I have this mental block about actually "fixing" leaky bicycle tubes. Swap in a new one and move on. But tubes aren't exactly cheap (especially since both my regular bicycles have odd size wheels and I have to mail order), so the last several flats I've kept the tubes, meaning to patch them. Eventually.

Last week I had a flat on the right front of the tricycle, removed a small thorn from the tire, and put in a new tube. That made three leaky tubes waiting for a fix. This morning, the same wheel was soft, so I assumed I'd missed the actual culprit. Figured this was my cue to actually patch all the tubes, so I filled up the kitchen sink to locate the leaks. The three older tubes had clear leak sites, though the most recent of those was very small and slow.

But I couldn't find any leak in the newest tube. I suppose it's possible I didn't have the valve tightened completely and it was leaking slightly through the stem. (The tricycle uses Presta valves.) So I checked the tire carefully for possible causes and put it back on. We'll see tomorrow if it's gone soft again. Which would be annoying.

But at least I've gotten a bit more practice in getting the tire on and off, which requires a high level of believing that it can be done plus significant hand strength. (The front wheels on the tricycle can be worked on without removing them from the frame. The rear wheel is...more complicated. But not quite as complicated as the rear wheel of the Brompton fold-up, which involves a lot of keeping track of which small item goes where.)

Given how many miles I put on the bike, I probably have a relatively low rate of flats. I got heavy duty tires because the rec trails have some vegetation hazards. (Star thistles can serve as surprisingly functional caltrops.) Glass is less common. One flat was due to a small, short wire that I only found by running my finger around the inside of the tire. (Ouch!)

Perhaps the odd thing is that my overall reading patterns *haven't* changed that much in retirement, although I do have more time for it. A substantial amount of my reading continues to be non-fiction for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, and that continues. In fact, I have to fight the temptation to spend most of my productive time working on that. But today I wanted to talk more about fiction.

Pre-retirement, my pattern was to have an audiobook going for commuting and my lunchtime bike ride (though bike rides were also for podcasts, since they fit better). If an audiobook really grabbed me, I'd find excuses to do things (like house or yard work) to continue listening. I generally also had one print book in progress at any given time, but they took a long time to finish because I didn't have a fixed context for reading. (Sometimes I'd read them during the break in my weekend bike rides.) Despite doing most of my buying via ebooks, they mostly just piled up because by the time I was done with work and other things, I didn't want to stare at a screen any more.

So what's changed? Well, for one thing, I cancelled my Audible subscription as part of paring down fixed expenses while I get settled into my new budgeting. But I decided it was well past time to actually get a local library card, and now I'm discovering the joys of Libby for audiobooks. I can't necessarily get the instant gratification (and there are plenty of audiobooks they just don't have), but I always have something going. And the borrowing logistics mean that once I've borrowed an audiobook, I make sure to prioritize it.

Print books aren't making any more of a dent on my time than they did previously, in part because my bike ride breaks are pretty much all LHMP all the time. So consumption is about the same.

Ebooks are getting a bit more of my attention. I'm trying to keep the iPad with the books (long story, two iPads for different purposes) charged up so that I can grab it when I'm in the mood. I'm gradually capitulating to the need to track about four different ebook apps, since Apple Books can get weird about showing me non-Apple books that I've side-loaded via the laptop. (It's not all-or-nothing. Some non-Apple books show up on my phone but not the iPad. And some do show up on the iPad.)

That brings us to reading during my recent New Zealand trip. Part of the trip plan was to include lots of relaxation time, and I cued up a bunch of books I'd been wanted to get to. One thing I found (when giving myself time and context for reading) was that I want to be more hard-nosed about DNFing when a book just isn't working for me. And one of the things that more and more doesn't work for me is books with blah prose.

There were several of those during the NZ trip. Stories that had a good premise, and themes that should be appealing to me, but the writing was just...not good. Not bad. Not awful. Just not *good*. Stories where if felt like the author was explaining the story to me rather than telling it. Stories where there were too many WTF moments in the plotting. Stories where the prose was relentlessly pedestrian. And because I started half a dozen novels in quick succession on the trip, it was easy to compare the ones that *did* work for me. Books with singing prose. Books with solid plot and character work. Books where I didn't want to get up from the couch until I'd finished them.

I need to get caught up with my "things I've read" posts, which will have more specifics.

I've posted the birdwatching report from my New Zealand trip on my Alpennia blog (https://alpennia.com/blog/new-zealand-birding). The non-bird parts to come.

Today's rhythm was thrown off by the need to check in at 11:30 on my potential jury duty service. Which also meant that when I went online to set up an optometry appointment, I didn't think I could commit to the "earliest possible" slot next Tuesday, with the next options starting in late October. And then when I checked in and found I was excused from jury duty, that next Tuesday slot had been snapped up.

It became clear to me on the NZ trip that I really needed to update my vision prescriptions, though in part this was because I was doing a lot more close-distance reading than usual and it became clear that one of my eyes has drifted more than the other. Then coincidentally, yesterday I got a note from Kaiser saying that my current glasses prescription was about to expire (it's been two years) and I should make an appointment.

But anyway, since I didn't want to go off on the bike this morning because of the check-in, I wrote up my birding notes. And now I'm thinking that since my routine is already off, I could just go off script entirely for the rest of the day. (Yes, yes, I have a fixed routine in retirement. What can I say?) Maybe I'll do something wild and crazy like pick rose hips. I have three or four bushes that have a lot of hips--enough to do something interesting with, anyway--and it might be fun to try some comparisons.