Day of the Hyenas

For a while this morning, everyone who came in seemed to have a yelping laugh, which they freely shared.

Hyuk hyuk hyuk. Hyuk hyuk hyuk. Hyuk hyuk hyuk.

They get extra points when they shut up and peer owlishly at something we have posted that we think actually is funny.

Other days, the crowd is like a swarm of mosquitoes: a constant, annoying whine, punctuated by occasional pricks.

August has brought the closest thing we've seen to full summer activity.

On Sunday morning, a guy came in singing the praises of his electronic shifting. "You never realize how much time you spend trimming your front derailleur until you have a shifting system that does it for you! Man! I'm never going back!"

At the end of the day, we had the perfect bookend to that:

"The battery died in my shifters and I lost the charger! Do you guys carry the charger for these shifters?"

Alas, we do not. And, of course, the battery is proprietary.

The smokeless moped crowd is here. There's another thing you don't want to be stuck on when the battery dies and you have miles - or even yards - to go.

Here's a question: If you had a front wheel with only 24 spokes, and one broke, would you go ride a century over mountain passes on it because it still seemed true enough? The guy who did this broke more spokes in the course of the Mount Washington Century, before deciding he should get things looked at. Weirdly, he and the wheel survived. I reused the rim and hub when I respoked the wheel today.

It's all here now. There's nowhere near as much of it as there used to be, but there are nowhere near as many of us to deal with it. It takes less water to fill a small boat than a big one, but swamped is swamped.

I need some sleep before I go back to bailing.