Back to the Salt Mines

Today was my first day back to work after last week's vacation. It was also my first commute in over a week, as well as my first chance to really try out my black Cross Check after some maintenance last week, replacing the drive train. I have been doing some riding, such as shopping and a few errands, but these are only 2-3 miles at a time. It has been over a week since I have ridden ten miles or more at a time.

It seems that my body hasn't returned to work mode yet. I doubt that I slept any longer than three hours last night. My internal alarm clock hasn't yet reset itself to my early to bed, early to rise schedule (by the way, I have been on this schedule for many years and have yet to become healthy, wealthy or anything even remotely approaching wise. Ben Franklin, you suck!)

Since I have been commuting by bike I have honed my routine so that by now I have a finely tuned system of preparing for work. I get up, grab my electric shaver on the way to the bathroom, shave, brush teeth, hop in shower, dry off, grab clothes that have been conveniently placed on a chair the night before, get dressed, open the front door, grab the paper and retire to the "library" while I skim the paper for approximately twelve minutes. This is the point today where things started to take a bad turn. As I arose from the "reading chair" and pressed the handle, the water rose to almost the top of the bowl. I knew I couldn't leave it like this all day, so I grabbed the handy dandy plumber's helper to try to remedy the situation. In my haste to get going to work, I must have been a tad overzealous in my plunging. Before I knew it, water was cascading over the rim right onto the entire front of my shorts. Since I have always had a policy against riding my bike covered in raw sewage, I removed the shorts and put on my Rapha knickers which happened to be right there.

At this point it was starting to get a little later than my normal leaving time, so I grabbed the bike and headed downstairs to the street. I was two blocks away before I realized I had neglected to turn on my lights. This time of year it is fairly light when I start to leave, so it isn't really a big deal. I could have done without the headlights, but I really don't like riding on the major streets without a bright tail light. That is the reason I bought the DiNotte 400R, which is one of the brightest bike lights available. I have noticed on the several occasions I have been without a rear light (either my fault or electronic failure, there is a lot more honking going on than usual, and I don't mean geese flying overhead. Drivers don't seem to appreciate it when I am traveling in stealth mode. These lights aren't cheap, but they have sales quite often (and how much is your safety worth?).

I stopped and quickly turned on the lights before I got to Olympic, which is the first major street that I turn onto.

Things were going fine for the next couple miles, until it occurred to me that I forgot my phone. I'm not one of those people that is on the phone all the time, and I definitely wouldn't be talking on the phone while riding. In fact, I keep the phone in my pannier, so I would need to stop and get off the bike to retrieve it. I just think of having the phone with me as a safety measure. Along with my tools, patches and spare tube, just another thing I can turn to in case of an emergency. Since I was already a couple miles into my ride, I decided to forego the phone for today.

The way things were going this morning, I am fortunate that I didn't have a repeat of the incident I had a couple years ago on my ride home. I neglected to engage the locking mechanism on my pannier, and after one gigantic pothole too many, it bounced right off my rack and landed in the middle of Olympic Boulevard during rush hour. My pannier contains my work clothes from that day, my wallet, my phone and my repair accessories. Noticing a sudden speediness to my bike, I looked behind me and there it was. I pulled over, ran out into the street dodging traffic and retrieved it. Fortunately, the normally crazy drivers were kind enough to use evasive measures to avoid hitting it, so everything was in tact.

Anyway, back to today. I was really dragging. My get-up-and-go not only got up and went, it slapped me around a little first and slammed the door in my face on its way out.

I made it to work without incident, and rushed up to have my morning tea. I normally have three cups of tea in the morning over a three-hour period, but I think polished them off in less than an hour.

To add insult to injury, when I went down to the small cafe in the lobby of our office building to get my daily sparkling water, cashews and banana, there were no bananas. My whole routine was down the tubes today. When will this madness end? The woman at the counter charged me for the banana and personally delivered it an hour or so later. On top of that when I went down to purchase a lunch beverage, she gave me another banana gratis. That at least helped alleviate the ill feelings caused by the undesirable banana situation this morning.

Of course, there was nothing that could alleviate the tiredness situation. I could barely keep my eyes open all day.

It was one of those days where I contemplated taking the bus home, but thought better of it later, after I had some coffee (which I rarely do, but extreme circumstances call for extreme measures). I made it home safely, but after a day of many cups of tea and some coffee, I hope I don't have a repeat of last night.

As for the Cross Check, everything seems to be working great.