The most eventful thing for me took place Monday evening. I was rapidly pedaling over the Longfellow Bridge on a very bumpy ride home, and all of a sudden my rear wheel completely locked up and I skidded to a stop. On closer inspection, the chain had jumped off: it was locked between the rear cog and hub. After some struggling, I managed to dislodge it; two links (and inch’s worth) were crushed and twisted. I rode home irrespectively; it was very bumpy every time  the broken links went over the cog.

I tried throwing on a spare, narrow-width chain I had lying around. No dice- the cog was for wide chains only. I didn’t have enough slack in the old chain to just remove the bad links. Furthermore, you shouldn’t break a chain any old place; my chain had a three-piece master link, which is composed of two plates and a clip which locks them together. This is the only place one should break a chain (when I practiced, I alternately used a flathead screwdriver or a needlenose pliers to widen apart the two arms of the clip), and the clip is reusable.

Since my favorite Open bike is closed for a few weeks, I went to my second favorite: Broadway Bicycle School. (I give little to no business to other, unnamed Cambridge-area bike shops, as they are obnoxious and terrible for many reasons.) They sold me a new chain, which was laterally stiffer, and therefore better suited for a fixed gear.

I went home and used my super-cheap chain tool to cut the chain to length (once you reduce the chain to the proper length, you can use the master link to close it). The tool failed miserably. It got jammed at the start of the job, and the pin that drives out the link simply mushroomed to the point of utter uselessness. I threw away the tool, and over the last two days, found myself in Broadway bikes asking them to take off successively more lengths (using a quality chain tool) until it was done correctly. They were very helpful in the initial explanation, and also didn’t mind the few seconds it took to break the chain for me.

This evening I got the chain on, and discovered a number of things. First, the back tire, which I hadn’t examined, was more than bald in one place; this heavy-duty tire had worn through its many layers in the skid (from 20 mph to zero in about 6 seconds). That’ll have to go. Second, the wheel was very wobbly, and always landed in the same spot when I let it run freely.

This inspired me to use all my drive-chain knowledge. I oiled the (brand new chain). I adjusted the chain tension. I made sure the bolts and washers were tightened down on the rear axle (they weren’t! A few weeks ago, I had them split in half because they were loose and had too much force placed on them). I adjusted the chainring bolts to get an even chain tension (that helped – my chainring actually has gotten straighter over time; perhaps I’m just getting better at this!). The result: everything runs pretty smoothly, although I’m still concerned the rear  hub or bottom bracket are damaged; at low rpms, there is still a wobble, although the chain runs quieter and there is less wobble at high speeds.

So, tension your chain sufficiently and save yourself at least $60 in new parts, possibly a lot more.

I wish I had a camera so I could show the various damage. Then again, I’d just as soon forget.

Back to the cycle.

Click on the pictures for bigger versions. If you click again, be warned that some are very big files and may be slow to download!

Instead of taking the copious amounts of children’s clothing or outmoded furniture to a charity, we just put them on the sidewalk for the taking. Just this weekend, an old set of lawn furniture, including 8 white chairs and an umbrella went from our yard onto the sidewalk and straight into the courtyard of the building across the street. Furniture of all sorts usually gets picked up and taken away post haste. A children’s bike had a half-life of about 2 minutes. (I put a sign on it to give law-abiding citizens an equal chance at it.) Now if only we could get a tax deduction with this convenience…

It is, however, inconceivable to me how it takes 2 months to grade a multiple choice exam. All excuses aside, that is well above any of my upper bounds on time.

I did have a funny conversation with a guy who works at one of these commercial companies. After we spoke on the phone, he sent me a quote. I then replied with the following email:

Thank you for the quote.
As we are simply a private residence with only a small number of items to discard, the cost you have quoted, roughly $220, is prohibitively high when it is acceptable for us to put the items into the regular trash stream. Therefore, we will not be pursuing recycling as discussed.

He then replied…

Well in that case you have to do what you got to do, we are a business not a
charity, although we are all about the environment and keeping things out of
the trash. We cannot force you to do the right thing, just keep in mind if
your equipment is found in the trash and they trace it back to you, there
are going to be heavy fines. Good luck.

I couldn’t let that blatant falsity stand…

I understand that, and it is regrettable to contribute to waste for us as well. I have to correct your information: it is not a crime for private residents to put computer items into the trash in NYC: see http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwasteless/html/recycling/electronicsrecycling.shtml. Otherwise, we would of course be using a removal service such as yours.

So he said…

Well if your computers have no business use whatsoever than yes you are
correct. However I simply try to help people realize that the throwing
hazardous things in landfill only hurts in the fight against Global warming.
You justifying your email and mine don’t help the environment. Thank You.

The discussion continues to be ludicrous. They’re not helping global warming, strictly speaking, and they certainly are not educating anyone. The direct effect of throwing away electronics in a landfill is a problem of toxic metals leeching into the water supply. The indirect effect is that recycling and reusing products is far less energy intensive than producing them from raw materials. The net effect there is a function of what is being recycled and how, but that is almost exclusively the case.

When I woke up in the morning everything already felt surreal. Why was I up before my alarm, and even more, so chipper? I ignored the feeling, assuming it was just more of what I had been feeling recently. I arrived at school with a little time to spare, entering physics and awaiting instruction on what I expected to be a dismal and repetitive topic: significant figures. It was. We moved through the lesson as I studied and explored my new calculator’s features: it’s a very advanced calculator.

The bell rang but we forced ourselves to ignore it: our physics teacher denied us of breaks between our two consecutive periods of class, instead dismissing us 10 minutes early. Almost immediately afterwards a rumble came around us, and people jeered about its cause, probably a sonic boom, or something. Yeah, it’s just a 747! I mumbled to my neighbor that 747s don’t fly supersonic. The next bell came, indicated the beginning of the next period and my physics teacher proceeded to post questions about converting units and arithmetic with significant figures. Soon the principal came onto the loudspeaker: “Teachers, please stop what you are doing,” he announced, and I expected that there had been another school shooting or something of that order. But the next line surprised me and the class jumped out of their seats: “A small plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. We will decide whether, before the first lunch period, whether to let students out of the building.” The crowd around the window, and subsequent exclamations of “Oh shit!” gave some indication of the magnitude of the event. At first all I could see was the relatively new residential building in front of our school. But as I moved closer, the flames erupting from the 100th story and the debris fluttering down were stunning. Smoke billowed from around the building as through the office building had become a smokestack. Everybody was talking at once and trying to make sense of what was going on. A girl commented that we were such rubberneckers. I tried to justify our behavior, but couldn’t. But I didn’t mind.

I switched windows for an even more breathtaking and horrifying view of the nascent, and expanding, fire. It was almost comical how flames neatly lit a single floor across the visible side of the building, almost like the artificial graphics of SimCity. More debris floated down from the tower, not that which brings dread into your mind: what will happen to the people below, but the kind that is innocuous and hardly grabs your attention. This stream of debris was occasionally augmented by small fireballs flying outward and down into smoke. The best indication of the ferocity of the flames inside the building was the black ball that went into free fall, obeying almost directly the laws of physics that are almost common knowledge, the 9.8 meters per second squared acceleration caused by gravity. I silently tagged this object as a person seeking an impossible escape from the growing fire.

Our class soon utilized the TV with which our classroom was outfitted. We learned that the building had been hit by an airplane and the newscasters were mostly repeating themselves and taking eyewitness callers. I drifted back to the window and sat alone there. I was soon horrified to see a fireball wrap around the outside of the building as though a gas explosion had come from inside. I later concluded that it was the explosion of the second airplane strike I had seen. The period soon ended, punctuated by the confused announcements of the administration over the loudspeaker. I progressed downstairs to my third period class, history. This class had a far superior view of the damage, even of the crater created by the airplane, which was absent from view: I assumed it had fallen to the street. One boy was cursing at everything that happened: the announcement that there had been two explosions, then that there had been an explosion at the Pentagon, and so forth. I was watching the proliferating fire and the smoke that came off the building, and studying its location and intensity. Out the window at ground level, West Street was closed and filled with rescue vehicles. There was a mass exodus of people from the financial center coming to and from the park, and moving largely uptown. I looked back and realized the fire had spread on the right of my view all the way across the floor, and down as well.

Dr. Stern, my teacher, commented that they couldn’t put the fire out on floors that high up, and they had to wait for it to burn out, which seemed absurd to me. Weren’t there hoses in the building? Sprinklers? That’s what zoning is all about. We were soon told to move away from the windows. We lowered the curtains and I smirked at the idea of a lesson now being conducted. I took my seat, which was 3 steps from the window. I heard a comment that people were now running away, and then there was a rumbling. The lights flickered and the TV turned to static. We came up from out seats to be horrified by what was now presented: a massive cloud of smoke and speculation about the building’s collapse.

We were moved from the room into the hallway and subsequently to our homerooms, where more rumors of collapse came. Out the window the haze reminded me of a gloomy, rainy overcast morning, but I knew that the sky was solid blue. The movie quality of the whole event took a new turn as it dawned on me that the haze was smoke and dust. I piddled around the room, and tried to contemplate what exactly was going on. It was unsettling to have such a swirl of emotion and commotion around me. People’s voices and tears and some people’s panic and others’ stoicism left me uncertain. The loudspeaker came on again, now with the command to be orderly, repeat orderly, and leave the building out the north exit. Screaming erupted and some people ran from the room and to the stairs. Everything around me had such a superficial quality that I was surprised to find the hallway far emptier than even during class, yet the stairwell was crowded. The entire first floor was entirely crowded, and women I had never seen before directed the human traffic. Perhaps they were the federal agents that had been mentioned before. I watched a teacher pick a student out of his wheelchair and walk him at our pace into the crowd. When the majestic first floor stairs came into view where there was normally a view of the adjacent school was pure darkness. A fireman strolled from the entrance west. Three people held a set of doors open, crouching over what seemed to be an incapacitated body. I wanted to offer help, but I knew it would be rejected. I continued walking with the crowd, once again told to be orderly and bumped into Martin, a student from Columbia Prep, my middle school. “Aren’t you glad you came to Stuyvesant?” I remarked to him, eliciting a grin from the tall freshman. As we shuffled around the outside of the building toward West Street I saw the haze again. But this was more than haze now, as I turned the corner I saw the entire street obscured by a dense pall; what seemed so permeable was entirely unforgiving, barely giving view of TriBeCa bridge, probably one hundred yards away. As we moved away from the disaster area I tried to put myself at ease by remarking to Martin about one could write about this experience for their college essay. Hell, you could use it for every essay topic for the rest of your life. It was at about this time that my first thought of my family seriously ran though my mind. I wasn’t aware of my mother’s hearing in Brooklyn heights, or my father’s meeting in the Empire State building. Thank god Ryan had graduated. And that some of my friends had left school, although I missed them. I was certain they were all completely free of danger, and I wondered if my parents would even be aware of the tragedy that had taken place in the morning. They weren’t, after all, TV watchers. I imagined coming home that morning and saying, “hey mommy, the world trade center fell down.” Well, I wasn’t certain of that. Well, “a plane hit each of the world trade center buildings, and the pentagon, too.” I didn’t want my family worrying about me. I was fine.