Smash, Bash, Crash
Political ennui isn’t the only reason I haven’t posted here much over the past couple of months. The other is a couple of spectacular smashes and their knock-on effects.
One was an office accident back in August. Somehow—I’m still not sure how—I managed to pull my iMac off my desk as I was getting up to leave for the day, bringing it crashing down onto the feet of my swivel chair and cracking the screen in two places. Fortunately the CPU and hard drive still worked, and I managed to hook up an old spare VGA monitor and mirror the screen onto that to confirm that everything was backed up. But it meant that I was without my normal computer for two whole months, getting by with a much older spare while the screen was being repaired. Mercifully, it now has been, so I can look forward to running more than a few programs at once without the whole thing slowing to a crawl.
Screen meets swivel chair. Mouseover for a close-up.
Two months later, at the start of a week off with the kids while they were on mid-term break, I was an hour into an epic ride around Edinburgh on cycle paths that go all the way from the old Innocent Railway around Arthur’s Seat to Portobello, Leith, Cramond, and back to Haymarket—some 44km in all, according to my son’s bike computer—when I came down a gentle incline at Brunstane slightly too fast, hit a slippery wooden bridge at slightly the wrong angle, and felt the bike slide out from under me. The impact ripped a hole in my jeans and wore the skin off my knuckles, the first time I’d ever worn fingerless cycling gloves rather than full ones. Once we found a supermarket I bought some Savlon and plasters, covered up all the scrapes, and carried on. I was okay for the rest of the day, but everything hurt the next one, and still hasn’t healed up completely.
Skin meets tarmac. Mouseover for a knees-up.