Bike seat

Last week, my fantastic boyfriend offered to run errands for me while I worked on writing my thesis. One of these such errands was getting my bike fixed. I usually leave my bike locked up to a parking meter outside my apartment, which means that it gets mangled from time to time by inept parallel parkers or stumbling drunk college students. For example, one day I came outside to find that overnight the chain had come completely off the front rings and was hanging by the right pedal. The last time I rode my bike before winter was in full swing, I noticed that the rear brake was sticking to the hopelessly misaligned rear tire and at regular intervals, it would make a horrendous squealing noise (and jerk me forward when I was trying to coast). When I tried to brake, I got a low roar. The combination sounded like a cat getting run over by a garbage truck.

I figured I’d look into it later, since I wasn’t planning to ride my bike much in the snow. I brought it inside and promptly forgot about it. A friend of mine makes and fixes bikes, so when the weather got nicer and I remembered, I tried to coerce him into fixing my bike with an ice cream payment. But somehow we could never settle on a good time to do all of this.

Enter: Josh. Of course, by the time Josh wrestled my bike down the four flights of stairs to get it outside, the squealing was at a minimum. “So, what exactly is wrong with your bike?” he asks. I swear, it was worse in the cold! In any case, the bike is now fixed, rideable, and much less noisy. :)

So now that the weather’s nice, I’m back to riding my bike to work. The only problem is that since it’s been a while since I last rode regularly, I haven’t redeveloped the callouses or posture necessary to keep my (ahem) butt from getting bruised by the seat. Ouch.