Hope and despair

Saturday, 10:10am: Coming home from Farmer's Market, I realized my front tire was low. This is the tube I bought in a vulnerable moment from The Bike Shop We Do Not Name. First time I'd been in there since a bad experience about 6 years ago. The presta valve has never seated properly on either of my pumps. (Not my fault--the back tire tube seats fine. I consider this evidence that TBSWDNN still has it in for me. It's mutual, guys.)

I fiddled with getting the pump on the damned thing, and the wholly predictable happened: The valve lock nut broke off. As Douglas Adams once wrote of manuscript deadlines, the remaining air in the tire made a pleasant whooshing noise as it went by.


Saturday, 11:00am: After digging around and realizing that it had been so long since I had had a puncture that I couldn't find a spare tube around the place, I walked the bike down to my regular guys, and got a new tube.

There are few things sadder than the sight of a bike with a flat tire. There are few things more encouraging than the faint, resonant hum of newly repressurized tires the moment they first hit the pavement again.