vlad contact lens puncture

vlad and the puncture are today, the contact lens thing is yesterday and this morning...

so let's start with the contact lens thing...

yesterday as i put in my lens i noticed that one of them (the left one) had a very small knick in it but i didn't have time to get new ones out so i put it in intending to change the lens when i got home, i had my keyboard with me because we were rehearsing with T's band in the evening, i was also listening to each of the collaborative improvisation i've so far done on my ipod...

so i was travelling from shoreditch to kennington on the 133 bus around 7ish and i was pretty tired, the bus had been fairly empty but it was just about to get really busy, i rubbed my right eye a little too vigorously and suddenly i couldn't focus in that eye...

i started to look around me to see if i'd knocked out the lens somewhere and at that exact moment a crowd of people came in and i moved along my seat to let someone else sit down (hugging my keyboard stand)...

i asked the man who'd sat down to look at my eye and see if he could see my lens... he couldn't, it wasn't anywhere to be seen and if it had gotten on the floor it would have been all over anyway... london bus dirt...

so i had a psychedelic 10 minutes or so, listening to me & D's improvisation from a few weeks back and only being able to focus on one of my eyes and i started to realise that it must be still in there because looking down and left i could see a strange kind of shadow... so i got off the bus (a palaver indeed with my keyboard) and continued the strangeness that my journey had become walking to SLP...

i arrived and went straight into the toilet to look in the mirror and lo and behold my lens was still in there, folded over... i got it out, (also a palaver) unfolded it and put it back in, went about with the rehearsal...

only it wasn't happy about this and that eye was getting sore so i asked T if there was any contact lens solution around, which of course there wasn't... i decided to take it out and throw it away, i could possibly have kept it in water until i got home but carrying a glass of water, along with my keyboard from south to north london...?

anyway we rehearsed until quite late and i got the tube home, all with only one eye to focus with... once back at finsbury park it became clear that i should throw away the other lens (which had a knick in it anyway) and walk back to ours (but only for another 19 days) unfocussed and that is what i did ladies and gentlemen and it was lovely, i do like a bit of blurred at night time, so long as you know where you're going...

the added part of the story is that this morning i got hold of new ones (my last pair, once we've moved i'll have to get some new ones) and put them in, but once they were in i couldn't focus on anything, i blinked several times but the mist didn't clear until i worked out that i'd put both lens into the same eye... which i think i've done before and which is pretty spectacular...

ok, so briefly vlad, it had rained so the roads were wet and this is the classic time to get a puncture, on the way home from a brief stint at work this afternoon i could feel my back tire going down not too far from home, close though i was i decided to pretend that i wasn't to practise my roadside puncture repair...

i turned by bike up-side-down and set about trying to remove the outer tire... after 5 or perhaps 10 minutes of this with no visible results vlad came over to help, he has one of those jobs where you stand around a lot and he's from russia, he helped me get the outer tire off and find the puncture, also clearing the tiny bit of glass from the outer tire when we'd found the hole...

so much for my independent roadside puncture repair... anyway it got to the glueing stage and it became apparent that i didn't have any glue in either of the tubes of glue i had... so i had to carry the bike, still up-side-down, up hornsey road and through the andover estate to home before i could complete the operation... but the kindness of strangers ladies & gentlemen...? bless vlad...

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punctures & gothernberg

Continent : Europe
Country : Sweden
State/Region : Vastra Gotaland
City : Gteborg
Lat/Long : 57.7167, 11.9667


as promised... and gratifyingly pretty it is... Gteborg, or Göteborg, or Gothernburg...

Sweden...

no facts for you, just pleasingly a little like gotham... batman's home...

thankyou oh 6333rd visitor for drawing our attention to this beautiful place...

and now punctures...

3 of them, all on my back wheel which is a real pain...

my front wheel has teflon coating and seems relatively impervious to punctures, but my back wheel is imperial rather than metric so they don't do that kind of tire for it... and it does get punctures... oh yes it does...

so 1stly, a couple of weeks ago, i got a puncture when i still had money, i took it to cycle surgery... they fixed it... marvellous...

the 2nd one came right in my recent no money period and i tried to fix it but messed it up... i had to wait until i had money again to take it in to cycle surgery again, and while they were fixing it they reconnected my gears wrongly...

so on saturday when i picked the bike up the gears were wrong, and the gear lever was very resistant... which meant i pulled too hard on it and sheared the cable...

so i took it into cycle surgery on tuesday and they said - oh look, your cable is sheared, i said yes, but it's sheared because you reconnected my gears wrongly so are you going to pay for it to be fixed? and they said....

no.

so i'm never going there again, cycle surgery on holloway road ladies and gentlemen, bullshit service... (forgive my language)...

there's a bike shop just round the corner from where i work in shoreditch so i decided to go there this morning, drop it off before work and pick it up around now... get them to rectify cycle surgery's mistakes...

i grabbed my bike this morning and lo & behold... my 3rd puncture... back wheel... no time to fix it, public transport into work, no rectifying just yet for my little bike...

gigging tonight @ the metro with T's band...

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