I've been in a fairly bad mood since Thurs. when I discovered that someone messed with my bike. I actually came out and saw someone climbing on top of the bikes parked outside Union Station to get onto this concrete ridge. What a total a**hole. While I didn't actually see him mess with my bike, what I did see was that someone had yanked the brake cable out of place. I managed to get that back in place, then set off for home. There was some problem with the derailleur and the chain was clanking on the side of the wheel and looking like it would come off. I was so pissed. I turned around and put the bike in storage and then took the train home.
I was hoping that one of my co-workers who knows a lot about bikes could take a look, but he had just set off on a week-long vacation. I decided that since I would almost certainly need to take the bike on the train, I would need to wait until Saturday to retrieve it from work. And going forward, I'll have to either leave the bike in storage or bring it into the office, which is going to be a major pain, adding close to 10 minutes each way. I guess that is pretty minor compared to the bike being out of service due to sabotage. At any rate, it just reminds me how much I dislike scummy destructive people, of whom there are just enough around to ensure that the collective we can't have nice things...
Anyway, Saturday rolled around. I went to the gym fairly early, then picked up some swim goggles at Winners. (I think these will fit better, but I'll check this out later in the week.) Then I went off to work. I fussed around with the chain and the gears a bit and managed to get the chain to bite on one of the middle gears. However, this meant that I had to take it very slow and pretend to be riding a "fixie," i.e. a fixed gear bike. It was really hard not to shift up or down, but I was disciplined and made it home. I did risk gearing down once I got to the steep section of Pape and fortunately didn't throw the gears out of whack. At the shop, they thought they probably could fix the derailleur, but they won't actually know for sure until Tuesday. While this experience wasn't ideal, I had really been stressing over taking the bike on the train (and dealing with elevators and so forth), so avoiding that did put me in a better mood. (Of course, if the derailleur does need to be replaced and this is an expensive repair, then my mood will revert to a much darker shade...)
I got a few other tasks accomplished, and then after dinner I set off to Harbourfront to see Angelique Kidjo. She wasn't going on until 9:30! Anyway, it was pretty crowded, but I was able to get a seat towards the back. I think she was a bit disappointed that it was so hard to keep the crowd on its feet, but it was a fairly high-energy show overall. However, it is true that the Celia Cruz songs are a bit slower, and perhaps she should have skipped a couple of those in favour of more dance-oriented tracks. At any rate, she sang quite a few songs from her Cruz cover album. She sang three* of the songs off of Remain in Light: Once in a Lifetime, Cross-eyed and Painless and Born Under Punches. This was my favourite part of the concert. She also did "Macumba." (Oops - "Tumba".) During the song "Afirika" she had the whole crowd singing, then she went into seats and marched around the whole audience. Pretty cool. She had a singer from another group come up as they did Makeba's "Pata Pata." Pretty awesome. I think the only way it could have been any better is if she came out for an encore and did "Malaika." Well, you can't have everything.
While I got home fairly late, overall Saturday was a decent day, and I ended it in a better mood than I started. Well, I'll just have to see how this holds up after Tuesday.
* Actually, she also sung "Houses in Motion." It turns out this show made it to Setlist.fm after all! It looks like we got a fairly typical set (and she has retired Malaika at least for the time being), though a couple of months back she did "Burning Down the House," which I'm sure was awesome.
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