As expected Thursday was extra shitty 💩

Didn’t rain on Thursday, and I got the bike wheel ordered, it was under $200, actually $171 with tax, I conceede I probably could have done better ordering it online but I needed some advice form the woke bike shop.

Of course they didn’t have the wheel in stock, so they had to order it and add the shipping plus their markup into the cost. And it won’t arrive until next Thursday. So no riding next week to work. And it’s going to be nice weather, at least for part of the week as I stare at my broke down bike a home. And then they couldn’t order the wheel with schrader valve, so they ordered on with a presta valve and said they could drill it out to fit the larger schrader valve. I was concerned about drilling a larger hole in the rim, but the woke bike shop didn’t seem so worried about it. That said, while I probably have the drill, I might pay the shop to make the change, as I don’t want to mess around with a new wheel. I totally expected the cost, and I’m glad I’m sticking with OEM but I still find it to be such a hack to be drilling out a larger hole in my brand new rim.

They said to transfer over the tube, gears, and brake would be $35 but I think I’d rather do that myself, both for the experience and because I want to save a bit of money as possible and do as much bike work myself. I am just not comfortable will drilling a new rim like that, maybe it’s silly. Maybe I can do it myself, I have a drill and can go carefully. I want to use the old wheel, and pull the spokes from it, and learn the ins and outs of working with spokes, so they next time I break a spoke, I can replace it myself. Mechanics are fine, and they have their place, but most things honestly on a bike you just throw away and replace these days. They have specialized tools but an inexpensive mountain bike, much of the tools are a spoke key, a hex wrench, a cassette puller, and apparently for the brake disks, you’re supposed to use a Torx-25 and not a hexkey which I was using but was told was actually wrong. I have set of Torx keys and will now use the proper to. Disposing of rim kind of sucks – although I can probably toss it in somebody’s bin, or if it’s carbon fiber, maybe I can burn it. Don’t tell a liberal. If it’s aluminum, I guess I could stick it in the attic and some point I’ll accumulate enough scrap for my $1.02 check from visiting the scrap yard.

Presta valves are popular, as they are standard with tubeless tires which are popular now with road bikes and mountain bikes. But I like having a inner tube, because it’s cheaper to replace and patch when it’s inevitably gets holes in it with all the glass that people toss out their car windows, or rocks and prickers on the trail. 29 inch inner tubes are at every Walmart. And I usually carry an extra. Plus then I can keep them full with Fix-a-Flat which has really kept me from getting flats in recent months – and the one time I got a screw through the tire, it didn’t leak until I pulled the screw. Rode for literally a week with the roofing screw in the tire. Fix-a-Flat works well.

Then work was complete shit yesterday. I got in this data job on Wednesday, where I had to parse out email addresses for several thousand constituent letters, but it wasn’t so easy due to various issues with the formatting, like the reply-to not being bracketed.