Dirty Fingernails

Today was a bonus day in Menlo Park.  While I'd much rather be making snow angels in Metrowest, there are some things that you only get around to doing when you have a bonus day (I do love this shot from bikeportland.org).  Today, I cleaned my bike!  I've owned my cute red Schwinn for 8 and a half years and I don't think I've ever cleaned it.  I've definitely never cleaned the chain and hubs (gear, whatever, I don't know the terminology).  Again, this is something I should probably be embarrassed about, but everyone has to start somewhere, sometime.  Kind of like when I used to hike the White Mountains in old running shoes.  People would always comment as they passed me and it drove me nuts.  Why call out the beginner?  Beginners already feel desperately awkward and out of place.  

Anyway, my chain was not rusty like the one pictured here, but if you replaced what looks like rust here to grease and gunk, you have my chain (well, my chain 3 hours ago).  More like this:

Gross, I know.  As a result of a gunky chain, my gears are a bit worn in places, which creates some interesting "surprise" shifts every so often.  Not what we're going for, and I will not buy a new bike until I learn to take care of the one I have.  So, I bought myself a chain cleaning tool and went out to the garage with podcasts in my ears and set out to clean the bike.  It was a lot of fun, especially having a garage as my work room.  I've never been the type who just takes everything apart to see how it works, but when I do take things apart, I realize that I like figuring out the mechanics and playing with things.  And a bike is a relatively simple machine to figure out.  So now, I have a clean back hub and chain.  The front crankset (?) is mostly clean, but I think I need to do more work, but I didn't have the right kind of brush to fully clean off all the spikey things.  So that's why my fingernails are dirty.  I scrubbed and scrubbed but couldn't get them clean.

The next thing I'd like to feel confident doing is changing a tire.  As I've said, I've never done this, I've only observed, but changing a tire doesn't seem to be something you just practice in your backyard.  At least, it doesn't make sense to me that I would purposefully take my tire off my wheel.  That seems like it will cause more problems than it will solve, at least in the moment.  I guess I'll just wait for my first flat, which I hope does not happen on my ride to school.

Shout out to Coleman, who once upon a time gave me a very basic bike repair book.  At the time, I thought, "he knows I don't ride my bike, that my bike is in pieces without tires, and that I only wished I rode my bike."  I didn't think it was a very good present.  Today, I was happy to have it for reference.  It even has a handy guide about what you should do every week, month, and half-year as maintenance.  Now I just need a few more bonus days to try all this out.

I've started watching the HBO John Adams miniseries.  If I take it to be historically accurate, lawyers would wear what looks like a graduation robe and hood (just open over their clothes).  So that's what they're for!  I have mine in my closet...maybe I should wear it to teach.  Just to remind the kids what they are working toward.

Tomorrow, I'm going to see Milk with Bec in the Castro, home of Milk himself.  More on that after the flick...