week of doom

Cycling back from snooker on Tuesday, I stopped in a Chinese takeaway in Beaumont, about 3km from home. Laden with chow mein and... whatever I got for my girlfriend, I decided to cycle on the path to the petrol station just around the bend (where I could buy a 2L bottle of something to drink, since coke cans are €1 a pop in the takeaway), rather than bother to cross back onto the road, cycle for 20 seconds and cross again to get to the petrol station.

I slightly underestimated the distance to the petrol station, so when I got my bottle of Club Orange and stuffed it into my backpack beside the Chinese food, I sat on my bike and noticed the front tyre was completely flat. Bollox, said I.
Anyway, I didn't want to faff about trying to fix it there because that takes me an hour and I had hot food in my bag. So after a longer-than-usual uncomfortable cycle home on a flat tyre, I pulled the takeaway out to find that it had leaked all the sauce from my chow mein into my backpack, all over my rain trousers and whatnot. And bollox again, I swore.

Next morning, we spent an hour fixing the puncture (I hate the damn things. Hate.) and I headed off to DCU. Some hours later, when I returned to my bike I noticed it was flat again. No problem, probably a slow puncture elsewhere, or a semi-sticky patch.. I'll just pump it up again and ride home. However, when I took the pump to college in my bag, I neglected to take the small attachment tube which connects it to the tyre's air valve. For the third time, bollox was uttered with some frustration.

Another trip home on a flat tyre, listening to the rim grind against tarmac through the outer tyre, and I left the bike 'til morning before swapping out the cursed inner tube with another I'd pulled out months ago with only one prior patch and which seemed to need only one more. This successfully carried me to college and back, but two days later it was flat again.
I put it out of my mind and on Sunday night, watched Lost at 9pm and prepared to do some catchup piano practice at 10 and a little more on Monday morning... when at about 3 minutes to ten, the power failed... apparently only on my road, or my half of the road even. So that lasted until about 3pm the next day, which caused some trouble since the piano is an electric keyboard.

When life gives you lemons, make cake! Unless you have a poxy electric cooker and the power is out.

...On the plus side, when I opened up my Macbook which had died in its sleep during the power outage (I put it to sleep with about 20 minutes left on the battery monitor, soon after the cut), I expected it to go through a normal bootup. Instead, I saw a funny progress bar whizz for a while, before it brought up the usual unlock dialogue which appears when you're logged on and wake the machine up. So there's a point where it wakes the machine from S3 (suspend-to-RAM) sleep and puts it straight into S4 (suspend-to-disk), then powers off, on the basis that the battery is about to run out which will destroy your S3 image and you'd have to boot again. Nice.