Remember the book Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day? well, by day hasn’t been that bad, but it certianly has been a series of unfortunate events. I woke up this morning at 5:30, so as to get to work at 7:00.
6:10 - Leave house on bike
6:14 - arrive at bus stop (about hawthorne and MLK Jr.)
6:15 - watch bus go by with two bikes filling the bike rack (which meant I had to wait for the next bus to come. At this point I am not worried, in fact, I left early just in case this happened)
6:30 - watch bus go by with two bikes filling the bike rack (I did not allow for two busses in a row to by full)
6:30 - start riding to work, very quickly.
6:53 - POP! my rear tyre actually makes a loud noise as it explodes. I am 1/4 mile from downtown milwaukie. At this point I realize that short of time stopping (the sun, which will not rise for another hour doesn’t offer to stop, besides which I am not carrying the right staff for the job) I am not making it to work on time. I call work to inform them as much and then start walking toward the Milwaukie transit center to bus the rest of the way to work.
6:57 It starts raining. Perfect.
7:30 I make it to work.
moral of the story: lateness sometimes happens, no matter how hard one might try to prevent it.
epilogue: when I got home this evening and set to fixing said flat tyre, I noticed how torn up it is. Now, let me explain, this is no ordinary tyre - under the rubber is a layer of kevlar (the stuff used for bullet-proof vests), so popping this tyre was no easy task. The rubber is pitted in at least a dozen places from road crap. so please, next time you are driving down the road and are finished chewing on that nail, or sucking the soda residue off the broken glass bottle, don’t just spit it out the window. dispose of it properly. for my sake. for my bike’s sake. please.
Other than having to work at Starbucks today, the rest of my day has gone better. So perhaps I will not move to Australia just yet.
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December 14th, 2004 at 8:38 pm
Well, if you do move to Australia, let me know. I’ll drive you. In my truck.
December 17th, 2004 at 10:19 pm
Are you, too, feeling like moving to australia? Bummer.
January 15th, 2005 at 9:18 am
I wonder when bicycle tires became tyres…interesting.
January 15th, 2005 at 3:03 pm
tyre is sometimes considered an obsolete version of tire; so, in that sense it is older then the current usage. (Much like the current usage of “climbed” over the older “clumb”) however, a more likely explanation is that “tire” is the american usage, whereas “tyre” is the british usage.