Today was one of those day I got off work in simply an irritable mood due to the fact that my experiments did not go as planned. Which in general means they take hours longer, as I attempt to self-correct. So the day ended much later than hoped and not quite as well as hoped...and I still had my commute home which normally I really enjoy but today it was all lost on my in my desperate desire to have been home a whole 2 hours earlier.
I strapped my helmet, embarked on my bicycle, and immediately had to maneuver carefully to avoid running into people, having lost depth perception, my vision in one eye blocked completely and the other almost completely....ah that other irritating issue (which I was willing to ignore on my morning commute due to my better mood at the time)...that of my helmet.
They say, "always wear a helmet, you never know when it will save your life." Which I completely agreed with until recently, in which I am nearly persuaded that it is my helmet that will get me killed in the first place.
My early and rather disastrous bicycle commute days before I switched routes, (which I shall go into further on a later date), was disastrous (on a weekly sometimes daily basis), but it was my knees and shins and even ankles that suffered and never my head. Indeed, at least one of these incidents was caused the very first day after I obtained my helmet and discovered its preferred resting position in front of my eyes, before I had gained enough of a balance to adjust it every 2 minutes.
One of my engineering friends, determined to help me, vigorously adjusted the straps this way and that way...until here!...the final product! In the engineering (and biology research) mindset of constantly weighing cost with benefits...it was a better product in that I had a clear field of vision, with the side effect of feeling rather strangled on my commute and arriving with a raspberry mark on my forehead; which of course my lab mates loved to point out every morning, and others who noticed though that I had crashed or something leaving this (momentarily) indelible mark on my head.
Earlier this year, on the colder winter days, (taking my life into my hands) I used the cold as an excuse for the necessity of wear a beanie instead of my helmet, which were quite nice days of un-distracted commute...
Then there is the issue of having long hair, which greatly affects day-by-day helmet positioning depending upon how and where all this hair is arranged upon the head. This is, in fact, what caused me to reconfigure the helmet from this superior positioning in hopes of finding a new position better suited for my hair that day, and alas as I lack engineering skills (or more acutely--time that particular morning) I am left with the current state of affairs. No raspberry forehead, no gasping for air the whole way to work and back, but no great field of vision either.
On mon bicyclette...
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