flummery

When I was ten years old, friends and I came back from seeing a James Bond movie and were playing at James Bond on our bikes, and I swerved too sharply, fell over, and broke my left leg. I broke both the fibia and the tibula, in fact, but they were clean breaks, very tidy. Hurt like screaming hell, though. As was the custom of the time I was in the hospital for several days and came out in a full-leg cast. My father, who lived some distance away, couldn’t get there right away and sent me a dozen roses in the hospital, which made the whole thing absolutely worth it; I had never felt so grown-up!

But that was the end of my bicycling career. For fifty years.

Now, however, I've moved to a small, mostly flat, navigable city, and I want to try getting back on that literal-not-proverbial bike! I fairly often have places to go and errands to run where driving feels silly but walking might take juuuuust too much time, and a bike seems like the obvious option. But do I want to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a new bike and run the risk that I won't enjoy it, or feel safely balanced after so long, or whatever, and will in fact end up not using it much? I do not.

Fortunately this city has a couple of nonprofit bike repairing and reselling organizations! So I stopped by one of them this afternoon and chatted with the head mechanic, and he picked out a bike for me from their (all donated) stock on hand, and we verified that it fits me. It needs some repair work and tuning up, which they will do over the next couple of weeks (him: "There's about six bikes ahead of you in line." me: "It's been fifty years, another two weeks is not a problem!"), and they asked for $125-$175, according to my ability to pay. I wasn't able to actually test-ride it, since it has no tires at the moment, but I was able to balance pretty well; I do feel pretty confident that I haven't forgotten how to ride a bike.

(And this time I hope to learn how to shift gears, too! Kid-me's bike was a three-speed and I just left it in second all the time.)

Now I just need to get a helmet -- which I do know to buy new/unused. And a lock. Whee!

I was supposed to meet up with someone yesterday, and we had the following email conversation:

them: We operate out of Location A and Location B. I'll be at Location A Saturday afternoon from 2:00 on.

me: Great, I'll be at Location A a few minutes past 2:00 on Saturday!

me at 2:15 pm: Hey, you're not here yet so I'm going to run a quick errand and come back.

me at 2:30 pm: You're still not here, so I guess we'll try again next week? I hope everything is all right on your end.

them at 3:00 pm, after I was already home again: We're at Location B.

It's not a huge deal, we will connect next week, but damn, I would have appreciated even a perfunctory "Oops, my bad," you know?

For the last week or so, coffee has tasted incredibly bitter to me. I mean, it's bitter from the start, but I drink it with sugar and milk and I've always really liked it; Geoff makes our breakfast coffee every morning and it's a nice little thing for us. (Sometimes when he goes away overnight he grinds coffee for me to have the next morning before he leaves.) But lately I've been finding it unpalatably bitter; even when I add extra milk and sugar, they just layer over the bitterness without easing it. Nothing about our brand, roast, or brewing method has changed, only how I taste it.

(I went away last week: four days in Virginia for a memorial service, which meant my first plane flights since February 2020, which was a bit of a mindfuck, plus a bunch of socializing, and Geoff says he's heard that things changing taste is a possible COVID symptom. I've never heard that, only that losing the sense of taste can be, and I feel completely fine, so I really doubt that's it. Plus iirc it started before I left.)

But this is a bit of a problem, since a) I like coffee, and b) having gotten only three swallows into this morning's cup before I had to stop, it was ten am before I could get my act in gear to start being productive. By which I mean, make a cup of black tea instead. But I don't like tea as much as I (used to) like coffee!

I miss coffee.

ETA: Okay, I have taken a COVID test, and it is negative, for what that's worth... (I think it's six months expired, but they're generally supposed to be good for a year or so after stamped expiration date, last I heard.)