Last night, wheeled bike out from my office building only to hear an all too familiar sound... spoke on front wheel popped. Weird though because I wasn't even on the bike yet. Who knows why it went just at that moment... Anyway, nursed it home in cold nasty rainy damp weather in the afternoon, and sure I had an appropriate spare front spoke around in my bike tools and parts, decided I'd just fix it this morning.

This morning, I find I actually didn't have a front spoke around. Ones for my rear wheel are too short. Luckily I realized my old rear wheel's non-drive side spokes are the right length. So I managed to cannibalize one from that wheel, install it on my front wheel, and true it up reasonably will with the brake pads. Running a little late at this point since the wheel repair took longer than anticipated, I emailed my boss real quick with my smartphone, telling a white lie that I had to fix a tire on my bike that had gone flat overnight and would be late. No harm no foul, right? Innocent white lie. Well, karma bit me. Got downstairs to my bike and now the front tire really does go flat, explosively so. I had managed to pinch the tube remounting the tire, and BAM! Threw on a new tube, remount the tire more carefully this time and finally I was off.

Adding insult to injury, I rode into a pretty gnarly headwind this morning. NWS says it was ten mph, gusting to twenty, but I think it was more like twenty occasionally relenting to ten.

In good news the ride was nice and sunny. And I now have a good source of future replacement spokes for the front wheel... Just need to finish disassembling the old rear wheel I had left lying around. I knew it would come in handy! :-)