Where the hell is the autowash

After driving around on errands yesterday morning, I came home to discover that I had one more: the clicker to open the gate on my building's car park wasn't working, dead battery. To deal with it later, I parked on the street...under a tree. Oops.

So Car is now covered with little specks of Tree Gunk, the windows are a mess, it's probably overdue for a little TLC, and I can't expect rain to wash any of it off. After going in to work for while this afternoon, I drove past a few of the gas stations I know, and none of them have an automatic car wash: y'know, the kind with the spray and the big rollers and brushes that as a child was a terrifying thrill, that takes 5 minutes. It's all I need: I don't want a hand wash or wax or anything like that.

I've now searched online--Google and Yelp--for car washes in Oakland/Berkeley. The only listings are for hand car washes which almost universally get panned in their reviews, even for $20+ it seems. There are detailing outfits with good reviews, but for $100+ I'd expect even my car to be frickin' sparkling inside and out.

There may be a couple things going on here. First, Alameda County may have different ideas about water use, which may discourage the installation of automatic car washes. Second, the balance of the high capital cost of the equipment versus the availability of dirt-cheap unskilled labor may favor hand washes. This area does not seem to like investing in itself.

Crap. Well, Car doesn't get used during the week anyway.

Watching the corks pop

In general, I'd say buildings in Berkeley are unprepared for genuinely hot weather. Realistically, it doesn't happen very often: the winds just blow off the ocean and keep things cool. However, on days like today, that wind stops--and things get noticeably less comfortable.


The thermostat in the lab at work is usually set to 72F, moderate. As the outside temps climbed to 98F today, though, the indoor temperatures (in our one-story, thin-walled building) also started to rise. 74, 76, 78...I work in a chemistry lab. Ether boils at, oh, 87F. 80, 81, 82...OK, so we topped out at 83F or so, so nothing started overpressurizing or boiling over when we didn't expect it to, but try putting on neoprene gloves and standing over a bath of rubbing alcohol for any length of time when it's 83F. Arms sweating until it runs and fumes, fumes, fumes...

I wonder how many batches of ginger beer in Berkeley garages blew up today?

The other aspect of this hot, dry weather (18% humidity, woo-hoo!) is that it released a hellish cloud of god-knows-what dust and pollen this morning. It was Bike to Work Day, so I rode past a couple of the "energizer stations" checking for schwag (at 9am, good luck). Every 10 seconds it felt like a piece of broken glass had blown into my eye. I didn't see my face until I got to work (25? minutes of riding), by which point my eyes looked like ripe tomatoes.

(not actually my eye)

I can only wonder what the volunteers at the BTWD stations thought of my Hellboy look, yeesh. (I'm a normal...er, relatively normal person! Really!)

High and tight

Having not had blog inspiration for a while, time to get back in the saddle with a bit of petty complaining...

If you know how to fix a flat, chances are you ride a bike equipped with a saddle bag. Heck, some people even race crits with them. Most saddle bags have a velcro'd strap to go around the seatpost and another that loops through the saddle rails to hold them in place, and the manufacturer's photos show them snug and secure:

Typically, though, saddle bags fall victim to the combined effects of vibrations and gravity: the bag contents shift aft, the saddle rail loop shifts forward, and truth is many bags look like a bad case of...hmm, this is a family show...so let's call it "half-mast":

I had to move my blinky light down to keep it from getting masked by Limpy the Saddle Bag...Now, I realize Limpy serves perfectly well and I can't even see behind/under my seat while riding, but out of sight does not always mean out of mind. Yes, in those quiet moments when I can't be bothered to do or think about something useful, it sometimes occurs to me to think about why I can't get my saddle bag to stay up.

Whether or not their bikes are actually any good or simply represent another version of technical parity compared to the umpteen other manufacturers out there, Trek has made saddle bags with a "quick cleat" attachment that indeed provides unfailing support to its saddle bags. The tradeoff is that you can't switch the saddle bag from bike to bike quickly unless you buy another "quick cleat" for the other bicycle...but how often do you use the same saddle bag on more than one bike?

Anyway, I had a Trek bag for years until some yutz decided to steal it, gathering for him-or herself a patched tube, a set of levers, a patch kit, maybe a crescent wrench, and the bag itself--but they failed to take the "cleat" attachment, so it was gone from my life and useless to them, thanks for that. But the memory of that saddle bag faithfully tucked up high and tight when compared to the vision of Limpy above will probably send me to a Trek dealer sometime soon for an upgrade.

...what the hell am I writing about? Good lord, just push the "publish" button and be done with it...