Mom told us when we were kids to be grateful for small blessings.


So when there's frost on the cars (when the predicted low was 36F), I'm grateful I don't have to scrape the bike's non-existent windshield. And the wind had abated, after the 25-30 mph gusts on the way home last night. Cloudless sky, bright sun, nice ride.


Nice ride until I did the litter pickup with the bike tire thing. One self-tapping screw right through my rear tire. It took me almost 15 minutes to fix the flat. Without glueless patches in the saddle bag the tube needed to be replaced. And despite the discussion a couple weeks ago, this was a tube I hadn't dusted with talc. As a result, every square inch of tube needed to be peeled away from the tire. Plus the screw was gripping the tire + tube so hard I couldn't pull it straight out, so I had to unscrew the dadgum thing.


As I rolled off, finally, I was thinking: well, it was easy to find what caused the flat, and I was lucky it was a Philips head screw and there was a bit for that on the multi-tool on this bike. But those are small blessings.