We had lunch at Chick-fil-A, which was thoroughly uneventful. We were there because another place in town, where we have tried to visit now on consecutive days, was closed.
Big Blue Bagel, downtown, had a message on their white board yesterday. “Closed for the holidays.” It noted they would re-open on Jan. 3rd. Which was yesterday. I checked. But they were closed.
That’s one way to run a business.
So we visited for lunch today. Closed. The white board had a breakfast special, so someone had been there. Now the place was locked up tight.
There are no hours on the door. No hours on the website. That’s one way to run a business. One of the review sites says they are open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Maybe they are not open in between.
Oh look, they are for sale. And use frames! That’s one way to run a website.
So Big Blue Bagel has now officially broken Smith’s First Law: Don’t make it hard for me to spend my money with you.
I was on the fence about the entire thing, but then I read the reviews on the review sites. They get fairly well panned, which strikes me as a bit difficult to do in a college town. C’est la bagel.
Visited the library. Did library things. Got ran out of the library, because they close the library at 5 p.m. “You don’t need learnin’ that bad, boy.”
That’s OK. We walked out to see this:
We have some of the best sunsets in the world here. I’m biased, I’m sure, but I realized that in undergrad and I haven’t been any place that consistently shows off enough to change my mind since then. Tonight’s wasn’t even trying hard, and I couldn’t get into position for the big finale fast enough, but the sky is just gorgeous.
Orange and blue and all that. Pollutants hanging over Montgomery 50 miles to the west help too.
Picked up my bike. Everyone was in the shop this evening. My derailleurs have been adjusted. Almost everything works again. I can fix the last little bit myself, because I know how to Google this part.
If you know the right nomenclature you can fix most anything yourself these days. If you have the proper tools.
Spoke with the owner about the proper tools. Bicycle maintenance has an improbable amount of specialty equipment — turns out you can’t make every change with a crescent wrench — for most of us this is daunting and unrealistic. I expressed my interest in knowing more.
I’d like to appreciate the art of maintenance a bit. And are there classes for this sort of thing? I don’t want to be a guy who tears down the bike and greases the ball bearings, but I also don’t want to be the guy in the shop every two months with the next thing I should be able to do on my own. It seems counter-intuitive, I know, like that’s asking you to take money out of your pocket, but …
There are classes. He told me about a great one in Colorado, if I’m ever out that way. And he said he’d be happy to teach me more. Make a list of things you’d like to know, he said. We can haggle over rates for a private lesson, he said, using the modules this class in Colorado uses. It wouldn’t be just turning a wrench. This was an important point he wanted to make. This won’t just be “turn wrench here” stuff.
After all these years in school a few hours learning about spoke tension doesn’t bother me too much.
Now I just need to make a list of things I’d like to learn. And ride.
That’s tomorrow.
