woke up this morning, this was on my mind

There’s nothing like setting the tone for the day by realizing what an idiot you are first thing in the morning. I was going to bike into work today – the weather is perfect for it, it’s my off day for working out, I didn’t have to rush anywhere tonight. I was all packed up and ready to go and decided my tired were a little flat. I hadn’t pumped up these tires before – a little Googling tells me they’re a Woods vavle, so they work similarly to the Presta valve on my mountain bike, though they’re closer in size to a Schrader valve. I did the front tire first, and had no problemexcept that I couldn’t find the pump I thought was in my saddlebag, so I used Rudder’s. The back tire was another story. In unscrewing the valve I managed to let all remaining air out of the tire, and then it just absolutely refused to pump up. I found my own pump (hiding in the saddlebag all along) and tried that too, with no success.

I really want the bike for tomorrow, so I can ride instead of driving to rowing. I think I’m just going to leave work a little early so I can walk the bike to a store before it closes (at 6, of course, like everything here), walk in and say, “Hi, I’m an idiot. Can you help me, please?”

In more serious news, I talked to my uncle last night. Shortly before visiting us here in April, he was told he had a tumor on his adrenal gland, hopefully benign. They took it out last week, and, well, it wasn’t. “Rare and agressive cancer” are really words you don’t want to hear from a doctor. However, it’s still possible that they got it out before it could spread, so that’s the hope I’m concentrating on. He’s feeling a lot better (still recovering from the surgery) and is determined not to kick off while he still has frequent flyer miles waiting to be used; I firmly believe (largely because I want to believe) that attitude and stubborness are at least a bit helpful in fighting off loathesome diseases. And so are having remained active and taken decent care of himself. So he’ll be all right. Dammit. Because I said so and I believe it.

And Mom goes for cataract surgery today – this should be quite minor, but as you can imagine she’s more than a bit worried about her brother.