MeghanIsMe

For Armiphlage and anyone else interested, my write-up about assembling the bike trailer I ordered!

The trailer arrived today (that was March 27) and I assembled it to make sure everything was there and undamaged. It's still pretty chilly out, though it's supposed to get to 0 later, so I put it together in the living room under Ella and Purrsephone's watchful eyes.

The quality seems ok. One review talked about poor quality of the tack welds holding the metal bottom plate of the cargo box to the frame, and I don't know welding very well but I agree with that. If they break, I can use zip-ties or something.

Another review said the quality of the wheels was awful. Before putting them on the axles, I took one tire off to look at the inside of the rim. The rim tape is not as nice as the fabric-based stuff on my bike's rims, but it'll probably do the job. None of the spokes seemed in danger of puncturing through it. The rim and tires look generally servicable as far as I can tell.

The axles were not attached to the wheels, so I put them on and attached them with the appropriate hardware: washers and snap-rings. The trailer came with a snap ring pliers. Another reviewer said it was the wrong size, but I had no problem with it. That reviewer also pointed out that unless you grease the axles, the whole attachment is just metal rotating against metal, and that seems like a bad idea. I greased the axle with white lithium grease before installing. It if needs to be regreased, it wouldn't be horrible to take the axle back out. It came with twice the number of washers and snap rings needed too.

The cargo area is pretty big! Ella fits with lots of room to spare, though she looks a bit concerned about this strange box she's in. I'm pretty sure a whole grocery order will fit in there. I'm going to find something to use as a cross-piece between the front and back corners around wheel level because cargo could easily lean against the fabric wall and push it against a wheel.

The whole thing is pretty big and heavy, actually. Fortunately, there are a couple of vinyl hooks in the wall in the storage room that hold it up nicely. The bike fits underneath, right where I'd been keeping it, so I don't need to take the wheels off to make it fit somewhere.

I'm really excited about showing up for my next grocery order pickup, sitting there in a parking spot with my bike and trailer to meet the employee coming out with the order. Given that this is Regina, they'll probably have never seen that before!

It came with a couple of little angled metal pieces with small projections at one end. I have no idea what they are and they didn't seem necessary for assembly and are not pictured in the directions.

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My first trip to get groceries on the 30th was successful! I wrote:

It's supposedly -3 out right now, but it feels warmer. I have to pick up groceries today so I wanted to see if I could get the trailer set up, and it turns out it was pretty simple. I removed the skewer from the rear quick release (QR), put the hitch plate between the lever part (I don't know if it has a precise name) and the frame, and put the skewer back in and tightened it. I had thought that the little indent on the hitch plate looked too small for the inboard end of the lever part of the QR to fit into, but it's actually just about perfect. I walked it around a little bit with the trailer attached and all seems good!

And later that day:

It was a success.
Riding on flats wasn't too different: I had to go down maybe a gear. When I was on a hill I could *really* tell I was on a hill!

The last set of fenders I had would have been long enough to keep wheel spray from flying up and into the trailer, but the set I have now is not. If there's any snow or rain or water, I'll need to put the cover on in it. Wheel spray refreezing on my trailer left little icicles on it!

The store employee who brought my order out didn't comment on the bike and trailer, but I think he smiled.

Someone on the Facebook Solitary Cycling community made a post asking the people who are "still" using manual gear shifting instead of electronic systems why they are doing so. This person does not seem to occupy the same existence I do, or even a neighboring one. I did not leave my answer, which is that my bike is 24 years old and those systems didn't exist when I bought it, that I don't have thousands of dollars to drop on a bike with bells and whistles that I don't need, and that even if I did, I wouldn't.

I have speculated about why, but I take some perverse joy in having and using hardware that other people don't like or understand. My bike is probably part of that. It's now old enough that the handlebars are non-standard size, and it uses rim brakes. It seems like it's getting harder to find bikes with rim brakes instead of disc brakes, and somehow that makes me want to cling all the harder to mine out of perverse stubbornness. It has a triple chainring gear train too (with only 7 gears in back instead of the 10 or more that seem common now), which is now seen as either a mountain bike thing or sometimes a specialized touring setup though some people say you don't even need them for that. Maybe eventually I won't be able to find parts, but I know there are people with bikes far older than mine that keep them going.

And it makes me think of my taste in computer hardware, though my reasons for those preference are, I think, more thought out and based in real needs and my use-case for them. If someone gave me a $200, 24", wide-screen monitor, I'd probably sell it and buy half a dozen old 19" 5:4 ones for $20 a piece to make sure I have extras in case mine die. Those are what I want. Bigger and/or widescreen ones do not work as well for me. I don't think I'd even want larger ones, even if they were 5:4 instead of widescreen. 19" is just fine for where they sit on my desk.

There are so many weird, boutique keyboard out there now, too, that save space by removing "unused keys" like page up/page down or home/end. I use those *constantly* when editing anything with code or text. I will fight you for my home/end page up/page down keys. I saw one lately with a programmable LED display on it too! Cute, but pretty gimmicky, no? And I type with my keyboard on a sliding tray mostly under my desk, so on-keyboard displays do me no good because I can't see my keyboard while I'm typing! (Says the girl who wants to paint her Kinesis keyboard pink. No I'm not always rational.)

Anyway, speaking of computer hardware, I'm going out tomorrow to buy a $20 video card from a seller on FB Marketplace that should let me attach 3 more monitors to my desktop if I want to. I don't know where I'd put a 5th one right now, but I'd like to have the option for when I figure it out. If I had 2-tall mounting pole, I'd definitely put it up.

I had a sticker on my bike helmet reading "I don't have a gender I have anxiety." I really loved that sticker: it became my favorite one on my helmet. But I've realized that I do have a gender, and, in fact, I always did. It just took a long time to figure that out. So it's time for that one to go. But I'm preserving it on a piece of paper to go in my files, because that's the kind of sentimental girl I am.

I got new tires for my bike! Without the technical stuff: someone on Kijiji was selling a slightly used pair of commuter tires that usually cost $40 - $60 each for $20 for the pair. My tires are showing their age and I was angsting about spending a chunk of money on good tires to replace them, so it was great to find these! The seller was in northwest Regina, so I picked them up on my bike.

I found a stepstool in the dumpster at my condo building yesterday, so now I have a stepstool and can stop standing on stacked pain cans or a rolling chair. I was planning to buy one sooner or later, so that was a nice find!

Bike tire technical commentary: I've been running Gatorskin 28c tires for many years and I trust them. When I was tracking things, I've ridden as far as 2000 miles without a flat. The ones I bought are Armadillo All Condition 25c tires, which are supposedly comparable to the Gatorskins in puncture resistance.
I was actually thinking about moving to a set of wider 32c tires next time, so having the narrower 25c isn't ideal. They need to be inflated to a higher pressure and will ride more stiffly, and possibly have less cornering grip. But I do really need new tires, and I'm pretty conservative when cornering anyway since that's how I broke my wrist back in the day.

These tires seem kind of weird to me. I would have thought that most people buying narrower tires like this would have them on road bikes and want to maximize speed, which these heavier, stiffer tires aren't designed for. But I also would have thought that people who want heavier duty tires that will stand up to commuting and minimize flats would typically want wider tires than this.

*shrugs* I dunno. I'm going to put them on my bike today and see how it goes. One of them - the one that was on the back, I'm sure - does have a little wear, but the other one looks nearly new. I think I'll get a lot of miles out of them, if they're as good as reviews suggest.

Sheldon Brown's website says you should *always* have the tire with the least wear on the front of the bike because it's the most important one for handling in emergencies, and is the one mostly likely to cause serious injury if it suddenly goes totally flat. I think that makes sense, but i also am a pretty heavy person who needs a really solid back wheel and who doesn't actually go so fast that a crash is likely to cause serious injury, so I'm going to put the worn one on the front. It won't be more worn than the back one for long anyway!

ETA: These tires were far easier to mount on the rims than the Gatorskins have been. I didn't even need a tire lever for it. That makes me a little bit concerned, to be honest. Still, they seemed fine on my little test ride. Maybe they're a little stiffer: maybe it's confirmation bias. I did realize that some of my inner tubes are for 28-35 tires, so they aren't going to work in these tires. But I have several that are sized 25-32, so those will be good.

So my bike is back home with a new derailleur that isn't black! They also used the blue casing that I'd bought to do the work myself so there are two more things that aren't black! I would have liked pink casing, but the only stuff I could find is made by Jagwire and is pricy. They adjusted the headset bearing for me but couldn't completely remove all the play in it because of wear.

I think my bike is probably older than the kid who checked me out at the register.

I had random debilitating fear this morning. I still managed to get Miriam to work and back and go to Jysk with her to buy curtains, but I was pretty useless after that. After napping for a while, though, I was feeling rather better, and was functional enough to drive out to get my bike. And after dinner I'm going to go for a ride, which will also help, I think.

We asked whether there is bike parking at the apartment buildings we're looking at renting in in Regina. "We don't typically put out bike racks," said the rep.

I've only lived in the Netherlands for a bit over a year, and I haven't even done much biking around, but I'm already so used to the bike culture here that that response feels really weird to me. Like, how could you *possibly* not provide bike parking? It makes no sense!

*sighs* Welcome back to North American urban planning... It actually makes me a little angry. It doesn't have to be like this.

We're having bad luck with online ordering lately.

We bought a bike for me on the 6th that was supposed to be delivered in five days. We've had no updates so I called the organizing company that coordinates the sales. They said they'd look into it and call back this afternoon. It is now 5:03 with no update.

We ordered a power supply for our XBox One from what we're now quite sure is a scammer. We're basically out 30 euros on that.

I ordered a face mask for myself from Folksy, the UK equivalent of Etsy, on th 24th. I got an email on the 27th saying it was posted, but nothing since. I emailed the seller yesterday for an update but heard nothing.

Danae and I are going to buying parts for a computer for her and I am nervous...

Typing is a bit difficult with my injured hand, so Miriam suggested I copy her update over so folks know what's up.

This past week has sucked. A lot. And most of the bad things happened to Chris, not me. I can't imagine how much 'fun' zie is having.

On Monday Chris was on the way to zir intake/orientation as a food delivery cyclist for Thuisbezorgd, the local GrubHub equivalent. Zir phone fell off the bike holder and cracked really badly. Possibly because of this, or because of other reasons, the phone ran out of battery and locked, and Chris did not have the SIM card PIN memorized, and so couldn't unlock it. A functioning phone is necessary for orientation, so Chris' orientation got rescheduled to Friday and zie headed home. Of course, at that point zie had to find the way home in an unfamiliar city without directions. This naturally took way longer than it should have.
Then, while biking home in the pouring rain, zie got hit by a moped. Zie was mostly fine except for a nasty scrape on the knee and some achey muscles.

Fastforward to Chris' intake at the new job on Friday. They use electric bikes. Zie was going about 20 km/h when the tires got caught in the rails for a tram and zie fell, scraping both hands, the previously unscraped knee, and doing some kind of soft-tissue damage to the left knee and ankle. Because of these injuries Chris was taking transit home, but sitting down wasn’t comfortable so zie was standing. And because zir hands were scraped up, zie was not holding on to the rail very firmly. The train lurched, and zie fell over, which slammed zir right rib cage into a railing.

I offered to call an Uber to pick zie up, but zie ended up getting the rest of the way home on transit.
At that point Chris could barely put weight on the left leg, and the ribs hurt really badly whenever zie tried to sit down, stand up, lie down, or get out of bed. Sitting still or lying still did not hurt too badly, and so zie decided to take some acetaminophen with codeine and after watching some cute animal videos, go to sleep. When zie woke up and tried to get out of bed to go to the bathroom, however, we began to suspect that the ribs might be cracked.

Note that the Dutch system is a little different in these sorts of circumstances. If you have a life threatening emergency, you call 112 and an ambulance comes. They assess your situation and I think give first aid, and if they determine that your life is in imminent danger, they take you to the emergency room. If you are not in imminent danger, but clearly need emergency treatment, if I understand correctly, they leave and you have to arrange your own transportation to the hospital. If your situation is urgent but not emergency room urgent, and it is out of business hours, you call the huisartsenpost, which I think is staffed on a rotating basis by all the GPs in the area, and works out of a hospital.
It was around midnight, so we called the huisartsenpost. The women we spoke with was very nice and competent, but apparently the emergency room at the hospital the Amstelveen area huisartsenpost works out of was closed, so if we went there, Chris would not be able to get x-rays. They told us to call the clinic at one of the other nearby hospitals if we felt the need for x-rays.

The next nearest hospital is the VUmc, which is on a university campus. I tried to find their equivalent of an urgent care clinic (ie. not the emergency room but open 24 hours) and couldn't find it. I tried calling three different numbers. Two of them hung up on me, and one put me on hold for way too long.
I had also posted on an expat community asking what we are supposed to do in this sort of situation. In particular I did not want to put Chris through the trauma of going to the emergency room and then have them turn us away because it wasn't life-threatening. Most of the people giving advice said we should just go to the emergency room. So I ordered an uber.

When we got in I told the driver to take us to the VUmc emergency room. He drove us somewhere on the VUmc campus and said he was going to let us out there. I asked if this was the emergency room entrance. He looked around, pulled away from the curb, did a U-turn, pulled into a driveway across from where he had initially stopped, and said we had arrived. We were about a 6 minute walk (normal walking pace, not limping injured walking pace) from the emergency room. I was so angry with that Uber driver. ESPECIALLY if someone asks to go to the emergency room, you don't just drop them off wherever. If you don't know where the emergency room is, you say so so that they can look it up, or you look it up yourself. It does occur to me now that maybe I misunderstand how Uber works. I told the Uber app that we needed a ride to VUmc, because that is where the emergency room is. But where he dropped us off is also VUmc. Maybe with Uber they will only take you to the point that is indicated in the app? But if that's true, then when someone tells you to take them somewhere other than what they indicated through the app, you should tell them that so that they can edit their destination using the app. This goes doubly if the place they are trying to get to is the emergency room.

Anyway, we finally got to the emergency room shortly before 1am. By 2am zie had been admitted and seen by a doctor. By 3:15 the x-rays were done and we knew there were no broken bones, but they wanted to do an ultrasound to make sure there was no internal bleeding. By 4am we knew that there was no bleeding and everything was normal. Another specialist came and examined zir knee because it was really swollen. She suspects that the ligaments may be torn. They gave Chris some painkillers (a mix of a strong anti-inflammatory and acetaminophen), a prescription for more of both, and by 5:30am we were in an Uber on our way home. No money changed hands, but there is a deductible of up to 385 per year that will apply, so I expect a bill from insurance of, at most, 385.

I was going to show you the trees outside our window that I don't recognize, but my card reader is not working so the picture is stuck on my Pentax. Instead, here's my new two-wheeled companion. This is Curiosity.



Danae ordered him for me after I picked him out from a company called Cheapass Bikes' online inventory. I was hesitant to buy without the chance to try it for fit, but there's also a 24-hour return policy and this seemed like the best way to get a reasonably priced bike (about 160 euros) for me soon.

He'll take a little getting used to, but I think we'll have a good relationship. Dutch folks have a cycling style that is different from mine, I think. Slower, shorter distances. Me, I always have the thought of doing some longer rides, 50 or 100 miles, in the back of my mind while riding whereas I suspect the Dutch are more inclined to see them as simply a way to get around.

Curiosity has no hand brakes; just a coaster brake. I worry about it's ability to stop me quickly at speeds of 15-20 miles an hour. The force I could apply to a front wheel would just skid the back wheel. But I don't think I'll be going that fast very often either.

I have a three-speed rear hub. I thought it was a Sturmey-Archer at first, but that's just the shifter which was apparently replaced at some point. The hub is a Torpedo, made by Sachs. I've never heard of them, but they seem decent enough. The gear range is wide and will hopefully be enough for getting around flat ground.

I would really like to have a bike more suited for long-distances at some point. I want to ride west to the North Sea, or southeast to Utrecht, and right now I don't think I'd be very comfortable on a ride like that. But I rode the two and a half kilometers to the hardware store on him and I think he'll be just fine for getting around the local area and into Amsterdam.

I have no tools here at all, so I picked up a bike multi-tool and an adjustable wrench so I could move the saddle. That helped a lot. (Speaking of the saddle, it's a wide, fairly soft one with springs. I've never had a sprung saddle before, but it's pretty standard here.)

I'm not sure how old Curiosity is; I'm going to see if I can figure it out sooner or later. He was made by Union, a German company that's been around for a long time. He has a steel frame with lugged joints and is heavy and solid. I'm going to have to raise the handlebars, or learn to put more weight on my seat; my arms are sore from leaning forward on them today. But I think part of it, too, is that I just haven't ridden in months now. That will change now!

I'm thinking about names for my bike in Amsterdam. My theme has been characteristics that relate to my feelings and needs at the time I acquired the bike/vehicle.

My Giant's name is Longing. My Novara's name is Perseverance. I'm considering Curiosity for my future Dutch bike.

My usual bike, Longing, came with a suspension seatpost. Last year, it finally wore out and spat bearings everywhere so I got a new, solid post. I couldn't get it to stop slipping with a quick release clamp. I brought it to the local bike shop and got a bolt-on clamp. They also showed me I was misaligning the bits and pieces. That helped a lot, but there was still just a little slippage. As I was leaving work last week, I adjusted it once more and snapped the bolt in the seat clamp as I tried to tighten it down.

So I ordered a new seat post (with suspension to see if that will ease the burden on the seat clamp and rear wheel too) and a new clamp for it. I measured tubes with my vernier calipers and got everything right! I was sad when the seat post arrived and it included a shim sized to fit my seat tube. I thought the post was sized to fit my tube exactly. Whatever. My original seatpost had a shim too. I installed everything and moved the saddle to the new post. I tightened the clamp as tightly as I can and it slips too. Maybe I'm just too heavy in comparison to before.

I am no longer screwing around. Yesterday I ordered a double-bolt seat clamp intended for mountain unicycling from Kris Holm. If that doesn't hold it, I don't know what will other than drilling holes and putting in cotter pins. (Which I suspect would slowly tear through the cro-moly steel frame, so I'm not doing that.)

So I have one of these coming.

If you haven't seen mountain unicycling, it's worth checking out. It's not a joke! They do some awe-inspiring stuff.

Longing is 19 years old this year. He's seen me through a lot of life.