Since I last wrote to you, I have had several items I have needed to fix. Well, you can probably call them repairs essentially. Though, fix and repair is probably the same damn thing. I digress.
First, the garage. I returned from work one night last week, I think it was either Friday or Saturday, I don't remember for sure. I pulled into the garage and as usual, I closed the garage door from in my car using the remote. Suddenly I heard a very loud bang, similar to a gun shot. I was a little nervous as you could imagine. I got out of my car and noticed one of the side springs of my garage was missing. I thought it was a little odd, and sure enough, the spring had broke. The biggest part was resting nicely on the step up into the house. The other part was still attached to the cable. This would later turn into a bigger deal than I thought. As it was, the garage door was now sitting crooked in the opening. Thankfully they make replacement parts for things like garages, and I was able to get a couple new springs at Home Depot. They came with cables in them and I thought these were the safety cables, I would later find out I was wrong.
After trying to figure out how I was going to attach the old pulley to the new spring and coming to the realization it wouldn't work, I decided I would need to get replacement pulleys too. So, I went to Ace Hardware because apparently Home Depot doesn't carry such items. At least, I couldn't find them on the website and it was easier to go to Ace than to Home Depot on that particular day. And, Ace is the helpful hardware place.
Finally got the new pulleys and went home to try and finally install them. I was able to successfully get the pulleys on the cable and attach them to the new springs. The next hurdle was getting the spring onto the garage door frame so they could do their job. Unfortunately, the springs were about 4 inches short of attaching directly to the frame. Here is where I figured out the cables were a necessary part of the whole installation process. They were to be used to attach the spring to the garage door frame. After some careful installation the garage door finally worked again.
Now, the garage door was broken for about 3 days. During that time, I had gone out for a ride on the cross bike with my dad. I took him to this small park in Brookfield to help him with his mounting/dismounting and showed him some drills to work on that particular skill. After, we were planning on doing some riding in Greenfield park. I have a loop I made up myself to follow and it is fairly challenging, but nothing too serious. We were about halfway through a lap and going through some trees in a field when all of a sudden I heard this serious noise. It sounded like I had run over a stick and for some reason thought the stick was stuck in my chain. Definitely wasn't the case.
I looked down and my chain was literally in my rear wheel. No good. My derailluer hanger was torn in half and the derailluer was just hanging on the ground. Can't ride the bike like that. Thankfully my dad was with and he rode home and got the car and was nice enough to give me a ride back to the Hacienda. After realizing my derailluer was actually bent beyond repair and getting a new hanger and derailluer, the cross bike is back up in action.
All in all, it was a few days of spending a lot of money to get make some serious repairs. This home ownership thing is cool, but it seems like almost everyday something new goes wrong. Either way though, it is fun and I have a new couch to hang out on and write this awesome and highly entertaining posts...alright, so maybe not so awesome or entertaining, but, you did read all the way to this point, so it had to be slightly intriguing.
I swear, I will put pictures of the hacienda up...just not today. Sometime soon though, I promise.
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