2022-08-24
Things have happened, but not in the order presented here.
Yesterday we had some colleagues from Stockholm visit the local office. It was great fun; there was a lot of socialising and pizza involved. Anecdotally a pizza place owner becomes very very happy if you order 20 pizzas on an otherwise slow Tuesday night.
When I was to go home at around 22:00 I couldn't find my bike. Anywhere within a 500 metre radius. Even though I'd parked it just outside. Oh, well.
Now I'm using an old commuter bike that we had in storage. It's not bad. Definitely a lot slower than the 27 gear hybrid I had, but I do need to practice slowing down in general for my well-being so that's not necessarily a bad thing. I just hope it holds up better than my last commuter bike which eventually just couldn't handle the, uhm, urban terrain...
I think bike commuting is awesome! And just in general biking is the second best mode of transport, only beaten by walking which is sadly too slow for many errands.
My trousers do not agree. Mildly speaking. I usually wear jeans when I'm in public. Only rarely am I seen in pyjamas in town or the grocery store. Probably not as rarely as the word "rarely" implies, but anyway! All jeans I've owned for the past decade have worn out in the exact same way: murdered by bike saddle.
They break on the inside of the thighs, just where the lower edge of the saddle scrapes against them. The rest of the trousers are just fine. It's just that this can't really be fixed.
I lost my only two pairs of jeans in the span of the last two weeks. Bought one new pair now. May buy another one soon-ish.
As it happens I have a sewing machine at home. On a whim I decided to do something with the two broken pairs and a bit of waterproof fabric I purchased for a project that never happened.
So I made a messenger back.
I didn't have any pattern for it and frankly couldn't be arsed to measure anything. I just improvised my way forward one seam at a time. Sometimes I failed my spatial thinking process and had to improvise some fix.
But I did it! It's got a whole lot of pockets and a waterproof flap as well as waterproof bottom. It looks pretty hideous, or eclectic if you will, with a mix of blue and brown jeans parts and bright red waterproof wax fabric. The pockets are good but a little too shallow for some use cases. It's of decent size but can not fit a 15" laptop.
I'm probably never going to use it because I truly love my backpack. Still, though. I'm happy with it.
Still have a lot of fabric left over from this and other projects. May do something with that.
-- CC0 Björn Wärmedal