Frozen tight
8 February 2021 09:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI set of to market to get some emergency vegetables (the greengrocery delivery was cancelled again) -- or at least I tried!
I discovered that I simply couldn't turn the key in my bike lock; I've heard of the locks on car doors being frozen, but I'd never encountered this particular problem before. Fortunately a squirt of penetrating oil managed to melt matters a little. When I finally got the lock open I found chunks of ice falling out of it, and a large piece of ice dropped out of my saddle cover.
I eventually set off about fifteen minutes later than intended, and worried about getting back before dark as it was already pretty overcast (at 2.30pm!) Since I was going cautiously, it took me a while to notice that nothing whatsoever happened when I tried to change up a gear -- first of all I thought the gear change lever had also frozen up and managed to wiggle it loose, but while it then clicked into all its accustomed positions, the gears didn't actually engage. I was stuck in first gear for the foreseeable future.
I was rather worried that I might have yanked something loose, since I could see the cable moving at handlebar level but couldn't detect any corresponding movement in the chain that ran into the hub, but I eventually remembered that the Sturmey-Archer hub selects the top gear by default when no tension is applied (or when the chain/gear cable snaps, as I've twice experienced!), so all that was probably happening was that the cable was slackening but the springs inside the hub simply weren't returning to their rest position because the mechanism was frozen. If I'd had more time and conditions had been less unpleasant, I might have experimented with applying cloths soaked in boiling water to the rear hub, but as it was, it was probably just as well the bicycle was stuck in first gear and not third for the purposes of traversing snowy roads. Besides, the last thing I want to do is to potentially introduce more water into the mechanism...
I did hope that the hub might defrost with the friction of travel, but it showed no signs of doing so -- the freewheel and the gear-changing rod are clearly not in close contact. So I made rather slow progress, an unfortunate side-effect of which was that I got rather cold. I was fine when I was cycling up hills that I would normally have been tackling in first gear anyhow -- in fact, I felt pleasantly warm and started breathing plumes of steam -- but long periods of free-wheeling (because I simply couldn't pedal fast enough to keep up with my own speed once I hit 10 miles an hour downhill) were not very pleasant.
Not entirely to my surprise, the market stalls were empty and abandoned; if there had been anyone there at all earlier on, they'd long since given up and gone home. But I did hear hoarse cries in a familiar mercantile rhythm coming from round the corner, so I went to investigate and found the unfortunate purveyor of game and fish still at his post, with his bare hands swollen and red with cold in a manner that reduced my own chilblains to the light of a minor inconvenience. It really wasn't the weather to make anyone fancy buying fish (though it would have stayed beautifully cold!) and with the rest of the market closed there were practically no passers-by in any case.
He offered me a rabbit for £5 (reduced from £7), and as I'd been considering buying one anyway, having been unable to purchase potatoes or leeks I ended up by going home with a parcel of meat instead! I don't know if the rabbits were deep-frozen before being sold, but by the time I got back (whereupon I discovered that my bike lock had started freezing up again...) the carcase was undoubtedly stiff with ice.
Unfortunately that means I really ought to cook the whole thing at once instead of being able to freeze it raw in more useful portions. It appears to be in one piece, and all the recipes I've got assume that you will be acquiring your rabbit meat neatly-jointed, so I shall have to joint it myself into the bargain, unless I set out to roast it (which involves 'sewing up the paunch', and lands me with a roast dinner for four!) As it was stiff as a board, I'm not quite clear whether it actually has the innards included with it for the purposes of making giblet gravy, or whether those are just lumpy bits of body cavity ;-p
Cooking an entire rabbit involves quite a lot of vegetables, which I'm of course still short of, and tends to require bacon; the most promising recipe in my possession involves par-boiling five onions and mixing them with herbs and stale bread to form a crust over the meat, and I'm not even sure I've got five onions left and don't want to use them all at once if I do. I certainly don't want to use all my bacon, though I might be able to get away with using dripping instead of 'fat bacon'. I used three rashers (of streaky bacon, so very long thin strips) when baking 'nutmeg beans' this afternoon.
For the moment it is sitting in the fridge, defrosting itself.
Total distance covered: eleven and a half miles at an average speed of around seven or eight miles per hour. I hope the gear hub does unfreeze without any further issues once the thaw starts, otherwise my horizons are likely to be even more limited than they have been to date. There is no local market, but there is a greengrocer's stall, if it's still running in this weather (he, too, may have decided the likely level of custom versus the discomfort is simply not worth it).
Total odometer reading now 2427.8; another four hundred miles since last July and seven hundred under lockdown. Goodness knows what my foot mileage has been...
I discovered that I simply couldn't turn the key in my bike lock; I've heard of the locks on car doors being frozen, but I'd never encountered this particular problem before. Fortunately a squirt of penetrating oil managed to melt matters a little. When I finally got the lock open I found chunks of ice falling out of it, and a large piece of ice dropped out of my saddle cover.
I eventually set off about fifteen minutes later than intended, and worried about getting back before dark as it was already pretty overcast (at 2.30pm!) Since I was going cautiously, it took me a while to notice that nothing whatsoever happened when I tried to change up a gear -- first of all I thought the gear change lever had also frozen up and managed to wiggle it loose, but while it then clicked into all its accustomed positions, the gears didn't actually engage. I was stuck in first gear for the foreseeable future.
I was rather worried that I might have yanked something loose, since I could see the cable moving at handlebar level but couldn't detect any corresponding movement in the chain that ran into the hub, but I eventually remembered that the Sturmey-Archer hub selects the top gear by default when no tension is applied (or when the chain/gear cable snaps, as I've twice experienced!), so all that was probably happening was that the cable was slackening but the springs inside the hub simply weren't returning to their rest position because the mechanism was frozen. If I'd had more time and conditions had been less unpleasant, I might have experimented with applying cloths soaked in boiling water to the rear hub, but as it was, it was probably just as well the bicycle was stuck in first gear and not third for the purposes of traversing snowy roads. Besides, the last thing I want to do is to potentially introduce more water into the mechanism...
I did hope that the hub might defrost with the friction of travel, but it showed no signs of doing so -- the freewheel and the gear-changing rod are clearly not in close contact. So I made rather slow progress, an unfortunate side-effect of which was that I got rather cold. I was fine when I was cycling up hills that I would normally have been tackling in first gear anyhow -- in fact, I felt pleasantly warm and started breathing plumes of steam -- but long periods of free-wheeling (because I simply couldn't pedal fast enough to keep up with my own speed once I hit 10 miles an hour downhill) were not very pleasant.
Not entirely to my surprise, the market stalls were empty and abandoned; if there had been anyone there at all earlier on, they'd long since given up and gone home. But I did hear hoarse cries in a familiar mercantile rhythm coming from round the corner, so I went to investigate and found the unfortunate purveyor of game and fish still at his post, with his bare hands swollen and red with cold in a manner that reduced my own chilblains to the light of a minor inconvenience. It really wasn't the weather to make anyone fancy buying fish (though it would have stayed beautifully cold!) and with the rest of the market closed there were practically no passers-by in any case.
He offered me a rabbit for £5 (reduced from £7), and as I'd been considering buying one anyway, having been unable to purchase potatoes or leeks I ended up by going home with a parcel of meat instead! I don't know if the rabbits were deep-frozen before being sold, but by the time I got back (whereupon I discovered that my bike lock had started freezing up again...) the carcase was undoubtedly stiff with ice.
Unfortunately that means I really ought to cook the whole thing at once instead of being able to freeze it raw in more useful portions. It appears to be in one piece, and all the recipes I've got assume that you will be acquiring your rabbit meat neatly-jointed, so I shall have to joint it myself into the bargain, unless I set out to roast it (which involves 'sewing up the paunch', and lands me with a roast dinner for four!) As it was stiff as a board, I'm not quite clear whether it actually has the innards included with it for the purposes of making giblet gravy, or whether those are just lumpy bits of body cavity ;-p
Cooking an entire rabbit involves quite a lot of vegetables, which I'm of course still short of, and tends to require bacon; the most promising recipe in my possession involves par-boiling five onions and mixing them with herbs and stale bread to form a crust over the meat, and I'm not even sure I've got five onions left and don't want to use them all at once if I do. I certainly don't want to use all my bacon, though I might be able to get away with using dripping instead of 'fat bacon'. I used three rashers (of streaky bacon, so very long thin strips) when baking 'nutmeg beans' this afternoon.
For the moment it is sitting in the fridge, defrosting itself.
Total distance covered: eleven and a half miles at an average speed of around seven or eight miles per hour. I hope the gear hub does unfreeze without any further issues once the thaw starts, otherwise my horizons are likely to be even more limited than they have been to date. There is no local market, but there is a greengrocer's stall, if it's still running in this weather (he, too, may have decided the likely level of custom versus the discomfort is simply not worth it).
Total odometer reading now 2427.8; another four hundred miles since last July and seven hundred under lockdown. Goodness knows what my foot mileage has been...
