Bike Part B

At the behest of my mother, I'm including the second half of the bicycle saga here...I don't really have time for this (two essays by the weekend, ah!), but she's the reason for the second half of the saga occurring at all, and anyway I can't concentrate because of words like "concept," "sprocket," and "monkey bike" that keep zooming through my head.

Speaking of zooming...

No, I think I'll back up and explain first that I woke up this morning to an emailed entreaty for photos of the new bike. I do my parent's bidding (no okay fine parents') and so I went out to the bike house this morning to take some pictures in a surreptitious fashion. Unfortunately, after five or so minutes of lurking around the bicycles, I realized (a) that people were going to see me insanely taking pictures of rows of bikes – possibly even their own bike, hey, who's the loony taking a picture of my bike?! – and, (b) that the clock had just struck 11, which meant that in real time it was 5 minutes to 11, which meant I actually had to mount up and zoom off to lecture or face the consequences.

And now we've reached the zooming...that's progress, eh? Well not really, because my instinct to BIKE like the WIND rapidly disintegrated into the physical reality of me pedaling along like a maniac because I couldn't figure out how to get out of 1.1 gear. Or however you label bike gears. Finally, I managed it - sort of - with a horrible grinding and crunching of chains, but I still seemed to be pedaling along like a circus monkey on a mini bike. I wisely chose to dismount.

I walked the Concept to class on screaming legs, feeling like I was in the midst of a heart attack, and faced the aforementioned consequences of arriving 15 minutes late (namely, walking into a large lecture hall, running into the doorframe, fumbling with some papers, and parading all the way down the lecture theatre stairs to the empty row directly in front of Dr. Mark Buckley and the Entire Second Year Oxford Psych Class).

After lecture, my breathing had roughly regained normality, and I had about an hour to kill before returning for a linguistics experiment. I walked to a different bike shop – not Back on Trax, psh – and explained that while, granted, I hadn’t really ridden a bike for five years, I didn’t think I was thaaat out of shape. The friendly bicycle repairman (see Monty Python) found that the breaks were basically on a permanent state of "on," and fixed that for free, but then recommended that I not change my gears at all because my chain might fall off. This is where a sprocket might come in. They could fix it for twenty pounds…tomorrow. Fantastic – the Concept is stuck in monkey bike mode.

I did a small but heavy amount of grocery shopping (Positive: the basket still works. Also, the wheels now roll.), getting three types of juice (mmm!) and some milk and some olive oil. Walking back to the Psychology building, I managed not to mow down any pedestrians with my now highly mobile and unstable Concept while talking on the phone to the BoT repair guy, who fantastically agreed to come by and have a look…gratis! Looks like I made a friend. (Sidenote…several days ago a man in a van marked “asbestos” waved enthusiastically at me while I was waiting at a crosswalk for the light to change. ???)

Leaving my groceries outside, wedged in their basket, I trusted both the elements and the population of Oxford to be kind to my purchases while I linguisticked away inside. My trusting nature did not, surprisingly, lead me astray: the outdoors remained refrigerator-like, and no one stole my olive oil, although my digestive biscuits sort of seemed like they had been peered at. I girded my loins and cycled back to campus slowly and frantically. I was not hit by a bus, and I did not fall into a pothole. It's all positive.

The BoT repairman was waiting for me as I rolled into LMH, and in addition to fixing the breaks and the gears – they must have gotten a bit squashed in transit, we think – he also adjusted the seat position, tightened up my bell, and gave me a little bit of electrical tape for a tiny rip in the cover of a break wire. Yayyy! And there you have it.

Fin.