New driveline on primary bike!

It's been a while since my last post here, because I meant to devote this blog to the paper route and not much new has happened on the paper route. For example, when I did my first-ever-since-owning-the-route, taking of a Sunday off to go canoeing in the Chesapeake in the late spring, it was a complete non-event, as I'd expected it to be, because that's how good my substitute is.

It's been a while since I bothered to take the bike along on the delivery; running is easy enough, and I still haven't gotten around to doing the additional fixing-up that I've been meaning to do on the devoted-to-the-purpose, paperboying bike. But by fixing it up as much as I did last winter, one thing that I learned was that even the crappiest-looking triple chainring, from almost any one of the big-box-store bikes in my junkpile, works fine (even for a "real" cyclist, such as you or I, who is generally bigoted against big-box-store bike parts and prefers bike-shop bike parts - you see I accumulate rusty-but-largely-unworn, big-box-store bike parts because the neighbors are always adding them to my junkpiles).

Meanwhile, my primary bike - a '70s-or-'80s Fuji road bike that I've been using since 1999 after a neighbor added _it_ to my junk pile - had been more and more in need of a new rear wheel lately. Well actually, the only things wrong with its rear wheel were that the pain-in-the-ass sealed bearing has been loose for many thousands of miles, and the freewheel on it was only compatible with my worn chain because I was too much of a turkey to buy a new chain for the last 3 years. That worn chain had also worn out the latest chainring of the proudly-single-chainring crankset that I'd been using for at least 10 (oops - not 17 as I just erroneously boasted on the BicyclingAdvocacy yahoo group) years and being vainglorious about the virtues of the simplicity of.

But this spring, I happened to get a very good rear wheel with a 34-tooth freewheel (_another_ thing I hadn't had in years) at the flea market for $30. Last weekend, I finally got around to putting it on (on my primary bike), together with an old junk triple chainring just like the one that I'd put on the devoted-to-paper-boying bike last winter.

Riding my primary bike with a front derailleur on it for the first time in years, made it such a pleasure to ride, that it produced a significant weekly-milage jump! For example, I rode it to Clarks Summit yesterday morning even though it had barely been over a week since the last time I'd included Clarks Summit on a ride itinerary.

My inspiration for choosing Clarks Summit as a ride destination yesterday was paper-route-related: This past Sunday, I'd accidentally delivered a paper to a house that was supposed to be on vacation stop. It's not good for a paper to be sitting in front of a house all week advertising that nobody's home; so, yesterday, when I was having my usual mid-week craving of a McDonald's breakfast and it was a choice of either Gibson (10 miles north), Carbondale (13 miles southeast) or Clarks Summit (17 miles south), I picked Clarks Summit.

But when I got to the particular house that I wanted to "steal" the Sunday paper from (it was 9 am or so by then), the garage door of it was open and there were people working in there; so, being shy as I am, I simply rode by, figuring, "They're back home already", even though the Sunday paper was still sitting on their front porch untouched.

It took until a few blocks later for the slight screwballity of this to dawn on me: If the people working in the garage were the owners, why was the Sunday paper still untouched? Well, maybe they were contractors or somesuch. Except, they didn't look like contractors; they looked like typical suburbanites. Then a few miles later, _another_ thing - namely something _about_ "typical" suburbanites - dawned on me: They're often so oblivious to what their own neighbors right across the street are doing, that burglars can go in and clean the place out in broad daylight!

Well, I think I'll just take the _non_-busybody approach and hope for the best, in view of what happened the one time - back in the early '70s when _I_ was one of those suburbanites - that I happened to be the only one who knew that the neighbor across the street was away for a week, noticed some strange people going in there, and got worried enough about it to troll my mom into calling the police: It turned out, after the police talked to them, that they _were_ just contractors or somesuch.