Argh, no updates

Forgot to update this week for some reason. Beginning of the week was fairly unspectacular.

Thursday was badminton. Despite the successful salad experiment of the previous week we had more Currywurst, which was a mistake.

Friday was the funeral of my grandfather-in-law. He died a little while back. He was 96 with very severe Alzheimers so it was a bit of a relief in the end. I only met him a few times and he never remembered me after the first couple of times. He seemed like a really nice guy though and I wish I'd had a chance to know him before the dementia got so bad. In the evening met up for a few drinks with Rob, Em, Andy and Maz, which was great even if it was a fairly early night.

Today was spent at my Dad's. We did loads of work on the bike. Got the tyres seated on the rims properly at last and rebuilt the handlebars with a new adjustable stem, a new bar, and new ergonomic handgrips. Also replaced the brake blocks with nicer ones. I never realised before just how fiddly it is to get the blocks angled correctly though. The new brake blocks allow you to change the pads without removing the whole lot though, so once it's set up, that's it. We were going to put the newer side-pull brakes on it but that would have meant all new levers and cables too so it got too expensive. Anyway, it feels great to ride now and if the weather isn't completely horrible tomorrow I'll take it out and try it out properly.

Saw a Boardman CX Team bike in Halfords which is meant for cyclocross. It is my perfect bike. Built like a road bike but with bigger tyres and has drop bars with four brake levers with shifters built into them. Absolutely stunning in every way. Shame it's £899. Here:

http://www.boardmanbikes.com/cx/cx_team.html

It's fun tinkering with bikes. I can see how people spend time building them up from parts and tweaking them.

Took the car to have the rear tyre looked at. As I suspected it did have a puncture. Sadly they also told me that my left front tyre was nearing the limit and the right one also had a gash in it. As much as I like the Toyo tyres it seems that they are too soft and fragile for what my car has to put up with. So they had to be replaced. They did the tracking too and found the back end was totally out of alignment, presumably due to the crash on the 29th. So that's all sorted and it does drive better. Still needs a driveshaft to stop the shaking at 45mph+ though. Damned thing.

In one of those moods where I can't get motivated to do anything except listen to music and piss about on the Internet.