Friday, April 25, 2014

Spring cleaning and n+1

I had the day off today, so I took Mike out to the balcony for a cleanup: degreasing and relubricating the gears and the chain, washing off all the accumulated crap on the frame, that kind of thing. It went fine until I got to the rear brakes: they were seized up and barely moved. So I sighed, and went into the apartment to wash off my hands and look online for the best way to fix them (even though I knew it was probably going to involve wrestling the entire brake system apart, washing it, and reassembling it).

But, in the process, a friend popped up on chat, and I bemoaned having to tear down the brakes. He promptly offered the loan of his bike, which he bought several years ago and never really got around to riding. So I suggested that I'd been thinking of asking if he wanted to sell it, since I knew he wasn't really into riding it, and he practically said I could have it for free, although I will pay him something for it.

It may actually be the case that I will soon have a summer bike and a winter bike. Or at the very least, a road bike and a mountain bike.

And I realized that the joke I've been repeating for a while now, and which I repeated while being certain it didn't apply to me, now actually does apply to me: "The number of bikes you need is n+1, where n is the number of bikes you already have." I feel like this is some kind of rite of passage.

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