15 years ago, I bought a Cannondale mountain bike with some of the first real money I was making at Johns Hopkins. At that time I was riding to and from work every day and hitting the trails on the weekends, so it was a worthwhile purchase. One thing that always bugged me about the bike was the size of the handlebars, which I corrected by chopping 2″ off each end with a hacksaw. The other was the length of the stem, which was excessively long and meant I was always leaning way out over the front wheel. I finally changed that this weekend, with the purchase of a shorter stem, and replaced the old one in about 15 minutes. What a difference.

Now, we have to hunt down a bike for Jen to ride and find a wheel-mounted bike carrier on Craigslist for our summer vacation.

I’ve been using a large Timbuk2 messenger bag to commute to work for the past month, which has been workable but not optimal. I had one of their medium bags for about ten years but it inexplicably vanished a while ago; I was heartbroken because it had been around the world with me and was just getting broken in. Timbuk2’s version of “large” is big enough to carry whole people, and when I’m just carrying a dainty 13″ MacBook Pro and my coffee, it’s a lot of bag for a tiny load. So I’ve been eying used bags on eBay and new bags from Chrome, Timbuk2 and Rickshaw for the past couple of weeks. I randomly signed up for Rickshaw’s email list on Saturday, and today in my inbox I got a one-day offer for 40% off the bag I’ve been wanting. Sold! They tell me it should be here in about two weeks due to high demand, but I can be patient.

We got a flyer in our mailbox from a local kid looking to mow lawns for college money, and I decided to call him up to see what he’d quote for our lawn. After some missed connections, he finally stopped over and quoted us an exceptionally low price, so I hired him on for next Wednesday. If I don’t have to mow the bulk of the lawn and can just deal with edging and actual housework, the weekly cost will be more than worth it. Now, if we could just get a tree service to call us back…