasting on the sidewalks instead of riding in the road. I didn’t make it very far. I made it home on foot and on bus after the tube deflated again, and I have at home everything I need to replace the tire, but I don’t feel great about having to learn a lesson twice.