Sunday, March 30, 2008

Thing I Love, #72,483

I'd like to give a heartfelt "Thank you!" to the kind cyclist who rescued me today on Hicks Road near Guadalupe Reservoir. I was sixteen miles from home and nine miles from civilization, and without your generous gift of a spare patch, this would have been an intolerable end to an ignoble week.

On a related note, I don't think I'm going to forget this any time soon. The whole thing was my fault, as is generally the case, but in a particularly dumb way this time. I always bring my patch kit and tools with me every time I ride to work, which is just about 8 miles each way, and really close to transit and stuff should anything happen. The one day that I went on a longish trip was the one day I did not bring my kit, and of course this was also the one day that I did get a flat during a ride. The whole thing is almost comical: it happened at the very tail end of the ride, at precisely the point where I had decided I would turn around. Any earlier or later and it would have been a shorter limp home: it happened in the absolute worst place possible, as far as distance is considered.

I do count myself lucky, though. Not only for the good Samaritan with a patch: also because I had discovered a flat tire on my bike just a few weeks ago, in the comfort of my home, where I could turn to Sloane and take my time figuring out how to safely change a tire. So I was fortunate to have that knowledge fresh in my head when I was sitting in the dirt at the side of the road, cheerfully manhandling rubber.

In totally unrelated news: I have discovered that Picasa web albums have a hard limit of 250 albums. This annoys me. Granted, I'm predisposed to be in a bad mood, but it's especially aggravating because there is no official documentation anywhere explaining this. I still have ample free space left, and I had to dig around online for a while before I found an (unofficial) explanation of the problem.

So, how did I get up to 250 albums in just a few years? First, I post a new album for each of my hikes, which means about 50 a year just from that. Second, I took a ton of pictures in my trip to Japan, and split that into a whole bunch of albums... there's just under 100 albums there. So, that doesn't leave a lot of space for the other, incidental pictures I occasionally take.

As a solution, I think I'll start manually deleting my oldest albums. I haven't decided yet whether to trim them all equally or focus on removing old hikes, which are of minimal interest to people other than me. This is just a heads-up to let everyone know that I'm not trying to disappear myself or rewrite history... I'm just reacting to the situation on the ground. If you happen to want copies of anything, I still keep originals of all my photos on my hard drive and am always happy to share!

3 comments:

  1. You have to love the cycling community. There are very few riders out there ... especially as you were, "out there" ... who would not at least slow down and offer help. And then stop and actually give it if needed. Glad Good Mr. Sam was there for you!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, they're great people. Almost everybody who passed me while I was working slowed down and asked, "Need any help?" Great to see, though hopefully I won't need to take advantage of it in the future!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Glad things ended well. I still need to put air into my bike tires after the cold winter, but hopefully I'll be able to ride mine again, too. I certainly could use the exercise!

    ReplyDelete