Subtleties of Everyday Life
One day a couple of years ago I went with Greg G to bring back pizzas for the Wedensday night engineering dinner. Now, I could probably write two or three entries about Greg, and another about the Wedensday night engineering dinner, but that's beside the point. Coming back to the building, he turned at the street before the one that goes straight into the parking lot. He commented, “I like to turn there rather than using the other street because when I make the left turn into the parking lot I'm farther from the pothole.” I thought, that's the kind of little adjustment you make when you do something day in and day out.
OK, so I was thinking of that because I made a little adjustment in the last couple of days. There's one really steep hill on my way home from work, at the top of Blake street at the corner of Edmands Park. I suppose I can get up it in my 2-1 gear (middle front sprocket, biggest rear sprocket) but it works better in my 1-3 gear (smallest front sprocket, third rear one). The road is uphill from Cabot Street, and I'm in the 2-4 gear from Cabot to the point where Blake is unpaved; then I shift down one rear sprocket for the uphill unpaved stretch; then it goes downhill for 50 yards, then regains the pavement and shoots steeply uphill. What I used to do was to shift the front to the small sprocket when it started uphill again. The trouble is that the chain wouldn't always get onto the small sprocket. I would be stuck in the 2-3 gear on the steep part, and that wasn't good enough. The adjustment is that I shift to 1-5 on the short downhill stretch. That's not too low a gear to be in there (it's about the same ratio as the 2-3). Then shifting to 1-3 is always reliable. It's one of those little things that makes a difference.
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