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The excitement of booking an antigen test and printing Eurostar tickets and things. And then the new “amber plus” status was announced. But we’re undeterred by the prospect of quarantining for at least five days upon returning from France – think how productive I’ll be – so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. It will be more of a pain in the arse than anticipated, but don’t let’s get out the world’s tiniest violin on my behalf.
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Some work.
I’ve been disappointed by the autonomie de la batterie of my téléphone portable, and the big problem is all the time I spend looking at bustimes.org – you know, dogfooding. (A former distant colleague called it “we drink our own poison”, so don’t ask them to look after your pet.) It’s not that much time, but it more than decimates the battery, so maybe I can do some things to make that less of a problem.
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On the bicycle to see a relative. A bit horrible with all the pollen blowing in my face, but you know, worth it, and then lovelier with a nice tailwind on the way back, only a bit marred by some mechanical crappiness at inopportune moments at traffic lights with important people with places to go behind me.
Bicycle mechanics’ waiting lists are long because it’s the summer and everything, so I boldly traded the old bike in for a newer (still second hand) one. I look forward to seeing someone else enjoying the old bike, re-refurbished, in the near future.
I have some complaints, like it’s a bit heavy, but eating less pies and fewer ale would have as big an effect as getting some carbon fibre forks. It’s difficult to see what gear one’s in, indicated by a red thing on a black background behind some reflective translucent plastic – what was Ian Shimano thinking? – so I dismantled one gear shifter and dabbed the red thing with a silver metallic marker pen, which is a slight improvement.
Then on my first longish ride I got the chain all tangled up. Untangled it after much sweating and having unnecessarily detached the chain, and eventually gave up trying to reattach it and walked home. Bought a whole new chain with a “Quick Link” link, which turned out to be even harder to attach, but then I remembered how to reattach the old chain so that’s good. This is quite boring, isn’t it?
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It’s been warm out. Stay hydrated.