It's not leaking

Thank you for all your reassurances for my knees over the last couple of days and the encouragement for sticking to my exercise regime.  You’ve all kept me in fine spirits.

It’s been quite an eventful day today although in quite an unexciting way.  

While I was freezing my knees this morning, a pupil arrived an hour early for her lesson.  I’m quite happy to have a bank of parental errors just in case I ever mess up on my own timings.  Luckily, everything was pretty much ready (apart from me) so I sent them to the park for twenty minutes.

After the boiler had a vague smell of gas yesterday, I discovered this morning that it had stopped working.  On phoning British Gas, I mentioned yesterday’s hint of a smell and figured it was because the boiler didn’t fire.  At this point they listened no longer and told me I needed to have the leak checked.  

It wasn’t leaking.  

Never mind, I had a lovely chat with Ollie here who told me it wasn’t leaking.  

After Ollie left, I was allowed to phone back British Gas to book the boiler man.  He’s back tomorrow.  He couldn’t fix it.

While all that was going on, I thought I’d sort my bike out.  I’ve been out on it a maximum of once in five years since it has been replaced by Little Dog and the hills.

To get to it, I really needed to sort the garage out so that too, has been done – and well overdue!  My bike has been hung up but the back wheel has been sitting on the floor and felt somewhat like cardboard.   Still, I thought I’d try pumping them up.  No explosions later and a bit of oiling here and there and all seemed to be working.  

Liz asked me a little while ago if I missed my bike and I could honestly say, I hadn’t.  But then, I live very much in the present and am not really one for memory lane.

So, for a little test outing.  

I warned Rich that if I was more than ten minutes to expect that I was pushing a broken bike back up the hill.  Rather tentatively, I took it for a spin.  It felt quite exciting.  As I set off down the road, all the good feelings of pedalling and the breeze in your face came rushing back.  It was such a great feeling and one that I had completely let go of.

No incidents later, I was back home.  And not a hint of knee pain.

However, my black helmet padding had disintegrated all over my forehead and I didn’t trust those wheels one bit.  So, I’m now the proud owner of a new helmet, tyres and tubes which will get fitted tomorrow.  I’ve had a fair few punctures on my mountain bike but not one on my road bike in nine years of cycling so I’m not so hot on taking those tyres off.  That may mean a broken nail or two so I might be cursing tomorrow.  

I think I have some thigh trauma to look forward to but I’m balancing that out with café stops, cheese toasties and regaining my title of cycling uphill the slowest without falling off.