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Sunday 4th 55F, 13C, very heavy overcast, windy and wet. The DMI forecast is a warning of heavy rain and thundery cloudbursts. Not a promising day for anything much except scuba diving and white water kayaking. I don't think putting cork tape on the handlebars counts as a proper flotation device. Life would be so much easier with a carport to shelter under. I can't swing a trimaran in the trike shed.
As it was regularly tipping down I exiled myself to make another dent in the shed's clutter. Never invest in cheap steel shelving! The flimsy shelves can't support any weight without buckling. If you are going to add some kind of reinforcing boards you might as well have them to start with. It depends how much you value your own time in fetching the materials cutting and fitting them. And you still end up with an undersized arrangement!
My shelving tends to collect shallow cardboard [supermarket fruit and veg] boxes rather than plastic tubs. I don't need the depth that most tubs provide. Deep tubs tend to become far too heavy or waste valuable storage space by being only half full. The cardboard "trays" are much larger than the ridiculously mean 12" shelving depth. Minus the flexible angle iron uprights of course. So they tend to hang over the front and back of the shelving and jammed between the sharp uprights. 15" is probably the minimum useful shelf depth. At least, IMO.
Then the shed's 2x4 wall studs push the shelving out so that there are gaps behind. Gaps which are guaranteed to attract unnoticed, falling items never to be seen again. If I wasn't such a skinflint I'd go in search of some decent shelving. Taller too, so I can leave a proper space on the floor underneath for heavier or bulkier items. Though a strong shelf would do just as well to provide extra stability.
I'm trying to use [well padded] ladder supporting wall S-hooks to hang bikes and trikes from the open ceiling joists. Bikes and trikes in particular, are mostly fresh air and quickly use up lots of valuable space. Trikes can have their wheels taken off and hung by the rear axle stretched across the open ceiling joists. Though this is not remotely handy for a regularly used machine.
Having talked myself into buying some better shelving racks I headed to town in the car. The downpours continued to increase in length and ferocity as I approached Odense. There was up to four inches of standing water on the roads at times with the car being dragged left and right by deeper water. Naturally I reduced my speed as visibility dropped, but I was the only one to do so. Time and again I had drivers sitting right on my tail when conditions were simply too foul to maintain the legal speed limit.
After a quick dash into the shop in heavy rain to pay for my racks I found the rain had actually stopped on my exit. What I hadn't counted on was a sociopathically selfish driver had parked with his nose in the heavy goods collection portal. So I had to maneuver the heavy trolley, loaded with heavier racks, around him. While this fuckwit used his mobile phone and waited his turn in the queue to collect something. I was getting into serious oxygen debt by the time I had detoured around his car, unloaded the trolley into the boot and returned it to the portal.
On the way back the weather was, quite unbelievably, even worse. Lightening added a bit of extra drama to the stair rods and fast moving windscreen wipers. I dropped from 80kph to 60 and then 40 [50-25mph] and the car was still swerving dangerously as I hit massively deep, invisible puddles. It had become so dark, still in early afternoon, that I had to switch on my dash lights just to read my speedometer.
Just when I thought it couldn't possibly get any worse and I had decided to pull off to wait for a lull, I was actually overtaken! A white van [what else?] covered in the graphics of a car sales and repair workshop went past at high speed. Somehow he managed to make my visibility even worse. The wipers could no longer cut through the sheer thickness of the water on the screen at its fastest setting. I could see the headlights of fast approaching cars as I let the car slow even more. Only to be immediately overtaken by a large car. It was completely impossible to identify the make through the deluge as the rain battered the car's roof and water roared in the wheel wells. I clung onto the steering wheel to try and keep the car straight as these two raving nutters rapidly vanished into the distance.
Half way back the road was lined for hundreds of yards on both sides by badly parked cars. Some sort of roadside garden center was holding a sale. The busy main road was marked with double white lines, the sky was black and it was still bucketing down. Despite all of this there were families moving down the outside of the parked cars in the roadway, against the speeding traffic, just to avoid walking on the wet grass of the verge! I had to slow and indicate and then wait for them to allow me to continue around them against the oncoming traffic. Despite the awful conditions the traffic was often speeding well above the legal speed limit and often careering along nose to tail. All desperately waiting for a chance to overtake. It is Sunday afternoon, lunacy is alive and well on Fyn and going about its business as usual.
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