Tuesday, December 16, 2008

The White Stuff

I'm on limited connectivity, so the photos will have to wait. I forgot to mention that I broke a spoke on the way home last night. It's to be expected. I had to replace 3 spokes just to get this wheel kludged together to have something to ride on. I didn't figure it'd be the last spoke replacement. This one's drive side, though, so I'll have to break out the cassette tools. For the time being, my tire's intermittently rubbing on the chain stay. I opened up the rear V-Brakes a bit last night. I will probably give the whole wheel a good once-over and re-tension tonight.

Between 3:00 and 4:00AM (according to the NWS), we started getting some light snow. There was probably an inch and a half of accumulation for the ride to the bus this morning. I love riding in the snow as long as motorists aren't all twitchy. There was a brief moment climbing the Quivira Viaduct where two cars were too scared to change lanes, and I wasn't about to pull off of the stable, packed snow and onto the powder, risking a loss of control with cars directly behind me. I entertained myself thinking of a few times where I enjoyed driving directly behind a snowplow at some fifteen miles per hour. I wonder if the driver behind me was similarly comforted, likely idling behind my 7 MPH clydesdale bikeness. "If this lane is good enough for a bicycle, I'll just hang out here for a while!" I have a hard time feeling bad about taking an entire lane for myself on a two-lane road, especially when there's barely any traffic and the inside lane is wide open for the taking. Snow makes the already treacherous sidewalks, gutters and bike lanes (not like there are any nearby) even more dangerous. There's not even any point in trying to use them in the snow; I prefer finding parallel residential roads to use instead of the arterials when I can.

More this evening. I definitely won't be attempting another full commute tonight, what with the broken spoke and a little throat thing that's been bothering me the past few days.

Random Tunage:
Hybrid - Dreaming Your Dreams
Cascade - Escape

1 comment:

Paul in Minneapolis said...

My first bike had the origanal wheels. After a thousand or so miles I started braking spokes one after the other. One spoke broke in a fast turn, I went down hard because of the wable. Thanks to Sheldon Brown, I re-built the wheel. That was six thousand miles ago and it's still going...

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