I can ride my bike with no handlebars...

...if only. Today has seen bank problems and bike problems.



Bank:

Citibank UK didn't accept my college-certified copy of my passport, and they want one certified by a banker, lawyer, or notary, apparently. This means, that if I try to pursue things with Citibank, it will just take ages and ages, since this all has to go through the mail. So, change of plans: I'm going with Barclays now, and setting up a very simple, plain checking account with them. They, in theory, have some sort of relationship with Bank of America, so in theory that may help me move money around, but I suspect that that's going to be more in theory than in practice. But I think I'll just take my financial aid check for the semester and pay it into there and hope they don't charge me a gigantic fee for doing so, and if I run out of that before the end of the semester, I can take some of my dollars sitting in my American savings account and try to move them over through my Bank of America account. That plan will hopefully work out okay.



Bike:

So, I made my first foray to the inside of Kelsey Kerridge, the sports center, today. Very much made me miss both MetroRock and Hemenway simultaneously. I saw the climbing wall at Kelsey Kerridge -- very bizarre, as expected. It's about 20 feet high (even higher than Keller's wall -- which for me is a minus), and about 4 or 5 times wider than it was tall. No ropes were being used, but I saw a rope on the ground near it, so I'm not sure what that was for -- maybe "abseiling," which is apparently one of the main uses of that wall. The crashpads under it don't look particularly bulky, either, but since I didn't actually go in I suppose it's possible they have good foam. Maybe. It's built in the style that was considered state-of-the-art 15 years ago before people realized how silly it was -- a lot of featured holds built into the wall that make hard climbing contrived or impossible. Not that there were any set routes on the wall. There were a few people climbing on it, mostly in sneakers, although there was one girl wearing climbing shoes, but they weren't any sort of model I recognized. Most of it is vertical but one corner has a horizontal roof about halfway up. Horrible design, overall. I've decided that I'll occasionally use it to try to do a gazillion traverses back and forth on.

The classroom was small, had no windows, and, most difficult for me, no mirrors. I really missed Hemenway. There was probably space for only about 10 participants, but there were only 5 of us, anyway. I was doing the half-hour "Krunch & Kore" class. It wasn't particularly exciting, but at least it was something to keep me from getting too fat. So I'll probably try to keep going to these kinds of classes there.

However, all of this is tangential to my bike problems. About 3 minutes into my 10 minute ride there, I started to notice that the handlebars were kinda loose. By the time I got there, they really felt pretty loose. Which was very unnerving. I tried not to put too much weight on them. But I went in and did the class.

When I came out, the troubles really started. It was dark at this point, and I couldn't see the lock that well. I just tried to stick the key in. And tried. And tried. And then I took my bike light that I had just fought with the wobbly handlebars to attached, detached it, and shone it at the lock. And I saw that there was no way my key was going to fit in it. I couldn't even figure out what was wrong. It was my lock, on my bike, and it was the right key. Eventually I hopped over the fence the bike was attached to and really started attacking the lock one-handed, with the other hand trying to hold the light. After fighting with it for 10 minutes, I eventually realized that like the outermost layer of the lock had rotated itself, and was misaligned. It took another 5 minutes to get it to realign so that I could stick my key in. I was somewhat concerned that no one tried to accuse me of stealing the bike, since that was pretty much what it looked like I was doing. Eventually, though, I succeeded in unlocking it -- which meant I had no excuse not to get it back.

On the way back, it was now dark -- but it wasn't late enough that the streets were unbusy. The handlebars were really loose now, and I had to make sure I kept them rotated at the correct angle so that I didn't blind myself with the front light. I'm not that good at hand signals to start with, but I really couldn't do them with the handlebars in their state, so at intersections where I would have signaled I pretty much just got off and walked the bike awkwardly across the street. The biggest problem was that the whole thing got extremely wobbly and I was having a lot of trouble steering without swerving all over the place into traffic.

But I survived. Nick is very sorry and doesn't know why it's done this, since according to him it has never ever ever happened before (although I am a bit skeptical). If I want to ride my bike before November, I will apparently have to track down a 5mm allen wrench. Good luck. On the other hand, though, I feel as if I may have had quite enough bike riding for a little while.