48. DEATH BY NEGLECT.

I killed our car. The second car that is. The one we used to do little things like take our child to be educated, shop for food to continue living and take the occasional holiday.

Don't need to worry about that last one anymore since we won't be taking any holidays in the near future on account of I killed our car and replacing dead cars is shockingly expensive.

How did I kill our car?

By completely failing to replace the oil that has been leaking out of it for the last 6 months is how. I'm not even going to try and defend myself. As I said to my wife after meeting her on the side of the road where she had been sitting for 3 hours after the engine seized up - 'I don't know what I was thinking....'

On the bright side - I'm not going to be short of opportunities to exercise for a while since a whole lot of the things we used to do in the now deceased car will have to be done on foot or bike.

In fact I have no doubt when my daughter is climbing the steps to receive her Olympic Gold medal in whatever it is she will be looking back to this time as the start of her long rise to athletic excellence.

See. Bright side.

I would now like to take the opportunity to warn readers of an approaching expletive. 

I am. 

A fucking. 

Idiot.

47. JUST GOING FOR A RIDE........maybe not.

So it's been two weeks now since I've ridden my bike in anger thanks entirely to the great hijacker of personal time that is the 7 year old's school holidays. 

I did manage a couple of hours at daughter speed along the Newcastle waterfront last week and while a year ago that would have had me sucking in oxygen like a stranded whale, now that I am a finely tuned athlete it's hardly the kind of pace that's going to get my heart rate above resting unless I did the whole thing with my brakes on while peddling with one leg and bunny hopping every 5 metres. And I'm shit at bunny hopping.

We did see a pod of dolphins off the breakwater which was pretty excellent. 

This country is awesome.

It has made me think though. How the hell is anyone supposed to get the time to exercise these days. I'm not so much complaining for me - I don't get to complain given my current situation work wise (in fact if you catch me complaining you should well and truly deliver a swift kick to whatever part of me is available and most likely to cause me maximum discomfort) - but seriously. 

When I was working morning shifts I listened to a lot of radio in the car during the 0530 - 0630 bracket so I got to hear the daily litany of traffic chaos on Sydney's main roads. Putting aside the sense of smug satisfaction it gave me (it's a long way to anything from our house but at least there's no traffic), it clearly demonstrated the sheer number of people that start work at that ridiculous hour of the day who presumably don't return home until after 5 or 6pm at night no doubt entirely shagged.

My wife is in the same boat. Out at 0530 and back at 5pm arse busted.

The way we work these days seems almost deliberately designed to ensure we don't have the energy to escape the grasp of our corporate overlords even if we didn't all have 30 year mortgages to ensure our ongoing compliance.

When I finally made the effort to be slightly less morbidly obese last year, I at least had the advantage of shift work which gave me a significant number of daylight hours in which to walk or ride or carry big logs up and down hills. 

Here's a thought. Instead of attempting to eliminate all physical activity from the work place lest the employer get sued because I hurt my back or sprained my dainty wrist, maybe it should become accepted that making it possible to get more physically fit (possibly, dare I say it, even during work hours) is an actual priority in the workplace. And maybe that should cut both ways. 

If, just say, I was employed in a job that required me to occasionally restrain a person and then hold that person for a period while one of my workmates went to draw up the injections, MAYBE my employer should devote more time to my readiness for this than to tell me how to lift boxes during the annual mandatory manual handling workshop. And MAYBE I shouldn't be able to work in this area if I wasn't willing to utilise whatever time my employer gave me to prepare myself properly.

I'm game if they are.

46. LOOKING LIKE AN ACTUAL BIKE.

In large part for my own benefit...

Behold the no speed, chainless, seatless, air in tyreless Thomas Slackline (2013).

Morale was getting low, so last week I put all the bits I have so far collected together, to form a shape that is, apart from being entirely unrideable, not entirely dissimilar to an actual rideable bike. Very attractive I think.

Missing from this picture are the chain, cassette, inner tubes (hence the rather flat appearance of both tyres), brakes and rear shifter (don't need a front shifter as I plan to have nothing to shift up the front - a decision I might live to regret were I not a finely tuned athlete with legs of steel and no need of the lower end gears that are merely a crutch for the weak and powerless), plus of course anything to sit on. Though all the hip and crazy youth don't seem that committed to having usable seats on their hip and crazy bikes anyway so maybe I just don't worry about that.

It's no co-incidence that all the missing bits are the most complicated bits to attach, as these are the parts most likely to expose me as a complete fraud in the bike building stakes. 

You will know when I have ordered and attempted the installation of these mechanisms when this Blog goes offline for about 3 weeks and then returns as a cutting edge political comment Blog (with a slight lean to the left of centre) that doesn't mention cycling at all except to trumpet the professionalism and service of whatever bike mechanic I end up paying to put it all together (once I regather the bits I throw off my balcony and into the surrounding bushland).

An alternative to that option is almost identical, except the break will be 6 weeks and the new Blog will be focused on the shortcomings of the health system of which I will have been a client after horrendously crashing what I THOUGHT was a fully assembled bike when everything I have attached to it becomes DEtached the first time I ride it in anger.

Fingers crossed for option 1.

45. SEE WHAT I'M DEALING WITH HERE...

See what I'm dealing with here? That's the thorn I found sticking through the tyre of my daughter's bike last week. She'd actually ridden around on it for a good couple of days while her tyre slowly deflated because it had so cleanly punctured it that it was sitting through the tyre and into her inner tube neatly enough that the leak was nearly sealed around it.

Not so neatly that it didn't deflate at the time most inconvenient to us of course. 

And it's not a puny tyre. No kevlar or genetically engineered spiders faeces or anything like some of the kit you can get these days but still - very annoying.  

I haven't had a puncture like this since I swapped out my normal inner tubes for thorn resistant ones last year some time, but it does make me reconsider the whole idea of going tubeless on the new bike.

Tubeless tyres are one of the many MANY innovations that seem to have poured into cycling in the 15 or so years since I last purchased a bicycle. It's one of those things that gets referred to in the cycling press in such a way as to make me feel like a total caveman for not having done it years ago (like dual suspension and owning a frame that has been tested thoroughly by NASA on the International Space Station). 

What you do (after making sure your rims and tyres are fully compatible of course) is pour some liquid sealant into your tubes, inflate the tyres rapidly enough so that they seat themselves properly in the rims (requiring of course some kind of motorised pump and special valves) and then slosh the sealant around inside the now inflated tyre until it's filled up all the gaps. 

Assuming all this has gone well, the still liquid sealant then fills any small punctures that arise during use of the bike, theoretically removing the threat of punctures from your world forever. 

Brilliant.

I hate this stuff. 

Why?

Because despite the fact that it sounds like a great idea that has been proven to work pretty well by the aforementioned mountain biking astronauts, I will almost certainly NOT be doing this to my bike and the main reason is embarrassingly obvious...

I am, in fact, a caveman.

44. INSERT CUP A INTO STEM B

Well it’s raining again. Mind you it’s been raining all week and then some in the big city (Sydney not Cessnock) so for a change they’re all up to their necks in water and I get to look confused when I hear about it instead of the other way around. So I can’t complain too much right?

Does mean I haven’t been able to get out for a ride as much as I would like to, and by that I mean absolutely bloody well need to, lest all the good work I've done turning my soft and spindly legs into storehouses of barely contained raw power just waiting to be unleashed in athletic endeavour, go to tragic waste. 

I suspect this enforced inactivity may have contributed to my criminal lack of motivation in the whole ride a bike, blog about riding a bike sphere. I realise I haven’t written anything on this blog since my rather random ranting of last week so shame on me for letting down my loyal readership........all 7 or 8 of you.

In an effort to kick my arse out of this shameful slackness I bit the bullet and actually put some stuff on the bike today.

To be more precise I used the thingy marked ‘A’ instead of the considerably more expensive thingy marked ‘B’....

 to put these thingy’s (which when put all together are known as a 'headset')..

...by means of the process pictured on the left in the picture below to end up with an installed headset as pictured on the right in the picture below...

All clear?

And besides one or two dodgy moments when I thought I had jammed the silly thing in sideways and would have to cut it all out with a hacksaw or something (remedied via the judicial application of the my state of the art wacking hammer), it all went very smoothly.

Brilliant.

43. IN DEFENCE OF OPTIMISM.

Be honest with yourself. Doesn't it make it just a little bit easier to sit around in comfort when you hold the opinion that nothing you do will make any difference anyway.

Is it a co-incidence that the societies that tend to think this way, which is to say any culture that has successfully invented the talk back radio show, are also the ones that have it pretty good right where they are?

It's no use coming up with alternate forms of energy - those other bastards won't do anything and we'll all get done over.

No point paying taxes - our dirtbag politicians will just waste it all anyway.

Screw doing anything about the ongoing obscenity that is large chunks of Africa - THEIR dirtbag politicians will just steal it all, turn it into bombs and send it back to us strapped to some boat person.

Do you reckon the farmer who gets up every day in some country where they wouldn't know what to do with a triple soy latte if one landed in their laps, to tend the 13 cows that are the life of not just him but his or her entire family, can afford to think like that?

For that matter, do you think those struggling up the Kokoda Track, or carving a living out of the Australian bush or insert whatever other noble endeavor you like at this point, had the luxury of thinking 'Ah f**k it all, what's the point it's all going to end up being wrecked by some other incompetent anyway'.

The hell they could.

We can of course. Because if we do nothing we still get to have our TV's and our cars and our lattes (yes I am aware that the use of the latte to illustrate 1st world hubris is a tired and much beaten about cliche) and our 2 thousand dollar mountain bikes. 

At least until the guy with 13 cows notices we have all this stuff and seem to be taking no action whatsoever to try and maybe cut him and his family in on the action and decides maybe he and his mates should do something about that....

Or...

Maybe we stop making the excuse that someone else is going to put all our good work to the sword and demand that they don't. Instead of asking our Politicians over and OVER what the price of a litre of milk is or whether they got pissed in university or whatever. Instead of demanding they adopt position B instead of position A over and OVER and then calling them back flippers entirely lacking a moral backbone when they do exactly that. Instead of that, maybe we could make the assumption that most of them didn't get into politics with the specific aim of screwing us all over and get them to accomplish a few things. 

Maybe we adopt the attitude of all those people from our past that we profess to worship and make the decision that a bit of sacrifice today is a small price to pay for the entirely self serving opportunity to look back in 30 years and say as a generation....

'We built that. Now say nice things about us on your radio show.'

42. GEEZ. WHERE DID THAT WEEK GO?

Oops.

Skip one blog and then another and all of a sudden it's next week. Crap.

Ok then. I'm probably going to back off on the 3 times a week posting for a little bit while I continue to churn through the award winning, intellectually invigorating and massively entertaining 100 Days of Drawing Challenge. 

Looking at the number of times each of my recent posts has been viewed, even if I get a 100% hit rate on self harming directly related to this news that shouldn't keep our health system jammed up for longer than a few minutes...even better if a couple of those people are in another country (though if you're in the States please make sure your insurance is all paid up).

......just to be sure - please don't self harm. It's not funny or clever.

Might take a break for this post from the whole cycling thing just to raise a couple of things I wish happened last week that didn't.

1. I wish Julia Gillard had smacked Howard Sattler in the face. For that matter, she could do a lot worse electorally speaking than book herself onto all of the programs that choose to operate with his particular style (I'm thinking Alan Jones, Andrew Bolt, possibly Ray Hadley if he still has a show...) and haul off on all of them. I'm sure she wouldn't have to wait long for what most courts in the land would consider just cause. Probably wouldn't even have to sit down in the case of Alan Jones before he'd something ludicrous.

2. I wish Joel Madden had fronted the media to bring to their attention the absurdity of running the news that he - the heavily tattooed rock star famous for being a....heavily tattooed rock star - had been caught with grass in his hotel room.

This reminds me of the time that snowboarder at the Olympics got  caught with marijuana in his urine. Ooh. A snowboarder. That smokes grass. Shocking.

I also wish I'd stubbed my toe on a huge gold nugget while feeding the chooks. But that's probably pushing it.