My lag of blogging lately is a sign I have been doing something else. Since I can do whatever I want, I tend to cycle between what motivates me. Such cycles tend to last 5-10 days. This week (when I say this week, I mean the previous 5-10 days, since I can hardly tell what day of the week it is anymore or whether it’s weekend) I connected with a guy who helps out at a local women’s shelter. Initially, I was looking for bikes to repair, mainly because I like to learn to fix problems and to learn, I need problems to fix. So far I have been taking in a few clunkers, but sourcing is a pain. However, the shelter offered a massive source of clunkers without the problems of getting them and getting rid of them again. Nice!
Essentially, people donate what I would call “rescue bikes”, that is, people got tired of their bike, it rusted, got a flat, has non-functioning brakes, and thus got neglected until it was finally given away, to the shelter. Then the bixes are fixed up for the kids and the women (and the occasional man) at the shelter.
In the standard progression of hobbies, I have now moved from 1) An expense-oriented hobby to 2) A free hobby; as I got 80% of the required tools, and parts are now covered by the shelter given a sale of an occasional bike.
Who knows. Maybe I can leverage this into something profitable. So far I’m quite enjoying it. The learning curve of bicycle mechanics is, no offense, quite shallow(*), by which I mean, anyone can easily learn the “basic moves” for the most common bicycle models. Doing them supremely well takes much practice, but I only need to get to 80% of perfect. With more practice maybe I’ll get to 90%.
(*) In contrast, watch repair has a much steeper learning curve. I have been able to take a mechanical manual wind-up watch completely appart and put it back together in a running condition. However, as you may have noticed, the trade in mechanical watches is kinda low volume these days with casios and timexes ruling the day, and so I would need to reach a higher level to provide value.
Of the other projects I’m working on are: 1) The book 2) The blog 3) The non-profit (you can donate here) 4) Copy-editing (my connection to the world of paychecks). Secondary objectives include 1) watch repair 2) learning to sail. Cycle-free objectives are 1) Adjusting passive income 2) Shinkendo. I do those regularly with constant intensity. Overall, all these cycles maximize the level of my contentedness compared to having them externally regulated … I never liked that.
