Friday, January 23, 2009

This one's a little flat

It seems like just yesterday I was complaining about bike troubles. Oh wait, it was eight days ago, right here. This time around, I was about a third of the way home when my back tire went flat, so there was a long, tedious walk from there, which wasn't really good for the bike or myself.
This is the second time I got a flat since moving to Blank, and it's interesting to compare the two incidents. The first time I got a flat, it was a week or two into my first term. I was feeling kind of floundering, and the flat came at just the right time to symbolize all that emotional angst in one single event.
It was so early in my tenure here that my internet wasn't even hooked up yet, so I had to drag out the yellow pages to find the local bike shop, then find it on my map, which managed to combine my frustration in:
a) my poor map-reading abilities,
b) my inability to find my way around Blank, and
c) the delay in getting my internet hooked up (which wasn't my own fault, but still very annoying)
Then there was walking the bike to the bike shop, and feeling guilty that I didn't know anyone around here well enough to ask them for a ride. (Yes, I felt guilty about that. Take it from an expert: with proper cultivation, you feel guilty about ANYTHING.) A fairly miserable experience, all around.
Now... it doesn't seem like a big deal. I know where two different bike repair shops are now, and I can go over tomorrow--unless the forecasted flurries finally hit, in which case I'll be equally willing to wait a day or two. Unlike last time, thanks to the last bicycle emergency, I know I can get by without one for a few days, so there's no hurry. I think I'll still walk it over though--I don't feel really comfortable imposing on most of my current friends to that degree, and the one I might feel comfortable with is out of town (so she dodged a bullet there).
So there you go. Even out of a fairly bad event, there's some good to be found, even if it's just realizing that you could have reacted much worse. A lesson for us all.
Now, if I was really on the ball, I would have either walked it to the bike shop that was actually nearby when the flat occurred, or I'd be walking it to the bike shop right now while the weather's great, but I didn't think of the first, and as for the second... eh. It's a Friday afternoon at the end of a long week. I feel entitled to slack it a bit, you know?
I suppose that's the other side with not being overly worried: the problem of being overly complacent. But hey, I found a problem, so that's a good start.
Anyway, I can afford to wait; it's not like the bike's going anywhere on me. Not on that flat, it ain't.

Later Days.

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