Bicycling Stuff

I ride a bicycle for exercise, around residential streets and the loop around the park. The bike is nearly 20 years old. I paid $300 for it at a bike shop, and they did a pretty good job of setting it up to fit me. It has 21 gears, but I only use 4: #1 granny gear for going up hills, #8 for starting up, #13 for most tooling around, and #19 when I’m going downhill or have a tailwind. All those other gears are wasted.
I’ve got LED blinklenights on the front and back. It’s a white one in front, but not a headlight. The one in back is red. By blinking, I hope to warn people that I’ll ruin the paint on thieir vehicle if they hit me.
I’ve also got a bell that I use to warn pedestrians that I’m not going to run over them. I also ringading-ding it when passing parallel-parked cars, so maybe they won’t open ther doors just in time for me to crash into them. It’s happened to me once. And they blamed me!
I wear a backpack with a reflective strappy vest on it. Hopefully it’s not so obnoxious that folks actually want to hit me.
My helmet has a knob on it so the size can be adjusted. My head doesn’t change size much, but I still find that knob comes in handy. I have a friend who hit a hole in the road that stopped his bike dead. He flew over the handlebars. On impact his helmet didn’t just shatter, it exploded. It’s supposed to do that to get rid of the extra kinetic energy. He had brain surgery and several shoulder surgeries. Months later, talking with the brain surgeon, he’s wondering why the doctor is just staring at him wide-eyed. So he asks. The surgeon says, “I’ve never had one of my patients able to talk to me after their surgery.” So always wear your helmet, kids.
I really like to have a rear-view mirror. I tried the ones that go on the handlebars, but it’s too hard seeing where behind you that you want to see, and they seem to bounce a lot too.
So I wear a mirror on my helmet. They attach with some sticky sided velcro. I used to have a plain flat mirror. At some point the sticky stuff on it’s velcro gave up. It feel on during a ride. I have no idea where the mirror got to.
What I like about helmet mirrors is that once you have it set up so you can just barely see your earlobe, you can see anywhere behind you that you want just by barely moving your head. That way I can see the car coming before it hits me.
I bought a replacement mirror, and it’s con…cave. Yeah, it’s concave and wide-angly. And kinda shaped like a fish scale. When I first opened the packaging, I was disappointed. I didn’t think that I would like this sideshow mirror distorting thing on my helmet. But my eyes got used to it in about 15 minutes, and the extra view really comes in handy. I like it more than flat mirrors now. At least for riding a bike.