Month: May 2009

Yesterday I mentioned the flat tire on my bike…last night, I took it off and brought it inside to fix. (So I could watch the original 90210. We discovered all of seasons 1-4 on the CBS website!) Started rotating to see if it was something obvious.

Jump back a couple of weeks: C took the tonneau/cover off of the truck so he could help a friend transport some art. He left outside the little pins that hold the springs (? I don’t know what they’re called) to the cover and to the truck, and neither of us remembered to bring them in, and then two were lost. 🙁

One of them? I rolled over it Wednesday night, apparently, and it neatly punctured my tire and tube. But hey, that was such a clean and tidy puncture that we fixed it lickety-split. Then cleaned up the bike, tweaked the brakes a bit, and I was able to ride today…in entirely glorious weather!

Monday, the truck broke down while C was on his way to jury duty. Turns out to be a wiring problem, in the hundreds of dollars to fix, and it could’ve been prevented with some routine maintenance that I’d been procrastinating on. Plus a parking ticket.

Yesterday I got a flat tire pretty much out of nowhere…as in, while it was sitting in the carport! Bike was too wet & filthy to fix last night, so no biking today.

This morning I found out that mom fell again (on Tuesday!), broke her toe and maybe her (other!) arm, and may have bruised or cracked a rib. As I said on twitter, bones of steel, but not much of a sense of balance. What worries me in a totally selfish way is that my sense of balance has always been somewhat…sketchy.

I’ve been reading Learned Optimism, slowly, and as I started recounting this list of woes to myself this morning, I realized that I could change my framing a bit and maybe see some other aspects both of those events and of the rest of the week.

For one thing, C was incredibly lucky: he made it to jury duty just in time, didn’t get picked for a jury, and apparently the truck could’ve very easily exploded instead of just refusing to start when he left the coffee shop.

Of course it’s definitely a good thing that the flat didn’t happen while I was riding on the trail in the pouring rain. And I should be able to fix it pretty easily tonight, and maybe get my brakes tuned up while I’m futzing. So tomorrow it’ll be totally sweet for what’s supposed to be fab weather.

Mom’s okay, Elizabeth’s there to help out, and hey: bones of steel! Plus one of mom’s friends had apparently already recommended a fall prevention class, which sounds like a good idea. Me, I’d love to see her take a “martial arts for seniors” class, if there were such a thing. (Y’know, I should probably look into something like that myself. And my balance is a lot better than it used to be, what with the biking and that yoga class I was taking.) In talking to Elizabeth, I discovered that mom is coming up this way on a road trip next month, possibly with Elizabeth. It’ll be nice to see her again.

Besides all that, I’ve been making good progress with my big Drupal project, biking has been fab even in the occasional rain, and Monday night was sort of sweet: C put on a Talking Heads concert vid on Netflix Instant, and we danced together in the living room. I could suddenly visualize a good way to lay out the living room while I was grooving and bouncing around. O happiness.