Timing Is Everything

25 May – Another painful wakeup which was to be expected followed by a sense of increasing despair as two attempts to do some much needed web work were thwarted by defective wifi hotspots.  The recently underutilised but perennial favourite at NoFishCafe in Surry Hills wasn’t working but I got a coffee anyway and the always reliable if somewhat slow spot at 370 Pitt (home of the old Cow Shed) was working fine for the PDA but not at all for the laptop (but I got a coffee anyway).  Hoping to find a courier who I could offload a somewhat urgent delivery to a banking friend of mine was to nowt – the only messengers I saw where peckers and schizophrenics, none of whom I could trust to take care of the sensitive item.  Despite keeping my eyes open the entire time I eventually found myself at the site itself and handed it over and had another coffee.  Feeling far too wired to be comfortable I trained back to Redfern and did find a useable hotspot but far too expose to do any serious work so that was a bit disappointing.  Attempts to fix Frangelica were also rather disastrous due to a lack of knowledge of how to get the brake levers off the twisted handlebars but am sure that there’s a trick to it which can be worked out by a better mechanic than me but until then I’ll just have to wallow in failure.  However, a late arrival by Dave lent a new observation point to the equation and we were able to locate a mysterious Allen key hole which, as luck would have it, enabled me to remove the levers.  A bit of a hack job to pry the old bars off the stem but managed to get Chevette’s original handlebars on and loaded up with the levers.  Not going to take her for a test just yet but it appears that she may be as good as new (even better, as the new handlebars are substantially narrower than her old ones – not that I plan on doing a hell of a lot of lane splitting just at the moment).  Replacement bar tape will have to wait for the moment but a slightly less sorry character was left at the end of the operation and that’s got to be a good thing.  Evening would be spent making a long wander out towards Aussie Stadium to see the ra-ra-rugby, an unexceptional game between a second tier Australian team and a second tier nation, first half was relatively close but the second half could be more accurately described as annihilation.  Also a bit disappointed by the alcomohol that was on offer – the only beer available was VB and Cascade Light so I was forced to subsist on the driver’s version.  However, one doesn’t go to the rugby to watch the game – at least I don’t, and the company was most pleasant, even if I did have to wait a whole quarter hour for them to turn up because I was on time and they were not.  After being offloaded into treacherous Redfern spent the evening making a new version of pancake batter and watching ‘The Man From Snowy River’, an Australian classic, not a very good movie, and one that was basically a love story wrapped around some nice cinematography and one absolutely incredible horse riding scene.  Huzzah turned up at the very end from the lips of Mr Jack Thompson and that was most satisfactory.