Category: Other and blather

A post

Posted on

A what??

This morning the back tire on the Cargobike was flat.

G didn’t wish us success in fixing the flat. At two-and-a-bit years old, she demonstrated a new level of sophistication this morning: "Bike is broken. We have to take the bus. Yes. Need to go to the bus stop!" It wasn’t just the fact that she verbalized the thoughts coherently that struck me. She was insisting, trying to convince us to abandon the repair effort and head for the bus stop, through an argument she thought might be more convincing than "I want to go on the bus!" I’d love to take her on the bus more often, just because she enjoys it. The problem is that it takes two buses plus two significant walks to get to the nursery, and then another walk and another bus to get to work. Repeat, in reverse, to get home. And then fix the bike.

I couldn’t find a hole so I stuck a patch on a dodgy-looking spot on the tube for good luck, even though I don’t think that was leaking, and stuffed the tube back in. Pre-posting edit: Still seems fine a few hours later.

I suspect the seal on the valve. There’s been a very slow leak for a long time and this is the second time I’ve failed to find a hole in the tube. The plan is to ask Hugh to replace the tubes and tires as it’s been on the order of 2500 miles on these ones anyway, and the frequency of flats has gone up. We’d like to swap to Schrader valves but I’m not sure if that’s possible, or a good idea with respect to the hole in the rim. The Cargobike’s huge low-pressure rear tire is, to me, the antithesis of a racing tire, and I just don’t know (yet) why Schrader isn’t standard there. Schraders have been dead reliable for us on our other bikes (we don’t really do above 85psi in this family at the moment).

I suspect Presta valves of a sort of sentience: if you don’t like them, they won’t like you. To compound our particular problem, we had a spiffy aluminum Lezyne pump with a thread-on flexible hose, which was a bad combination with fixing flats on the Presta valve in situ. The hose has to bend, and you have to thread it onto something that itself is held in with a nut threaded onto the valve body — a recipe for letting the air all out as you (I) try to remove the hose after pumping. Gorgeous mini pump. Just somehow akin to a Presta valve in that I can’t make it practical despite knowing others love it. I recently bought a Topeak Road Morph, which has a nice flip-lock mechanism on the head, can be held against the ground by your foot, and comes set up for Presta by default, but which, being meant for road bikes, doesn’t seem to pack a whole lot of air into each stroke. If it would fit next to G’s seat in the box, I’d have the Topeak Joe Blow track pump with me all the time.

Here’s where I stop, read properly, rewrite, add photos, etc. Not. I think I’ll post it like this.

Raisins and rays

Posted on

G is constantly striving to make new mental connections. It’s very visible with the words and phrases she slots, with ever-increasing accuracy, into contexts she thinks we’ve used them in. Small kids are such earnest and industrious learning machines, it’s incredible. To me, in any case, an adult who hasn’t spent a lot of time with kids.

Currently, G believes that we often have small orange fruits called “clemons” in the house, which share some properties with “lemons,” but aren’t yellow and are round, and are more easily peeled and eaten. It’s hard to convince her that they’re really called clementines, because when we say it, we’re clearly announcing that it’s “clemon time!”

I found some evidence of another ambiguity in G’s verbal world, which I have recorded for posterity. I like to try to imagine the conversation between F and G that preceded this.

Wet spider webs (but no spiders)

Posted on

It’s been a bit spidery around here. And we had one day that was wet and windy in a peculiar way that caused all the webs to bead up.

I was glad I’d decided my Panasonic LX3 was pocketable that morning. Here is a “no cycling” cycle bridge garlanded in jewelled webs. Garlanded. In jewelled webs. I’m daring myself to leave that sentence like that. I thought about saying “bejewelled,” but that seemed like taking it a bit too far.

Hallowe’eny! Sort of. Although it’s water droplets, not dust, all over the webs.

Pretttty. And stretchy.

I also saw watery webs at home. I took pictures with my D90, using every lens I have: the kit 18-105mm, the 35mm, and my new Sigma 70-300 “macro” zoom.

When I had picked out my favourites it turned out they were all taken with the Sigma lens.

I wasn’t being systematic with the lenses so I don’t know why.

Some of these photos are cropped, which doesn’t make it easy to judge anything about the lens. Sorry. Not useful!

It was fun playing with where the focal plane sat in the web, and making the droplets light against dark things or dark against the sky.

You’ve noticed, perhaps, that I didn’t focus on the spiders, some of whom were in fact available to pose. I may keep spiders for another post. I have some pictures with that Sigma zoom…but I’ll warn you first.