Just a perfectly peaceful weekend around here. I read a lot. I washed, I think, every item of clothing and other fabric we own. At least it feels that way. My normal two loads of laundry turned into six. Some of those were towels, which the cats have since commandeered for their coziness, and sheets. I started all this Saturday and finally finished it today. The whole of the weekend will be remembered as being in the laundry room or reading in the backyard.
Also this. I had a short bike ride on Saturday. Short because I broke my bicycle. More specifically, I messed up my wheel. Most accurately, I destroyed the hub on my rear wheel. Here is the hub. You can see what exploded.
This is what happened: we set out for a ride and I was instantly left behind by my flying wife. She broke out her tri-bike, plus the wind was gusting to 29 miles per hour and my legs felt dead all day. None of those things are recipes for success. Then I sat at a red light for a good solid five minutes. (I have the data to prove this is not hyperbole.
Finally, I got out of the wind and was riding basically OK, and then I heard a great solid POP! The rear end of my bike immediately went wobbly.
It wasn’t a flat. Not quite a spoke. In fact, two or three spokes that belong in that area.
Without spokes your wheel is not in round. And that meant it was rubbing the frame and that’s why it got wobbly. My ride was done.
I was nine miles from the house.
So I summoned my flying wife, who, after setting an incredible record on a Strava segment near the house, came to get me.
Tomorrow, I’ll take my wheel to the bike shop. Maybe I’ll get it repaired quickly, and it won’t cost a million dollars. But it is a bike shop thing, and you never know about bike shop things.
What we do know is I can’t ride that bike until it is fixed.
Other than that, and the laundry, we spent a beautiful weekend sitting in lounge chairs under an umbrella, reading. I got through a book-and-a-half, which will give me something to write about a bit later in the week. But, for now, just look at this view.
That plane is going to Naples, by the way. And in the original, when I zoomed in, it looked like there was a low light/shutter speed problem. The plan had four blurry wings instead of two. Maybe that’s how it gets all the way to Italy.
I was sent to the grocery store last night before dinner to get cupcake wrappers. We were making muffins, and ran out of them. Did you know there are two different sizes? And did you also know that the scale of everything in the grocery is disorienting enough to make you think that the small ones are too small? And so you must need the JUMBO ones. Plus, the brand for the JUMBO wrappers shared the name of our blueberry muffin-maker’s hometown. So I got those.
As I was making this decision, a woman came down the aisle with a smile big enough to light up the right side of the store. From a great distance she looked like a colleague. So I smiled back. As she got closer, her eyes moved away from me, in the center of the aisle, to something over my shoulder, or beyond me. And at the same moment, all of this happened quickly, I realized she was not one of our colleagues, or anyone I knew from elsewhere, and she started talking. On her phone.
That smile was for someone else, which is great, but really.
Those headphone mics are no better than Bluetooth headsets for creating awkward interactions.
There’s a small fireworks display in the grocery store’s foyer. (Sure, this is awfully early for the Fourth, but somewhere nearby some … overzealous person … is lighting fireworks on Memorial Day.) I didn’t notice this at the time, because I was trying to hurry back for dinner, but is there a fireworks sword on the market now? And what does it do?
I’ll have to go back and check that out to be sure.
Anyway, I got the wrong cupcake wrappers and felt awfully bad about that. But the blueberry muffins are good, nevertheless. Also, the laundry is done.
