I gave blood on Tuesday afternoon (donation number 67). As usual, they warned me to avoid strenuous activity for 24 hours, and as usual I ignored them, by cycling another 25 miles and running five during the rest of the day. Although the official advice is actually a lot more measured and reasonable.
As I set off to ride to work I briefly wondered why my headphones started cutting out, then realised that I’d completely forgotten to pick up my rucksack.
Looks like some kind of solitary wasps (mud daubers?) have been nesting in my lounge window frame:
I thought I was ready to start rebuilding the wheels for my purple bike. Originally I was just planning to replace the hubs, but after taking the old wheels apart (which turned out to have been a waste of time) I realised that one of the spoke holes on one wheel had ripped through, so I ordered new rims too. I started lacing the front wheel up, then when I went to fit the third group of spokes I realised that the ones I’d bought were far too short (this is my first stab at wheel building, otherwise it would have been obvious from the get-go). This wasn’t entirely my fault – I’d based my spoke calculations on the effective rim diameter quoted on the product page from the retailer I bought the rims from, not noticing that they’d just included one set of specs for both the 650B and 700C versions. Naturally the figure was the one for the wrong variant. I’m now waiting for another bunch of – hopefully correct – spokes to arrive before I can try again. These basic wheels have already cost more than the fancy (but admittedly very cheap) carbon ones I got for the road bike.
Another post-parkrun Cricketers visit on Saturday for second breakfast, then Robin got wind of a beer festival at Ipswich Transport Museum, and he, Jo, Neil and I cycled over for the evening. I’d never got round to visiting the museum before – it’s quite interesting, and nice to be able to get in for less than the usual price and wander round with a beer. Apparently it raised a decent amount of money for them too, so hopefully it’ll become a regular event.
On Sunday evening we were all back out again, along with Dave and Sally, for dinner at the Cricketers again and to catch up with Dave’s tales of his trip over to San Francisco to run the marathon and drive around on a Harley-Davidson.