(Latin for “the peace of May”)
We’ve been having a peaceful time the past week or so. The car is working, though it still needs a new wheel bearing and we can’t seem to get the cooling fan to run on low speed. It works at high speed if you do something like turn on the A/C, but otherwise it doesn’t kick in until the engine gets a bit warm. Still, it’s good to be able to drive it some without all the advance notice and arrangements with a borrowed vehicle.
I’m spending a lot of time with my mountain bike. The hybrid has succumbed once again to the plague on all hybrids — pinch flats. That is, because of the crappy design of most rims, the tubes tend to slip down into the narrow channel for the spoke ends and blow out. You can’t patch next to the valve stem, so it requires buying a new tube. The cheaper tubes don’t work at all, blowing out in less than a day most of the time. In other words, the hybrid is just a shoddy design all the way around. I regret buying it. I’ve given up on it lately and have been riding the mountain bike everywhere. It takes a different riding posture. But while the mountain bike is a little heavier and offers a bit more roll resistance, it goes more places with little risk of damage from rough surfaces or terrain.
There seems to be little in the news that provokes a prophetic response in me right now. The house has been quiet while my son and his brood are off on some SCA weekend gathering. The temperatures have been such that we leave the windows open day and night and really enjoy the fresh air moving through. Most years it’s not like that very often nor for very long here in Central Oklahoma. We typically have serious tornadoes about this time of year, but it’s been surprisingly cool with no massive hot and moist air fronts charging up from the Gulf to stir up storms.
Still, I can’t seem to shake this sense that summer will be rough for a lot of folks. I can’t estimate what other kinds of turmoil might be coming, but I was altogether serious about my warning that we might be facing some serious ugly crap on the Internet. Even if it’s not much to you personally, you’d be surprised how much of our business and government activity now is utterly dependent on the Internet working properly. It’s as if something is whispering in my ear that I should enjoy this vacation, because my computer ministry will explode later.
May have mentioned this before, but knobbed road bike tires may work out for you on a hybrid. I use them after a string of flats and I don’t have a problem. There’s lots of construction near my house…the roads always have junk on them but it doesn’t seem to hurt the tires.
Thanks, Jay. I’ve only had one puncture through the tread during the three years I’ve owned it. However, I’ve had three or four tubes pinch flat against the rim right next to the valve stem. On a previous hybrid, the same thing — multiple pinch flats where the tube blew out on the inner face next to the stem. The rims that come stock and those I’ve been able to buy all have a very narrow channel running down the center. It’s a really crappy design flaw. One I managed to fill in with cork strips, but the one in question is deep, and would require three layers of cork, making it considerably heavier. I can’t think of any other way to prevent the tube from extruding itself into that narrow and channel.