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August 10, 2003 : dynamo!
Wasn't dynamo a word from yesteryear? Like swell? Or maybe it's always been one of those comic book words. Actually, maybe I'm confusing it with dynamite! Regardless, we bought our bike-light dynamos one of the very first days of our vacation and only today did I succeed in getting it to work. But I'm getting ahead of myself, let me first talk about laundry, the dreaded word which even upon hearing it causes Eva and I to give each other the evil eye. Never fear, however, that today we managed to find a solution. The solution is, switch laundromats! We piled all of our laundry into our two back-packs (looking quite the part of lost student back-packers), tossed them along with our bikes into the back of the VW Transporter, and headed for any laundromat we could find between our house and Eva's mother's place. After one small U-turn, we were stuffing three machines with dirties. As it always happens on wash-days the world over, one never has the right sort of coinage. At our laundrette around the corner, we need 2 and 1 and 50 cent Euro pieces to wash and 20 and higher to dry. At this particular place we needed 1 and 50 cent pieces to wash, as our beloved, much-saved 2 Euro coins weren't much help. After Eva's attempt to ask the bartender at the cafe next door if she could break our 2s, I went on a gigantic hunt for change. I stopped 3 people on the street and went into 2 shops and finally had enough 1s to get us through the day. I don't know where Eva's confidence came from in respect to our leaving our laundry and heading for a short bike-ride, but for some reason today she was keen on leaving our unprotected laundry to wash (she's usually much, much more sensitive about leaving them since the laundry issue of two years back). We hopped on our bikes and headed to a cemetery we had seen from the road. It wasn't large, by any means, but it was a subtle blend of really old head-stones and chapels all the way up to 6-sided stones filled with ashes carefully stacked in rows. One thing I love about going to any cemetery, are the names of the people themselves. Even here I could recognize the old names having been replaced with new names. No Jennifers and Jasons, but names that sounded old and European, much like our old names sound Old and English. The day was, yet again, a scorcher. We returned to the laundromat, spun them in the little machine that gets them as-dry-as-possible, and headed on out to Broechem to line-dry our things and work on our bikes. We hung a line and set out our things by 5:30. Ordinarily there wouldn't be enough time in the day left to dry everything, but with the heat of the day still dragging on into sweaty nights, everything but the waists on jeans was dry by nightfall. Eva busied herself with spray-painting her bike. It went from late-nineties beat-up mountain bike to shiny black in just a few hours. She then, of course, realized that it now looks a bit stolen, but that's besides the point. And me? Well I fixed the damn dynamo. I had to "complete the circuit" with some stereo wire I bought just for the job. We bought the damn dynamo in an effort to not have to charge batteries all the time for lights and so we wouldn't have to remember to take our lights with us inside anywhere. So, after 1 month of dynamo stress, it's over. Funny thing is, the only other bike light I've ever used was a halogen version which is blindingly bright. This front and back system isn't for my sight, but just to remind people there is a helmet-less human coming in their direction. Leave it to me to be slightly disappointed at its output. Eva said, "wow, that's really bright!" and I said, "doesn't look like it." Then I said, "aha!" And the rest is the explanation I just gave. Regarding the week, well it's jam packed. The wedding page I made for my friends Jessica and Eric is now finished and now I just have another list of projects to get to work on. I'm about to reach enough busywork to have me a full-time job! Isn't that funny! IN THE NEWS: |