Assorted observations
It’s really damn polleny out there. The record pollen count for Atlanta is 6,013 particles per cubic meter air set on April 12th of 1999, and Monday was heading in that direction with 5,499/m³. Everything is yellow from those freaking pine trees. I park my bike outside during the day, and after just an hour or two it’s coated with a thick coating of yellow dust. I’m fortunately not allergic to anything I know of, but I figure that I probably go through a few cubic meters of air in a day, and breathing in 5,499 particles of junk for each one seems probably unhealthy. I hope it rains soon or something.
I got a flat tire today, which isn’t terribly unusual, but this one was a little sobering. Since I last replaced my tires after the nail incident, I’ve had the attitude that my tires are basically invincible, held together by some kind of Italian black magic. I’ve had so many incidents where my thinking while on the bike followed “Shit! I ran over a beer bottle! Sweet! I’m still rolling!” that I perhaps expected too much of them. I couldn’t find the hole in the tube at first, and my examination of the tire revealed several gouges and small holes. I ended up just stuffing a dollar into what looked like the nastiest (which turned out to be correct) (aside: if you want a quick buck, you can steal one out of my rear tire), and hopefully that’ll hold for a while. I also apparently managed to pump the new tube up to 110psi with that wimpy little hand pump, which I thought was pretty impressive. Maybe I had a bunch of adrenaline running through me from being so pissed. I still have a lot of faith in Vittoria, but I need to keep in mind that every sharp rock and broken bottle carries a material cost.
The storage facility that was recently built behind the Home Depot on Peachtree Dunwoody is now open. I’ve felt that this building was pretty odd from the start, since it’s in a pretty nice area, and it has a fancy-looking brick façade. I saw a sign out front today advertising wine storage, so I guess they’re trying to be an upscale storage facility, suitable for all of your high class, semi-urban storage needs. I wonder how well it’ll work.
I still haven’t purchased new panniers for my bike, and I think it’s about time I did. It’s getting pretty hot now, so wearing a backpack means more than just the discomfort of carrying something on my body instead of the bike: I get some kind of serious sweaty. I’ve been able to live out of just my tiny rack trunk for a good while this past week or two, but today I needed to bring the pack in order to buy food, and the back of my shirt felt pretty gross. Something like a messenger bag could probably alleviate this problem to some extent, but to me down that path lies the way of the hipster. A messenger bag still has the problems of putting the weight on your body, and I don’t share the needs of a bike courier, so I’d rather go the old-school route and attach some big bags to the back of my bike. I haven’t looked very hard yet for new ones, and I wonder if I’ll be able to find something that doesn’t look too much like I’m out for a week long tour without being too small. Even with those crappy Delta panniers, I met one guy who seemed convinced that I was doing a fancy job of being homeless.
I now know what Cracker Barrel plans to do when they exhaust the world’s finite supply of old junk to put on their walls: cut it with whatever newish junk they can find. I recently saw a clarinet hanging from the wall of a Cracker Barrel, and it didn’t look banged up or tarnished or anything. It was real wood, too, so it’s likely worth two or three hundred at least. It seemed really out of place nestled among the metal signs advertising Danny McHejaz’s nickel restoratives.
I’m a sucker for bargain bin DVDs, even if they aren’t really a bargain. I went to a Borders recently and got caught by the ? (mostly equal to) $10 bin. I somehow ended up with copies of Twelve Angry Men (I remember seeing part of it in some social sciences class in high school, but I don’t remember why or how much of it we watched), some Western that also stars Henry Fonda, and The Neverending Story. Maybe I should stick to renting.