the great bike saga 2008, pt 2

to continue the story. so now i was left with a bike tool and my old bike, which was being used for parts. fortunately i had picked out a frame from the trash a while ago - it was a large hybrid commuter bike with a nasty tricolor stripe and half-decomposed seat. the sign said "free" and basically the owner didn't feel like replacing its pedals. so then, the obvious thing was to fix it up using the other pink pedal that was left. with a little air in the tires, my interim bike was almost ready - except we were missing one more pedal, the other pink one that, unfortunately, got stolen with my old bike.

i tried several times to obtain pedals - often with a flashlight and pedal wrench, looking for abandoned bikes in the streets. being without a bike meant i had to skateboard everywhere - to work, to taekwondo, and along my neighborhood. there was one bike that was almost completely stripped - the pedals remained because only the seat was easy to remove..but i couldn't take away the pedals because they were stuck too hard. i even considered going back to alicia's apartment to see if there were any abandoned bikes in her complex's bike rack, but i decided against it.

unfortunately, the next day, i received a call from alicia asking if i had ridden her bike to work, which i hadn't. "oh no," she said, "i guess it got stolen." so if you see any decathalon bikes with a huge sign that says "MyBike.com", it was either hers or some other poor sap's mybike.com loaner. but from that point on i decided that no porch would be safe from bike thieves, and that as much of a pain in the ass it is, it's probably necessary to lock the bike to itself and something else, every time you leave it at home.

so now, we are bikeless, and suddenly the hunt on craigslist has started.