Impatience and Bike Maintenance

Starting tomorrow, I'm working seven days in a row at the cafe. That's an awful lot of time stocking dressings and toasting sandwiches and slinging soups, and I'm not particularly looking forward to it!

So I decided to make the most out of my day off by doing a little spring cleaning on my bike. I've had my Jamis Explorer for a couple of years now, and I'm trying to make it last for years and years to come by actually maintaining it. I let my last bike rust and deflate outside of my dormitory at KU, and it was a bad decision.

Anyway, I've never done any sort of bike work before (unless you count attaching a headlight to my handlebars), so I had to depend on an expert's help. I considered reading Zinn and the Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance (which is supposed to be the best bike handbook you can buy), but Zinn was a little out of my depth: the book seemed to be too thorough and technical for my needs. All I really wanted to know was what I could do with $20 and a few hours to make my bike ride better longer.

Fortunately, I came across Fred Milson's Complete Bike Maintenance at my local library. Milson's text is much briefer than Zinn's. I also has lots of color pictures with little red arrows on them and chapters with titles like "Know Your Bike" and "Instant Bike Care." Yep, I knew right away that this was the book for me! I gave my bike a quick wash, a thorough lubing, and stuck it back in the garage.

Overall, I'm not sure that my work made an immediate difference. My bike was very clean to begin with (I rarely ride off-road or in bad weather), and all its components seemed well oiled (though grimy) before I started. But the process gave me a chance to be outside and listen to the radio and get grease under my fingernails and feel all handy and capable and coordinated. And I don't get to feel coordinated very often.  ;)

So now that my bike's ready, all that I'm waiting for is spring. Real spring, not this misty, gray-skied, dismal, 40 degrees and windy crap we've been having. I'm ready for green fields and warm breezes and flowers and all that good stuff. So get a move on, spring! I'm waiting!

Suburban Riding

Cycling in Olathe has its challenges. I'm constantly stuck at lights and stopsigns, swerving to avoid overcautious drivers, jostling over bumpy sidewalks, and searching for those ever elusive bike lanes (you know, the ones that go for a half-mile and then mysteriously disappear).

 

But, then again, Olathe is wonderfully flat, so it's easy to conquer miles and miles of road here with minimum pain. And I have to admit that some parts of Olathe are beautiful. Take the shady, verdant streets near my house or the hidden trails and parks tucked away alongside Olathe's busy intersections and strip malls. 

My favorite trail is the loop around Frisco Lake. The trail is smooth and well-tended, the lake is shimmering and clear, and you can see from horizon to horizon over the water's expanse. Usually, the surrounding park is teeming with Canadian geese, men fishing, gaggles of small children chasing ducks, and mothers visiting on park benches. But yesterday afternoon, the park was wonderfully empty and still. The cooler weather had cleared away everyone but the ducks that snoozed on the bank, and this:

  

I don't know if she was a heron or something else, but she had a beautifully spotted neck. She waded through the water delicately, snatching up and gobbling fish that looked at least seven inches long.

It's not often that I catch sight of such natural beauty in the suburbs, but I am grateful for it, and grateful for whatever moved me to haul my bike out yesterday, strap on a helmet, and take on the streets of Olathe on a Tuesday afternoon.