Rhapsodies

I had a crazy evening yesterday.

I was heading downtown for a meeting when I stopped at one of my favorite art stores for supplies when I discovered something very important was missing, my bike chain.

After the brief panic I realized where it was. You see a couple of weeks ago I’d finally gotten some nice strong straps to put an old milk carton on to my bike rack as a nice cheap basket. It’s been great. Not only has it doubled (maybe even tripled) my carrying capacity it means that anytime I’m not carrying anything extra it means the backpack goes into the basket which does wonders for my back not to mention the problem of overheating caused by the fact that when you are riding hard a backpack is like wearing a very thick sweater vest.

There have been a few bugs to work out. It took a while to get used to what it does to my center of gravity as well as breaking with the added inertia, but the biggest problem is security. Since noting is strapped down in the basket, unless your going straight home you have to take everything with you after you lock up.

Which brings me back to my little drama with the bike chain. A bad habit I’ve been getting into is rather than putting the bike chain around handlebar where it belongs when I’m in a hurry I’ve been just tossing it in the basket… or in one of the canvas shopping bags I’m using.  So that’s where it was yesterday evening… in the canvas bag in my kitchen rather than around my handlebars at the Barnes & Noble downtown.

Fortunately I was lucky. A very cool concierge let me stow the bicycle in their storage unit for the hour and a half the meeting took and later I was able to keep it in the corner at a bar I was at for a social meet up. But with any luck this experience will be enough of a shock to keep from doing it too often… One does not want to stick one’s finger in an electrical socket too many times.