Happy Yender

To what could be the next best thing to a Kosher holiday. The rainy season has started early and someone was nice enough to have stolen a shopping bike and left it in our bike park. Bless those who steal other people's modes of transportation just so they don't have to walk 1.5kms from the train station. The bike that had been left in our frontarea was moved over to the bike parking where it was roped off because it didn't have an apartment number sticker on it which meant it was rogue and would be removed. But not before the lurker and I removed the fenders. The way I saw it, and this is a justification for all my acts of theft, was that someones $100 bike had been taken and they had already given up so they went out and bought another one. It eases my pain. After some scraped knuckles and some beer the fenders were on the ground. The fun didn't stop there as we inflated the tyres and oiled the chain. If this bike was going out it was going with a makeover. Now comes the hard part. All of my plans carried out while under the influence start off like the road to hell........with alcohol (not good intentions). I would actually have to mount them on my commuter so they would be of use and not be thrown away under my wife's " if you ain't using it, it's gone" rule. Without hardware and experience I set out to mount them working under the delusion the sun would cleanse me of my hangover. It takes a certain kind of person to be Bond and they are rare. James Bond is the kind of man my Father always hoped he could be, alive. I am a different kind of man from a different generation and that is the Macgyver generation (or Airwolf). I was daunted but not unstoppable so I set out to work with only my wits and shit load of junk that I had refused to throw out. The skateboard hardware was an easy choice because it truly does fit everything. I used a shoelace to secure the fender to the fork crotch (new t-shirt to replace urine burn) but I ran into trouble when I tried to mount the thingy to the end of the fork. The skate hardware would hold but it was sliding out. I remembered the Japanese industrial revolution and the coins that they stamped out to commemorate it so I grabbed some. The 5 yen piece fit like a charm and I am happy to say that the fender mounting only cost 20 yen plus beer and shoelace. And, yes, I was still hungover at 6:30am but there was a tallboy hanging out in the fridge.