More frustrations but also good news

This morning I was up bright and early and the weather looked lovely: blue skies! Sunshine! Brilliant! I decided to get my bike out and dust it off, to speed up my journeys to and fro. It took 10 minutes to retrieve it from the little shed at the bottom of the garden (battling cobwebs and barbecue and shredder). Rode it down the path and noticed the tyres needed pumping up. Wasted another 20 minutes trying to pump the tyres up with the pump supplied (which was never very effective). Hunted in the garage for the footpump and adaptor ... phoned Vic ... he thought the adaptor was in one of the little storage trays hung on the garage wall ... finally found the storage tray he meant - no adaptor. Hunted some more and found a better bicycle pump. This one did seem to be putting air in, but when I tried to take it off again, I unscrewed the tyre valve and the tyre very quickly deflated. Thus what had been intended as a time-saving option … wasn’t. More frustration, as though the PC problems weren’t enough!

I thought about walking the bike into town and dropping it off at the bike repair shop on my way over the allotment to have the tyre and inner tube replaced – that would have been a good idea, but by then the clouds were starting to form and I just wanted to get to work as quickly as possible before the rain started.

Anyway, the good news is that I did manage to get some work done over the allotment this morning, including planting up some baby lettuces that Patrick gave me. More good news: I thought the purple sprouting broccoli was finished before I went into hospital, but it’s still sprouting.

At the end of the day I phoned around the various bike repair shops and got quotes, and discovered that the one I first thought of (the one on my way over the allotment first thing this morning) had the right tyre and inner tube in stock and repaired it for me on a while-u-wait basis. At least the bike is now sorted.