Storage Conundrum

We sat down for a nice breakfast yesterday at St. Helen’s. If you haven’t been there yet, and you happen to be a connoseir of greasy spoons (read: you like the small town diner feel) I would highly recommend this spot. The owners ride, the service is friendly and if you hit it in the evening, you can, in fact get a beer. But all of this is beside the point.

KB and I sat down to breakfast, as we often do, at St. Helen’s. I had already had some coffee so I was in Jabber Jaws Pratt mode. KB on the other hand has been stuck in “obsessing over touring” mode for a couple of weeks. Since her birth month (yup she celebrates for a whole month), she has been nagging me about getting a touring bike or getting a bike set up for touring, or whatever. She even rode into the shop on Saturday to get a feel for her Trek she has kept around for the past 43 years just so she could tour on it. Oh and she bought some knickers. I love knickers.

Anyway, she was nagging me about getting a touring bike. Now, I’m a fan of having bikes. I love bikes. I don’t really care for riding said bikes as can be deduced by my riding habits, but I do love bikes and I love having my shed full of them. So her wanting another bike shouldn’t really be an issue. However, we recently ran into this,

We, for some odd non-logical reason, decided that the Mooseknuckler Cycling Alliance World Headquarters needed an actual guest room. This effected our bike storage situation negatively. Prior to said decision, the guest room was the gear room and road bikes were stored next to the drum kit and sleeping bags. Converting sleeping bag hanging space into bed space required some rethinking of the bike situation. Being the bicycle storage genius that I am, I simply moved them to the shed and hung them up. After which, I noticed the real problem.

You see at five bikes a piece, we are at capacity. We could in fact fit more bikes into the space, but this would hinder ever being able to ride them. It’s already hard enough to get a bike out of the shed for said activity without adding more bikes to move.

So we were having breakfast at St. Helen’s and KB was going on and on about how she “needed” a touring bike. Normally, I would immediately begin looking for how to go about procuring another bike but for some odd reason all I could think about was the space issue. Five bikes each, that is the capacity. Ergo, if she wants another bike we need to eliminate one to maintain our bike storage equilibrium. Maybe its my mathematically trained brain that says if 10 equals total space use, then 10 is max. Sure you can subtract one from ten and get 9 and then add one more to get back to ten, but if ten is capacity…

Before going to breakfast at St. Helen’s, I like to read Yehuda Moon. Half of the fun of reading the comic is reading the incessant comments by bicycle commuters and junkies like myself that love bikes. Often the subject of the perfect number of bikes has been covered. After exhaustive research it has been determined, by the commentors on Yehuda Moon not myself, that the perfect number of bikes is, X-1=Perfect. Where X is the number of bikes that would cause you to get a divorce. As long as you maintain one bike under this number (remember X-1) you will have the perfect amount.

In relation to this equation goes the following, if X is the amount of bikes that will cause you to get a divorce and X is equal to one there is no way around not getting a divorce. It’s in the math. You should just go ahead and get it over with.

Now I relate this all to you for your benefit. Remember we were eating breakfast at St. Helen’s, and I found myself in a conversation I’ve had many times. What is odd is that I was caught on the opposite side of the conversation. For the first time in my life, I was telling someone that they didn’t need any more bikes and if they wanted another bike they needed to eliminate one they already had.

At this point in time, my brain completely froze. This is the equivalent to the pinwheel of death for Mac users or the Blue Circle of death for Windows folk. My brain basically melted. The hard drive ceased to function and all data stored up to this point was about to be lost. Luckily I’m a Windows user so I Alt-Control-Deleted the context and everything went back to normal.

Now I’ve got to figure out how to get another bike in the shed…