All hardware sucks
I was riding the trek down to the Big Big Store to get lunches for the bears and some vegan fud for me (Oh, yeah, I’ve switched to a vegan diet. I’ll talk about that some day or another, and it probably won’t be a spittle flecked rant about how everything in the house/store contains dairy and/or eggs) when it started to make a horrible scrapy squeaking noise. My outbound route looped through Garthwick, and the scrapy noise started around the time I reached the junction of Milwaukie & 17th, so I had about a mile and a half to try and isolate the problem while I was riding along, and, by the time I reached the store I was pretty certain that it was the (cassette == nonrepairable) bottom bracket.
I checked the cranks out before I went into the store and it certainly looked like the squeaking was coming from the bottom bracket, so after I finished shopping and went home (to an increasingly loud chorus of scrapy noises which made me wonder if the bottom bracket was about to seize or break in half) I derailed the chain and spun the cranks to verify.
Yup, the bottom bracket is toast. Sigh. Time to throw it into the recycling (or just tear it apart for spares) and run – on the project bike, not the trek – up to the LBS and pick up a new el-cheapo sealed bottom bracket.
At least this is a component that only costs about $10.
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The fruitcake will need some substitutions. If I want to make it fascisticly Vegan™, I’ll need to strike the honey and replace it with some other sweetener (corn syrup + molasses? That would give the fruitcake a slight smokey taste that might be good) and, of course, I’ll be replacing the eggs (there are lots of vegan alternatives for eggwhites, but I’ll need to investigate a bit for yolks) and swapping out the dairy chocolate for a vegan formulation.
I’ve done olive oil a couple of times in the fruitcake, and I don’t remember any difference from butter. I think the only thing that has the potential to be problematic is the honey (there is, apparently, a huge screaming vegan debate on whether honey is an acceptable foodstuff or not. The “I don’t want to eat food that you have to kill something for” part of me is not bothered by honey, but I am morally offended by industrial chicken farming to the point where I have lost my taste for eggs, so the argument about industrial beekeeping is not completely unreasonable. But then again, beekeeping is needed to actually grow field crops in North America, so it’s kind of hypothetical to shun bee vomit because industrial beekeeping has stupid and counterproductive (hive death is a real problem, so the industrial beekeepers have a powerful incentive to stop being idiots. Mind you, there are farmers out there who won’t stop doing stupid things because they can’t imagine the alternatives to be viable even as their beloved industrial practices fail to provide enough money for them to live on) practices, but still eat, well, any food aside from licking the morning dew off the grass or scavenging roadkill.) But in any case, different ingredients mean experimental cooking, and I need to get back into doing that anyway.
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Vegan? That precludes the fruitcake, unless you can figure how to veganize it. BTW, I bought the cookbook :-)
And if it isn’t one bike having a worn-out part, it is another bike. Hopefully in a parts-replacement lull, for the time being.