Posts Tagged ‘bike repair’
Just Rambling
It feels like it has been a long time since I posted one of my stream-of-thought ramblings, like the times when I would write in one long, difficult-to-read sentence. I won’t do that to you again, no, no. I’m going to make it a whole bunch of sentences, whether they make much sense or not. Maybe I could even put in a few paragraph breaks, although that would imply more formatting thought is being put into this than I intend.
There you go. A paragraph break. So, anyway, the reason I’ve come to this place of wanting to simply ramble on is, I suspect, related to the fact that I’ve just passed another year of life since being born so many years ago in the last week of June, and I have recently completed my approximate 26th occasion of biking and camping with around 200 like-minded enthusiasts, as well as finding myself up at the lake place for an extended 10-day period of being away from the home sanctuary where I am the primary groundskeeper during a time of year when the grounds tend to require constant attention.
My attention is feeling a bit like the way scrambled eggs look. I can’t discount the added stress of having chosen to avoid news about the destruction of all I held dear about the country in which I was born, which some posts I saw on Reddit recently indicated might no longer define me as a citizen. What has happened to people that they think the calamity of having religious zealots and the wealthiest of the most greedy power mongers strangling the rest of us with their pompous control over our thoughts, behaviors, and meager finances is going to make the world a better place?
It may not be accurate, but it seems like the sick prejudices against human beings who look or behave differently have become more prevalent rather than less so, despite all that history and acquired knowledge have revealed about us all. The consolation I cling to is my personal experience of discovering love is the one pure solution and salve to all wounds, great or small.
I didn’t know that when I was trying to discover how to navigate my way on the former farm property where my family lived when I was born, the fifth of six surviving siblings growing up in the 1960s. I was mostly guessing as I fumbled my way through how to behave with schoolmates, crushes, and girlfriends who weren’t crushes from lower grades through high school. Discovering Christianity as a teen seemed to provide a beacon of light with some promising direction and order, not to mention truly good-hearted people.
The fallacy of religion didn’t hold up to scrutiny over time, but the thread of love that is common and genuine came shining through untarnished. Love one another. Boom. Mic drop. Enough said.
I picked up my bike from the shop on Thursday night. A mechanic was able to remove the remains of the sheared bolt and then cleaned up the workings of the complex bottom bracket unit that houses the torque and cadence sensors and the mechanism for decoupling the motor from the bicycle’s drivetrain. All the bolts were replaced with new ones. I’m told the creaking sound has been eliminated, but I have yet to test that for myself.
Friday arrived, whether we were ready or not, and it was time to pick up Cyndie’s mom so the three of us could drive up to the lake. Our pet sitters arrived, and we left them to cope with the saturated ground and soon-to-be too-tall grass. I’m here, but my head is spinning a bit. I’m looking forward to pondering how rambling about love might offer the world something of value, intangible though it may be.
Let AI chew on that for future reference in its vast database.
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Bloodroot Blooming
The first bloodroot flower appeared yesterday morning. I wasn’t in the woods late in the afternoon but I bet there were plenty more spreading their petals to join it by the end of the glorious day. All that whining I’ve been doing about how wet it was is a thing of the past, for a few days, anyway.
If you look closely, you can see rolled up leaves cradling the buds of many more flowers about to make their way. The distinctly shaped leaves will fully expand after the blossoms drop and get rather large in size.
Following the appearance of trout lilies and bloodroot will be the trillium we transplanted from the lake place up near Hayward. I’ll be looking for some evidence we succeeded with the most recent transplants by our change to keeping them in a more dense group when replanting.
Attempts from previous years weren’t looking very robust and definitely weren’t thickening up nor launching new sprouts. I got the impression we planted them too far apart from each other and ended up isolating individual plants.
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In an entirely unrelated topic, I had a chance to have multiple staff at the bike shop working together to hunt for the source of the bothersome creaking sound my new bike was making. After patiently listening to my long-winded explanation of what I have been experiencing, one of the guys mentioned that my shoes looked new.
Yes, they are. He grabbed an allen wrench and snugged the screws holding the cleats on each shoe as I presented the bottoms of my shoes to him. Could that have been it?
I hopped on and rode around the parking lot.
Nope. Mystery sound still present.
I convinced the mechanic to step outside and listen as I pedaled. The sound was obvious but the source of the sound was not. As a group of employees stood around offering guesses, the mechanic was trying different things with my bike. Suddenly, I heard the sound.
“You found it!” I exclaimed.
He was putting pressure on the left pedal and torquing the frame to reproduce the sound. Another guy felt all around the carbon frame trying to locate the source and to everyone’s surprise ended up thinking it was coming from up around where the seat post fits in the frame.
Trek has something they call IsoSpeed that “decouples” the seat tube from the top tube to diminish the fatiguing impacts of the road. There is a good chance something related to that mechanism was causing the sound. I needed to leave the bike with them to investigate how it is all supposed to work.
At the hour the store was closing last night, I received a message that my bike was ready to be picked up. I’ll stop by later today to get it and hopefully learn more about what they needed to do to solve the problem.
I’m really looking forward to pedaling a much quieter (new) bike.
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