All Work and No Play

Work is really interfering with things lately! I was up early yesterday, but it was to drive up to Baton Rouge for a frustrating, irritating meeting. My tongue was sore afterward from my biting it. Then we got thrown a curve ball by the NSF director who had to change his flight schedule for his visit here Sunday and Monday. It wasn't until a few minutes ago that everything settled down on that front. Anyway, the bottom line is that I didn't get to ride at all yesterday and was grumpy about it all day. Then when I got home we had one of the sisters-in-law over for dinner. It took two bottles of Rogue Mocha Porter before I started to feel better.

So this morning I ignored a few emergency emails that had arrived the evening before and went out for a ride, hooking up with a few of the usual suspects up on the levee. The relative stability of my morning routine was disrupted, however, when I got ready to leave for work, only to remember about that flat tire on the communting bike that I had forgotten to fix. I extracted the tube, which was all bunched up inside the tire because I had ridden a couple of miles on the flat, and found two punctures. It was a nice try, but the tube was toast and still leaked from at least one other spot. By now I'm running late, so I figure I'll just take the old Pennine in to work. I pull it down from its hook in the basement only to find that it too has a flat rear tire. Damn. Not having another shraeder valve tube around, I pulled a regular presta tube out of my bag, stuck a faucet washer over the valve stem to accomodate the larger hole in the rim, and put that all together. After all that, the damned thing didn't hold air either! So I moved on to bike number three - the old mountain bike. It was hanging there in the basement with its knobby tires designed for riding in mushy wet mud with about 20 psi in the tires and no pedals. Now, seeing as how I'm dressed for work, I fished out a pair of old pedals with toe clips and leather straps still attached and installed them in order to accomodate my brand new 7C Bass Weejuns. I felt rather self-conscious riding a mountain bike while dressed like an accountant, though. I always feel like riding a nice old English 3-speed type bike is quite appropriate for someone dressed like that, but somehow it doesn't work on a mountain bike, but since the bike room at work is still closed and I have to lock up out on the street, there's not really a good way to change clothes. I'm just not going to ride up the elevator in riding clothes. I'm already considered eccentric enough!

I think my stash of heavily patched spare tubes is just about exhausted now. I may have to **gasp ** buy some new ones.