Originally Posted by Tundra_Man

Rough morning so far. Didn't sleep well.

Weatherman completely missed the boat today. They said it was supposed to be sunny and nice, and the rain wouldn't hit until Wednesday. About 4:30 AM I woke up to the sound of torrential rain hitting my roof. That got my brain spinning.

On Saturday I had taken a short ride up to the grocery store on my hybrid with rack and fenders (which I call my "rain bike".) On the way home, I blew my front tire. This was the original tire on the bike, and had lasted 7115 miles before it finally wore through. I could quite literally see light through the thin spots in the tread, so I didn't even bother fixing it. I just walked the bike home and threw the tire in the trash. Then I ordered a new tire which is scheduled to arrive tonight (Tues evening.) "No problem" I figured. The rain isn't supposed to hit until Wednesday, so I could just ride my fenderless road bike for a couple days until my new tire shows up.

Now the rain hitting the roof had me rethink my plans. Of course, I could always ride my road bike in the rain. I don't like to do that, though, because it's such a pain to clean the bike afterwards. And probably a bigger issue is riding in the rain without fenders is extra miserable. All the gunk that would have normally wound up on the underside of the fenders is instead evenly distributed all over my body. Yuck.

So as I lay in bed I formulated a plan. I managed to doze off for a while, then I got up 15 minutes early. I went out and took the front wheel off my TT bike and put it on my hybrid. They were both 700c so it was a pretty easy swap, I just had to adjust the brakes a little to accommodate the thinner rim. It looks a little funny with a 32mm tire in the rear and a 23mm slick in the front, but oh well.

So I was congratulating myself on my ingenuity when I suddenly realized the bike had no chain. When I'd pulled the front tire off I'd also decided to clean the chain. I then forgot about it, and the chain was still sitting in my jar of cleaning solvent. So I had to pull the chain out and try my best to hastily dry it off and lube it, then reinstall it on the bike.

By this point it was 20 minutes past when I should have left for work. Even though I had gotten up early the extra monkeying with the chain had made me late. So I rolled the bike out of the garage to discover a couple of things: first, while I was messing with the chain the rain had stopped and the sun was coming out. So I probably could have just taken the road bike. And second, with the unexpected rain came an unexpected change in the wind direction and intensity, and now instead of a mild crosswind as I thought I would have, I had a fairly strong head wind to fight all the way to work.

Finally got to work late only to discover that my network account was locked out. So I had to monkey with that for a while.

Well, the day can only get better from here, right?