Biking

So I asked a good friend of mine if she would like to go on a bike ride today, I do this thinking that I will just pump up my tires and go. It turns out that my tire has a hole in the inner tube, so I fight with it to get the wheel off and ready to change the inner tube. This is kind of an older bike that has a disc brake instead of the standard calipers. I finally get it all ready and run it over to the bike shop where I am informed that my tire has a giant tear in it and that there is no point in a new inner tube without a new tire. 

I get the new tire, costing $21 instead of the $8 I expected. I take it home and begin to reattach it and find that part of the bolt that adjusts the brakes in the back is stripped. So I grab my friend and head over to Wal-Mart (blech) and get a washer so I can tighten the bolt without getting to the stripped part. Finally I get home and get everything back together only to find that the brake cable came off up on the handle end which takes me a while to fix. After all this the bolt that gave me the trouble in the first places completely strips and makes the back brakes unusable. 

At this point I decide that its not worth it and that I will work on it another day. I take a friends bike and discover part way along the ride that one of the front gears is unusable, the biggest one, and that the handlebars are dangerously loose in the front to back direction. 

None of this put me in a bad mood remarkably, in fact I had an amazing time. We get to campus hang out with a third person, bake cookies. (I even wore a "man-pron." It's like an apron but for a man) After it gets kind of dark (read: pitch black in the woods) we make our way home. The handlebars at this point are so loose that it takes all of my forearm strength to keep them upright. My legs are dying and I ran into a boulder. 

Overall though, it was an amazing time. Wonderful fellowship, good exercise and perfect weather. It was an incredible day.