Gleaners

You can really tell that the harvest is over when the gleaners show up to, well, to glean the last morsels of digestible calories from the dirt and debris that not long ago was a corn field.It is an interesting measure of how wealthy we all are and how abundant food has become that this task is left to the geese. Only a few generations ago those ears of corn would have been scooped up by human gleaners.

I had a flat tire today. Some good always comes from flat tires and today's bit of useful information is that the rip in the tube was very similar to what I was getting when I had flats on NewLOOK. I did not change the NewLOOK wheelset over to the Crown Jewel so it isn't exactly the same thing but interestingly enough I am running the same brand and model of wheel on those two bicycles. Today's flat I am fairly certain was a pinch as I flatted quite abruptly only seconds after not noticing a gaping chasm of a pothole in the street I was riding. A leak flat usually takes at least a few seconds to go down, today's flat was poof, flat. The similarity of the damage to the tube leaves me to ponder if this outbreak of flats on these two bicycles might just be a tire inflation issue.

Flats are mostly a waste of time and a nagging inconvenience. Even so there is something quite self-affirming and ultimately pretty positive about the whole flat tire experience. There I was too far from home to comfortably walk home, particularly in bicycle shoes. My vehicle was unexpectedly disabled and I was able to just reach into my pockets and produce the items necessary to cobble together a repair good enough for me to ride on an underinflated tire the few miles back to my floor pump. I was near the farm campus and while making the repair I had a pleasant enough chat with a foreign student pedestrian who was fascinated to find me sitting there with my tools working on my problem. His English wasn't good but he smiled when I explained that even though the repair was going to take some time that the actual repair was not "rocket science". Which it is not.

So today I had three bicycle rides, the first being the several miles until I actually had the flat. There was an interlude while repairs were effected followed by a shortish ride back to my garage for proper tire inflation. After all that I went out and finished the ride. With a late start the whole thing ended up taking pretty much all afternoon.