Filled with frustration
I had one of those weekends where I spent a good portion of it feeling frustrated and annoyed. There are times when I get into this mode and it is very hard for me to shake. Luckily I had some Zima on hand to help reverse those negative feelings.
I got my run in again on Saturday morning. It was again a run that was held in stifling humidity and temps hovering around 80, at 6:30 in the morning. I survived and ran a little quicker than the week before so that is a win.
I had a number of small tasks I wanted to get done in addition to my normal Saturday morning duties. One of them was taking apart the downspout connected to the super gutter that runs along the pool cage. For awhile Cindy and I noticed during hard rain water would be backing way up the pipe, spilling out the seams.
Then I disconnected the downspout and felt the weight of it, the problem became obvious. The irrigation tube I buried over 15 years ago had slowly filled with debris. That debris had gotten to the point where it was backing up into the downspout itself. I took each section apart and cleaned it out. I have no way to clean out the buried irrigation tube so I came up with an alternative route for the water which spills out onto a section of the yard that is well secured with thick grass so erosion shouldn’t be a problem.
We went to Home Depot later to grab a few things including a new toilet seat for the guest bathroom. The soft close mechanism in the existing seat had failed, resulting in a lot of unintended slamming when using the facilities. When picking out the replacement seat I made sure to get an oblong model because I remembered when I replaced the original I picked out the wrong style of seat. (oblong/circle) You can imagine my happiness when we got home and I realized that once again, I picked the wrong size seat. We actually have a round bowl, not oblong. I went to Home Depot a second time during the afternoon to correct my mistake.
During the afternoon Cindy and I went to the school with the two MiniPros in the trunk. I wanted to document the difference between a regular unit and a unit that has had oversized tires installed. As I was setting up the gear Cindy hopped on the Monster Minipro and said it felt weird. I got on it and felt the same weirdness. It turns out the weirdness was because the one tire no longer had air in it. This was annoying, since we paid to have it installed. I asked Cindy to run home to grab the pump so I could reinflate the tire.
When she returned after a lot of pumping and no inflating I realized that the problem was the tire was no longer seated on it’s bead. Any air I was pumping in was coming out instantly. I gave up on manually pumping, as my frustration level was off the charts. It managed to inch up a couple more spots when I wasted money at the gas station trying to pump the tire up as well only to discover the pump didn’t appear to be working correctly. Once we got home I attacked the issue again, using my air compressor. By the time I was done failing I was a sweaty, smelly mess and just miserable. I told Cindy she would need to take it back to the bike shop to get the tire mounted again, if it cost me more money I didn’t care.
Saturday night we stayed home and watched Ghost in the Shell, a movie Cindy decided she hated before it even started. Evidently it got bad reviews but I normally don’t do that much research before adding titles to my Netflix DVD queue. Well to be fair, it was a pretty bad movie but I have definitely seen worse. You do get to see Scarlett Johannson in a body suit quite a bit and the special effects were pretty wild. Overall though I really can’t recommend the movie, it’s pretty dumb with a C- grade from me.
After watching a number of videos regarding reseating the bead of a tire I decided to take one more crack at the Minipro on Sunday morning. I saw various techniques including some that sounded a bit dangerous where you spray the inside of the tire with carb cleaner and then ignite it with a lighter to pop the tire onto the rim. I used a non-combustive method where I used a ratchet strap that I affixed around the middle of the tire. I cranked it down tight to force the edge of the tire onto the wheel. I then hit it hard with air pressure. I got very excited when I felt the tire expand under my hand.
I jumped a bit when after releasing the strap the tire made a loud pop as it snapped all the way onto the rim. When I checked the tire pressure initially it was double what the maximum rated PSI is supposed to be, whoops. I walked in and triumphantly told Cindy I got the tire back on. She agreed to head back to the school with me to do the testing for real this time.
The testing went well. We confirmed that the bigger tires help top speed and clearance. We also realized that riding without fenders is a safety hazard because without them you can easily press your feet inadvertently against the large spinning tires. You can see the full result of the test below.
I decompressed a good portion of the remainder of the weekend getting lost in WoW. It helped bring my mood back to a more even keel.
I have a hell week at work as we launch the new cloud based solution that will replace the majority of our back end systems. We have been working on this goal for over 18 months. To have all that work come to fruition is a good thing.