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In the pharmacy's seasonal products aisle a cardboard display hawked small novelty tins of coal, intended for the Christmas stockings of those deemed "naughty." To this display an employee had affixed a large Post-It note advising unwary buyers that "This is REAL COAL. It is not candy!"
Seventeen miles into my ride yesterday I finally put a real hole through one of my tires (tffffffffft-tffffffffft-tffffffffft). No mere pinhole, this required me to use the roadside remedy of using a folded dollar bill as a boot between the patched tube and the tire, to prevent further herniation. I took this picture to show the damage, the structural fiber of the tire shredded and splayed out. The tube, so far, is holding. The good news is this incident gave me some important tire-changing practice (bonus: it was the rear tire).
Holy buckets, things are changing. I hope to have them more or less back to normal shortly.
The leaves were falling prettily across my path more than a month later than last year. It's 74° out (F) and today's ride takes me past nine hundred miles. I'm still hoping to reach my goal of a thousand miles in the 2005 calendar year. Today's ride also marks the first occasion in which a driver made me mad enough that I flipped him off. It was otherwise a fine ride on a gorgeous day!
I was approaching a crosswalk on 42nd Street in broad daylight early this afternoon. A delivery van was parked at the curb on my right, its opening rear doors guarded by man who, as I approached him, drew his shiny, heavy revolver up out of his holster. I had been moving my iPod from my front to my rear jeans pocket--did he think I was drawing a weapon? A guy like that ought to keep his holster clipped.