Nothing is normal in the bike shop

The repair lineup so far includes a 70-pound smokeless moped,

A recumbent trike,

and a tall bike:

This is after the previously mentioned modern marvels with press fit bottom brackets, and shares the jumble in the storage area with bikes ranging widely in price, quality, and age.

You never know who will need a bike fixed:

We've also worked on bikes for a guy named Bill Murray, who is just Bill Murray, not Bill Murray.

Behind the tall bike in the photo above you can see a Rocky Mountain full suspension bike with XTR from back when eight-speed was the top of the line. The disc brakes on it sounded like a couple of truck horns.

I revamped the repair queue. It used to have dividers for the days of the week, but no subdivision to tell us whether one tag stuffed into a particular day slot was more or less urgent than another. After years of dealing with a bushy mess, I finally yanked out the day dividers and made two category columns:

The "Regular" side is straight first-come-first-served. The "Hot" side is for people who have stated an urgent need. During triage, when we ask the customer about their timing, some of them will say that they definitely won't be back for days or weeks, so we can fit them in down the line. The days of the week were meaningless, which is how the days of the week feel anyway when we're buried in work.

Now that Memorial Day Weekend is here, the next thing we know it will be Labor Day and we'll be going back into grayness. Foliage tourism has dwindled even more than summer tourism, so what little we see tends not to amount to much in work load or cash flow. Maybe we should be in the ATV and oversized truck business, so we could make some money off of the final destruction of our planetary ecosystem. We could import some elephant ivory while we're at it, and host weekly cookouts of giraffe steaks.

The thing is, you don't have to be busy for the best of life to evaporate. You just have to be at work. Mere incarceration is enough.

This story about two bike shop employees who burned down their shop as they were trying to cremate a mouse reminded me of the first shop I worked in. A regular customer of ours used to say that he liked coming in because there was no adult supervision. Our antics never extended to pyromania except perhaps a little bit outside in the back parking lot, but the spirit of unfettered experimentation runs strongly in all the bike people I know. The tall bike is an example of that sort of thing. My bike guru in Florida, who grew up in her father's machine shop and went on to have one of her own, has built a tall bike. She and her husband built aero road frames in the 1980s, using aircraft strut tubing. They also built and repaired more conventional frames. Not all of us are skilled enough to get beyond the nuts and bolts level of improvisation, but that still opens up a lot of territory. A bike -- or other pedal-powered machine -- is the sum of its parts. The industry makes it harder and harder to mix and match, but if you look around you can still find stuff to work with.