Day of stuff sucking

[xela]

Only 9:00, and already a distinct pattern has emerged.

Got up early intending to take a long ride. Went out to get ready, starting with fixing the flat I got last night, close enough to home that I just pushed the trike. (Which turns out to be a whole lot more annoying than pushing the bike: it's essentially impossible to push one-handed.) Went out to the garage to find another tire had gone flat overnight. Couldn't find a leak in either, which leaves me suspecting that the blinky valve-cap lights I installed yesterday may have somehow caused the valvestems to leak — without leaking enough to hear. Which is to say, I don't have a good theory on why I had two flats in 12 hours, and the least-bad one I have seems really unlikely.

Anyway, checked both tubes, remounted and inflated the tires, and went on to the next thing: Installing my new bike computer. Which has a plastic bracket with a quick-release mechanism that you're supposed to mount to the bike, so you can take the computer with you when you park it. Except the computer wouldn't slide into the bracket, and once I gave up trying, wouldn't come out of it either. (The second time I've had that kind of thing happen this week: The Krytponte U-lock I bought came with a similar plastic bracket; when I tried it at the store, I couldn't get the lock out of the bracket. Neither could the entire mechanic staff of one of the best bike shops in New England. How fucking hard can it be to engineer spring release mechanisms in plastic?)

Then, as I was putting things away, I picked up my bike bag and my camera (the cheap digital point-and-click I bought myself for my birthday, not the SLR) fell out. Only fell a foot or two, but that was enough to kill it. Sigh. I could complain that a metal-bodied camera ought to be able to survive such a short drop, at least when turned off with the lens withdrawn into the body. But I think the suck there lies largely with me.

Part of what I was looking forward to about riding today was playing with the data from the computer when I got back, so the anticipation is now soured a bit. And I'm not sure I really want to risk taking the trike So now I'm trying to decide whether I really want to risk taking the trike more than a mile from home until I have a clearer idea what's going on with my tires. Especially given how the day has gone so far.

---

On the flip side, the day's had its good points too: When I weighed this morning, I was spot-on another milestone. And as I was coming in from wrenching on the bike, I ran into grunniens, who I hadn't seen in a couple months. And it's an absolutely gorgeous sunny day out.

So I think I'll go out and see if there's still air in my tires, and if there is, I'll take the ride I was planning on. Wish me luck.

Comments

[eichin.livejournal.com]

if the point&shoot is an olympus, I learned first-hand that they've got decent out-of-warrantee service via their facility in New Jersey; worth getting a quote, though there's bound to be a newer model of whatever it is by now :-)

The old canon's are kind of fragile that way but there are a couple of repairable bits there too...

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

It was largely a throw-away anyway: its purpose was for me to see how I liked having a camera I could carry all the time without giving it any thought (something I've never done before, not counting cell-phone cameras), and it's main virtue was that it was on close-out at at Microcenter for like $65 last spring. I now know that I very much do like having a camera I can just stick in my pocket, and that the next one needs to be a smaller. (It was a FinePix A500 — a last-generation 5 megapixel with 3x optical zoom. With the lens retracted, it's like 100 x 65 x 35 mm, which makes for a bulging pocket.)