How was your day?

The world is trying to keep me from enjoying my bicycle.

Over the weekend I had it in the shop at REI to have the gear shifters replaced, because they weren't, well, shifting very well. I went to pick it up on Sunday. I failed to pick it up on Sunday because the building had just been evacuated due to a fire in an adjacent shop. Fine. I took the bus to and from work on Monday and picked the bike up after work.

Today I rode to work. Fantastic. It's a nice, short, pleasant ride, and much quicker than walking or the bus. There's no actual bike rack, so I lock it to a stopsign on the corner. Work was 'meh'. I work until 2. Around 2 I go outside.

Now, a word about my bike: I've never had a particularly good seat. The stock one that came with it was terrible. I eventually replaced that with a cheap but slightly better one, one which was basically a metal frame, a slab of foam, and a fabric cover. At some point, after many winters, rainstorms, snowstorms, and so on, the fabric cover began to come apart. Rather than replace it, I bought a gel seat cover kind of like this one. It cost about the same, absolutely no more than fifteen bucks. I think I got it at Wal Mart. I put it on; it made the seat slightly more comfortable and also kept it from shedding tiny shreds of black fabric onto my butt.

So. Today. I go out to my bike after work. It is still there, happily locked to the stop sign.

The gel seat cover is not.

The gel seat cover is probably the fourth-cheapest thing on my bike. The little bell was probably, I dunno, three or four bucks, and the front and back reflectors - together - were probably five or six. Okay, sure, I"ll be generous and say that maybe the actual mounting brackets for my lights are cheaper too, but I don't know that you can even buy them without investing in the lights, which are at least equal to the cost of the seat cover.

Oh, and did I mention that my seat post is the quick-release type? All you need to do to remove it is twist a little lever and you can slide it right out. Amount of time to remove the entire seat post assembly from the frame: fifteen seconds or so at most. Amount of time to find the seat cover drawstring, unwind it, pull the release thing, and finagle the cover off the seat (a tight fit): I don't know, but certainly more than fifteen seconds.

So. The upside is, after months of meaning to I finally got a new saddle, because when the scumbag theives won't even take it you know that it's time. And I'm finding someplace else to lock my bike, and taking the seat inside with me from now on.

And I'm grumpy today now, damnit!