So, Happy Valentine’s Day! Kate and I had very good dinner-n-a-movie-or-two last night in our Anti-Valentine’s Day celebrations, and it was good. It would have been nice had it not rained all day and thus quashed our hopes of going ice skating (which I WILL do this winter! I swear!) but we had a good time anyway and did lots of chatting. Yay. Good luck on your test, Kate. And Daddy, I love you. Happy birthday, again. I’m so happy you made us crab rangoon 😉
( whee! Kingdom of Heaven international trailer! )
And onto the true story of the squirrel-eaten bike…
So, my bike is locked up on the deck behind the apartment, has been ever since I moved in, because there’s not really a good place to store it inside, esp. if it’s at all icky outside. Still isn’t, but there might be some more room for it now that the Christmas tree has made it out of the sunroom. (The tree didn’t go far…it’s still sitting on the back porch, kindly being a fire hazard, as Kate pointed out, but it’s a pain to get down the stairs and right now it’s too wet to be carried…) Anyway, the bike sat out all last winter to no ill effect, and all last summer, and most of the fall, since I didn’t get to do much biking while orgo was going on. Alas. And so on Saturday, when the weather was just too nice to stay indoors before I headed over to my parents’ place for my dad’s birthday, I decided to lug the thing down the stairs and bike some Forest Park. I hadn’t looked at the bike in months, and what do I find? Almost every piece of plastic that was even remotely near the railing had been gnawed or eaten totally. I mean, teeth marks everywhere. They even got the zipper pulls off my seat pack. And they ate some of the stuffing out of my (relatively new) saddle. Bah.
My aunt says there is nothing good about squirrels. While I like the way they can hold their tails in the air, now I’m inclined to agree with her.

Now all the eating, while annoying, does not stop me from riding the bike. it’s just a little uncomfortable to hit the shifters, because they’re covered in gouges from sharp little rodent teeth. The bike makes it down the stairs, I put air in the tires, test the brakes, and head off. But when I make it to a small hill, I realized that I couldn’t shift past 4 on the small gear…makes going up hills very difficult if you can’t shift down. (If you shift into a higher gear is that good for hills or bad? I can never remember which one it is). It’s possible that something’s just stuck in the deraileur, but I can’t fix it on my own, which makes me sad. I even got nice whole-hand gloves (not the fingerless biking gloves, I’ve got some of those) that are supposed to give some wind protection when biking in the cold so I could do a little bit more biking now.
Alas. I’ll probably have to get a new bike, because with all the things I’d have to get replaced or fixed I’m not sure if it’s worth it. I mean, it’s a lovely green Schwinn Frontier, but it’s also about 5 or six years old, and has served me faithfully since then, but it is looking a little ratty around the edges. I guess we’ll see. I don’t really want to buy a new bike, as the good ones are expensive, but maybe there will be a sale…