I have just spent a good while trying to fit a new panier frame to my bike only to discover it won't fit because my bike is too old and doesn't come with the fittings I need. I'm not sure if I could take the frame, which cost me £20, back to the bike shop since I've opened the bag o' bits that came with it (screws and washers and suchlike). I do enjoy my little bike, and considering it cost me all of £10 I'm pretty pleased with it, but increasingly I'm thinking of nice shiny new bikes from the employer cycle to work scheme. Something like this *drool*. I could get it for less than retail, tax- and interest-free taken out of my pay each month, but the boy says I'm not allowed to. Boo!

Lots organised this weekend. I have started sneaking photo albums out of my mum's house and am scanning all her old photographs with the intention of saving them to an external hard drive and given them to my parents for Christmas, possibly along with a digital photo frame if my brothers will contribute. So far I've done all the old school photographs, a few from a drinking cycling holiday my parents and friends when on 12 years ago, and my parents wedding pictures. It's slow going, and I'm not bothering to touch-up the photos beyong cropping and straighening as I would anything else I scan, but hopefully it will be worth it. Plus I predict skintness this Christmas, what with house-hunting and everything, so the more sentimental/homemade presents I can supply the better. :)

( dragons and eggs here )

It amusesd me that I've got Tom curious in Dragon Cave. He says he's not that fussed with the whole thing, but he's got an account and an egg. Heheh.

I cycled in on my new (old) bike this morning, and it was wonderful! It's not an amazing super awesome uber-bike or anything, it's just a nice light bike with drop handlebars and a decent set of gears. But it's so noticable how much less effort you have to put in for hills and bursts of speed. Just a little lean forward and a push and all of a sudden you're going faster! With my hybrid I realy have to push to go up hills (mostly because it's so heavy!) but this new one is so much easier.

I actually cut five minutes off my commute. More importantly, I managed to overtake two people, and was catching up with a third before I turned off. :)

My bike does not have a name yet. My previous bikes have been Oddity (town bike, hybrid), Alyda (town bike with suspension, hybrid) and Lily (previous road/racer, now retired and awaiting recycing at the tip). My first bike was a boy, but all the subsequent ones have been female. I think this one is female as well but I'm not sure what she's called. She's a Peugout but doesn't have a model name. Will have to think about that one...

Need a cycling avatar methinks...

I'm having one of those days when I'm not sure if I feel unwell or whether I'm just exhausted. I think I over-did myself last night cycling home from work in what was probably approaching gale-force winds. 8 miles against the wind, and the last mile with paniers full of shopping, was probably not a good idea. I didn't want to cycle in this morning but today was the one day I HAD to since Jam was staying at home for gas engineers and hence needed the car to come into work later.

I think I'm going to get him to drive me home tonight and just cycle home after work Thursday or Friday to collect the bike.

I'm also beginning to seriously consider buying a decent road bike on the Cycle to Work scheme, which would allow me to buy a new bike at ~33% of the retail cost, spread out over monthly payments with no interest or VAT (yay!). It works buy your company officially buying the bike and renting it to you for 18 months, after which time you can purchase the bike from them at 5% of its retail cost. Pretty good deal! I'd be able to get a bike worth something like £800-1000, which is way WAY more than I'd ever pay for a new bike, but it would be all shiny and fast and light and joyful and so much better for a 6 1/2 mile commute than my clunky old hybrid. I love my hybrid, but it's more of a town and country sort of bike - just nipping to the shops to buy food, cycle up the lane on a sunny day, that kind of thing. It copes well with rough riding, but isn't fast and is VERY heavy (but can hold two paniers full of heavy shopping with no worries!).

Oh, bike love!

I am sooo close to fixing my bike! It's frustrarting, because the only thing I now lack is a spanner large enough to tighten the bottom bracket. It's about 45mm, and the largest I can find is a 40mm spanner. My adjustable wrench only goes up to 37mm, and while a mole wrench will fit it won't grip enough to actually tighten the bolt. Most bikes, it appear, have a notched bolt which requires a simple tool to adjust. Mine, being old and crap, just has a huge hex bolt. I'm going to phone up the cycle shop to see what they used, and maybe I'll have to go in and buy something from them.

Buggery.

SO close! So very very close. At least it's raining today so I don't feel so bad about being in my car.

I've been slipping into bad, lazy habits of late. Without my bike to cycle in, and the bad weather meaning I'm not going for a run, I'm feeling lazy and lacking in energy and want to eat. It's strange, but when I'm doing exercise I have more energy and I'm less inclined to eat badly. It's like since I'm doing some exercise I might as well make the effort to eat properly - without the exercise I just don't see the point. So today I went for a run -first for a while - and I feel really good for it. I don't feel I need my afternoon coffee, and while I could eat somethign I don't want to grab a chocolate bar or a biscuit, which is usually really tempting to do!

I'm a bit more optimistic about the bike situation - last ditch attempt to fix it will invlove gluing the offending bracket shut with the strongest adhesive I can find - plastic metal, the shop tells me. So after work today I'm heading to B&Q to buy some, as well as a spanner that will fit the oversized bolts that are coming loose. That will hopefully give me a few more months out of the bike, but will render it unfixable so it's a make or break effort. Hopefully in a few weeks I'll have some money to repair my hybrid, but until that I'll have to make do with the an obscure and ancient racer!

Prognosis isn't good for my racing bike. The shop says they'll try to fix it again, but it looks like the whole cassette will need replacing, which won't be a simple job. I think because the bike is old (and an obscure brand), the cassette is firmly in place and won't budge without the aid of equipment to heat and expand the frame, which is not going to be cheep. Probably be a write-off. I'm not too upset because I got six good fun months out of it for £25, but it does go some way to show how racing bikes and Bristol's horribly disrepaired roads do not mix.

I'm keeping an eye on ebay for anotehr racing bike, but in the meantime I think I'll save up and get my hybrid repaired - she can cope much better with the nasty roads, and can carry more weight (though is a heavy bike and not as fast). Of course what I'd really like is a nice touring road bike, but they are expensive and would require quite a lot of maintenence. Hoh well.

But good news is that my iPod isn't broken! Jam thought it was, since last night is was being strange - refusing to play anything, skipping tracks and generally being awkward. Turns out that was probably just due to low battery (why it doesn't just shut down when it gets too low to work I don't know), as it's fine this morning after charging. So not everything is broken! Good thing, too, as I have no money at the moment! :P

My bike broke this morning. Gears have started slipping up so that I can't cycle up the big hills. The gear cable seems to be springing out of position for some unknown reason. I really do not feel bothered to deal with this - I was willing to give my bikes a service when all that's required in tightening and lubricating, but fixing some unknown problem with gears that I am no familiar with is rather daunting. Stupid bike. I'm not in a particularly good mood this morning...

I wanted to update my user pictures, but I can't find a way to replace an existing image with a new one. I can onle see how to delete an old image and upload a new one in its place. For example, I wanted to edit this one so that it says 'grr' because that's what the kitten is thinking, but I can't see how to do that without uploading the edited image as a new one. Not a problem, apart from it leaves old posts for which I used this icon now iconless; a small issue, but one that bugs me. You should be able to replace an avatar, dag nabbit!

My bike died on the way home yesterday. I got to the bottom of the M32 (don't worry, I don't actually cycle on the motorway - just cross it at the start) and as I was cycling round a corner onto the cycle path my back wheel just jammed. This has happened before - I think the axel has slipped and the wheel cannot turn as it's not sitting freely on the axel any more. It's easily fixable, but it requires spanners and allen keys, which I don't carry on me. So, swearing under my breath I started to carry my bike home.

Normally when you're forced to walk your bike home it's due to something like a puncture or a broken chain. No problem, since you just puch your bike along and hope it doesn't start to rain. But with a jammed rear wheel I eitehr had to carry the bike on my shoulder, or lift the back wheel up while puching it along. Neither were at all comfortable since my bike is a road x mountain hybrid with suspension and not particularly light. Lovely to ride, not so much fun to carry.

I made it about 500 metres before dediding I needed help. I gave jam_warrior a call, and thankfully he was home early, so he came out and met me and carried the bike the rest of the way. All in all I think we carried it about a mile and a half, but it felt like a marathon. This morning my wrists are still aching from the strain of it!

Actually most of the way the bike was pushed, just allowing the back wheel to skid along the road. I'm going to have a small worn patch but it was a hell of a lot easier than lifting the bloody thing. Plus if you could find leaves they provided a nice slippery surface, and puching it through the muddy park was also no problem.

So this morning I came on on the new bike - the racer. I had intended to get more used to it before I attempted a commute, but it was either that or drive and the weather's not bad enough to justify that. It's a more difficult cycle but definitely faster - without really trying I made good time this morning. The only problems with it stem from the fact that it is a racer, and that means less stability, fewer gears (I struggled up the hills because the gears don't go low enough for me, though this meant I was forced to really puch myself to cycle at a fair speed and I made it up the hills more quickly!), no paniers and nowhere to attach a rear light! I attached it to my bag so no problems there. It's going to take some getting used to, and the extra exertions from hill-peddling and leaning forwards means my legs and arms are aching a bit now. But it'll mean if I keep it up I'll get a bit fitter! Hooray! Plus I can probably shave 5-10 minutes off my journey when I get more used to the bike.

Man that was a lot of waffling on bikes and cycling! Sorry, that was probably really boring for anyone who's not mildly obsessed with green transport. Hoh well...

We're havins some much-needed rain at the moment. It annoys me how much people complain about the weather in this country; when it was sunny a few days back everyone complains about being too hot, and having to water the garden, and not having air conditioning. As soon as it rains people complain about it being wet, and not being able to hang the washing out, and this 'bloody miserable weather'. Seeing as most of this country is sufferting severe water shortages right now, we should all be damned grateful for the rain!

I'm thankful for small mercies, so right now I'm thankful for the fact that although I get wet on my cycle into work, it's neither cold nor windy. So the cycle in really issn't all that bad. Saying that I have an entire set of clothing hanging up in my office to dry. We do have a drying room, but as there's no heating at the moment it's just full of damn clothes, and absolutely stinks. Mostly it's sweaty men's stuff, so I leave that place well alone.

The only thing that does annoy me about the rain is the fact that people start to drive like maniacs. Or rather, as someone I was speaking to yesterday said, they continue to drive the same as when it's dry when they should be slowing down and leaving more room. That coupled with reduced visibility makes cycling in the rain rather more dangerous than normal, but I'm confident I'll be fine.

I do need to sort my breaks out though. The cables have stretched a little and need to be tightened - it's okay when it's dry, but in the wet I need them as responsive as possible. A job for the weekend I think...

Rehearsals are coming along fine. The bones of the perfromance are there and starting to be fleshed out somewhat. It needs polishing but it's going to be absolutely amazing! Only three weeks until kick-off. Annoyingly we have to rehearse on Sunday, which is the World Cup final. Hopefully the MD will be nice and let us leave in time for the start of the match, but I wouldn't count on it...