Splitting up

[igenlode]

After the windowsill-pot flooded during Monday's heavy rain due to having no drainage holes, I finally got round to pricking out the remaining kale seedlings (of which I shall now have far too many, save that the plants are still being devoured by caterpillars).

Annoyingly, I lost my second expensive 'new' cycling glove, after having lost the first one only a month or two after I bought them this time a couple of years ago; those gloves just seemed to be that little bit too bulky to stay safely in my pockets compared to the old ones. So having been wearing one new glove and one of the old ones I am now down to two worn-out gloves, although it's just as well I did keep them...

I went back to look for it, but looking for a single black glove at midnight in the rain with fallen leaves heaped along the gutters and cars parked on the road was a fairly hopeless task, and even though I walked for a mile or so searching from the pavement, then cycled back all the way up the hill to retrace my route from the carriageway side, then cycled back down again, I didn't find anything and wasn't surprised not to do so :-(

Comments

[igenlode]

Yes, I thought of that after the first time a glove fell out of my pocket (and was successfully found in a limp, run-over state after an intensive search). But it's no good as a solution in this context, because the specialist cycling gloves are stiff, waterproof, gauntlet-like things with cuff fastenings, where children's mittens are little floppy wisps of wool. It's completely impractical to go around with large semi-rigid objects hanging from the arms of your jacket all the time, or even to cycle with them dangling from your wrists over the handlebars.

I did speculate about rigging up some sort of shortish clip-on-a-string arrangement that would secure the gloves to the *pockets* when not in use (which is 80-90% of the time), so that if they did fall out due to their bulk and stiffness they would just hang on the end of the string rather than falling into the road. The idea would be that when you actually needed to wear them you could undo the clip. But I never got round to constructing and testing out the concept, and since I'd managed to go a year and a half or so without any further glove-related disasters I had more or less dismissed the idea as unnecessary :-(

The irony is that the new gloves, which are about twenty years more modern, are apparently that little bit larger and more bulky than the old ones, enough so that they fall out whilst the others don't -- one would expect high-tech clothing to have slimmed down over time....

[watervole]

Saddle bags?

[igenlode]

I do actually wear these gloves when not on the bicycle, as well, in the winter -- they have the advantage of being very warm (because windproof and waterproof) and weirdly easy to slip on quickly, precisely because they are stiff and stay open to receive your fingers. But I suppose I *could* switch them for, say, my smart leather gloves, and store the waterproof ones permanently in the zipped lid of my bike bag... I'm reluctant to do that because they would take up rather a lot of space and make it permanently bulge and not fasten down very well, and because they wouldn't be very accessible while actually cycling.

I tend to need to slip them on and off according to how much I overheat; hands stuck out in front of you can get terribly chapped and cold, but you don't want to be actually sweating into waterproof gloves, because washing and above all drying them out again is a real pain. Sometimes I deliberately cycle with one glove on and one glove off in order to lose heat through one hand only and regulate the process further ;-)

But it's relatively rare for me to put them on before the start of a journey and keep them on constantly until the end. Which is why I rely on being able to jam them in my pockets, or conversely get them out and slip them on without having to stop and pull over... and under those circumstances I have to say that I probably wouldn't be carefully clipping and unclipping them, either :-(

[watervole]

Ahh... Now I see the complexity of the problem!

[igenlode]

Basically I need deeper pockets.

When I bought this (second-hand) jacket as a replacement for my old worn-out winter jacket, specifically in order to be something I could cycle in (it needs to be short but heavy, warm but not padded), I did look for pocket size as a criterion when choosing between the fairly limited selection of garments available. I thought this one had decently large pockets, while most of the others didn't -- but they are not as good as the deep vertical pockets with a button-down flap over the top that I had in the days when I was first buying cycling gloves.

The main issue is the horizontal/diagonal openings, which mean that gravity is only 50% on my side, as it were!