Week 44 - Day One: Mrs. Fix It Gets Bloody

BIKE: Mike
TIME THERE: 22 min.
TIME BACK: 22 min.
WEATHER: clear, 16C, 13 km/hr cross/tailwinds there; a few clouds, 23C, 6 km/hr cross/tailwinds.
WHAT I WORE: yoga capris, t-shirt, zip-up hoodie (hoodie in panniers on the way home)
NOTES:

Poor Mike. He's seen better days. His brake pads are wearing thin, especially on the rear wheel; some of the cogs on his cassette are missing teeth, making some gears essentially useless because the chain keeps skipping over the broken parts; the headset loosens up after a certain amount of use, resulting in creaking noises and distressingly shifting handlebars until I tighten it again; and, generally, the bike is feeling kind of stiff and creaky and in ill repair.

Over the weekend, I decided to attempt a bit of a home remedy by replacing the rear brake pads with brand spanking new ones. I've never done this before myself or seen anyone do this, but it didn't look too difficult. I did manage to figure out how they went on, but it took some futzing around to figure out how to loosen the brakes enough for me to get the new pads on and how to adjust everything to make sure it all fit together properly.

While working on the brakes, I managed to stab my thumb with a loose piece of wire from the brake cable. This thin, sharp, and filthy errant string of metal penetrated fairly deeply into my finger pad (which itself was pretty filthy from working on the bike). There was instantaneous blood flow coming out of a very tiny little hole right in the middle of my thumb, and given the depth of the wound there was a surprising amount of pain. I was close to being finished with the brakes, so I finished those off before trying to clean up my bloody mess. This was perhaps a mistake.

Blood flowed from my thumb, sullying the brand new brake pads and the wheel fork and even the ground beneath me. By the time I went to clean up my wound, it was all a big mess of blood and bike grease and road dirt. If the loose wire itself didn't cause an infection deep in my thumb from its initial penetration, surely this mess would have traveled into the wound and done it. Now, twenty-four hours later, my thumb is sore enough that I find it very difficult to text message and do other thumb-heavy activities, and I worry about whether some kind of tiny little infection will set in. Maybe next time I injure myself while working on the bike, I'll take the time to clean myself up right away before the wound starts closing. Or maybe I should behave a little more prissy and just pay someone to work on my bike for me. I'm too damn delicate for this stuff!