Man, this last week (let's say Monday to Sunday) had to have been the worse on-call week for my group on record - at least top three. Being primary on the first week of the month was a bitch. I got paged for about 4 days in a row including some 3a.m. calls and some mid-dinner interruptions. Add to that two days of business travel to San Fran, additional responsiblities of a promotion, training the new guy that started on Monday, about 30 miles of riding, mid-week basketball against a bunch of young guys, two broken sprinklers, a leaking radiator, teardowns on three mountain bikes, house cleaning, shopping/furniture purchase and a half day at Disneyland. All the ingredients for mental and physical burnout.
Okay, so the riding and bike fixing are my refuge. Three of my bikes needed love and attention and I needed to give it to them.
My trusty
Mangoat had been out of commission for about 2 months now and needed the whole drive train rebuilt. New cogs on the front sprocket and a whole new cassette on the rear. He is almost now ready to be ridden, but I found that the right pedal cage was completely destroyed and have to order another. On a sad note, I lost my favorite computer from that bike, I set it on my truck while working on the bike and I think I drove off with it on the hood...
I've been riding the Mustang lately because the goat was b0rk3n, but I noticed that the shifting was pretty messed up. It needed a simple pulley fixed on the rear derailleur. I found this out the hard way, but I had been riding with a cracked pulley missing a couple teeth for about 4 months now. I remember thrashing the rear derailler when a branch got caught up in the drive train. Mustang is now ready to go.
Finally, the Ellsworth that I built for my nephew got its due attention. I had built this thing up from scratch only to watch it sit for 3 months because I couldn't get the derailleurs dialed in. I begrudgingly took it in to RockNRoad and spent $20 to get them to get the gears initially lined up. I did an 18 mile test ride up to Beak's and found that the shifting was still off. Turns out, the rear suspension caused some funny tension in the rear shifter line so I had to do some more fine tuning to account for the suspension sag. I think it's dialed in now and ready to be raced.
As you can tell, I prefer to write about my frustrations with riding and fixing bikes, or working on arcade and pinball machines, rather than frustrations of work. There isn't much point to this entry other than, I was feeling a little bit burnt out this week, but was able to finish up feeling pretty good.
Let's hope for calm week next week. At least I won't be primary on-call.
