{"id":573884328,"date":"2013-01-04T22:58:01","date_gmt":"2013-01-05T04:58:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/?p=573884328"},"modified":"2013-01-05T19:18:21","modified_gmt":"2013-01-06T01:18:21","slug":"restaurants-sunsets-and-the-bike-shop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/blog\/2013\/01\/04\/restaurants-sunsets-and-the-bike-shop\/","title":{"rendered":"Restaurants, sunsets and the bike shop"},"content":{"rendered":"

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

That’s one way to run a business. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Oh look, they are for sale<\/a>. And use frames! That’s one way to run a website.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

That’s OK. We walked out to see this:<\/p>\n

\"sunset\"<\/center><\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Orange and blue and all that. Pollutants hanging over Montgomery 50 miles to the west help too. <\/p>\n

Picked up my bike<\/strong>. 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. <\/p>\n

If you know the right nomenclature you can fix most anything yourself these days. If you have the proper tools.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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 …<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

After all these years in school a few hours learning about spoke tension doesn’t bother me too much.<\/p>\n

Now I just need to make a list of things I’d like to learn. And ride. <\/p>\n

That’s tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,40,14,28,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-573884328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-auburn","category-cycling","category-friday","category-iphone","category-photo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573884328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573884328"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573884328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573884329,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573884328\/revisions\/573884329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573884328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573884328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573884328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}