Where's little Nellie when you need her?

With the crankshaft bearings being a priority outside of the work stuff, I took a lunchtime ride out on the push bike to a place to get them sorted. I probably should have explained that while it might seem like a travesty that a bike less than 12 months old should be in need of repair already, you gets what you pays for. What I mean is, this is a tesco value bike all the way from sunny china. It's solid enough, but the complicated bits (bearings and gears) seem to be not quite 100%. I'm told this is because Chinese metal is made from an ore called bambooicite which of course makes perfect sense and now I understand why I keep being chased by Panda's whenever I'm out on it.
Now I'd planned to go to a little shop off in the city that takes care of such things, but this is where the out-of-town labels for once got the upper hand. With it being so hard to pedal the damn thing and having to pass halfords on the way into the city, the inevitable happened and I gave up the slog in favour of the corporate convenience.

It seems like a reasonable enough price - £25 for a full service, brakes, gears, tyres wheels etc and that includes the cost of the new bearings and the time to fit them, but they're booked up pretty solidly until a week on Wednesday. Mrs G is bound to be displeased. It means she'll have to continue on the old clunker for at least a week. Daughter and I will have to persuade her that's it's good for her (which of course it is) but sometimes, you can't see it for yourself. No doubt when the cheap and cheerful chinese chopper has had it's service, it'll be a slick machine and faster than a speeding bullet.

I'm not cycling anywhere today however. I'm in the Japanese roller skate off to a Starfleet base for a meeting with the Badman on our secret mission. Can't say anymore than that on the subject for obvious reasons, other than to say that spectre have taken a shufty through the files they have on us and are considering changes to the organisation. Felix Leiter has his work cut out and of course Q-division have a couple of tricks up their sleeve yet, including Little Nellie:

http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=kbKPsPit0pI

Fun times. I'm also in the process of switching phone handsets within Starfleet. This seems to be an extremely overcomplicated process that shouldn't be, but time will tell.
And with that, it's time I hit the road.Good Luck.

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