until the next time

My gears have been a bit weird for a few days, which I'd attempted to correct with a few turns of the rear mech's barrel-adjuster yesterday evening. I wasn't sure if it had done anything but this morning's failure-to-upshift smelt very much like last spring's severely-frayed-cable-derived shifting problems; a quick inspection in the car park revealed some frayed ends. There's possibly something not quite right with the cable entry point in the shifter if it's causing cables to fray every six months but whereas a new set of shifters costs quite a lot of money a new cable is only a few pounds, even when I had to buy one at full price at lunchtime after it turned out that I'd taken the spares out of my locker at work to take home in order to try and assess how many spare cables (and of what type) I've stockpiled from various sales over the past year. Pleasingly it only took five minutes to fit the new one before heading home in the evening, as opposed to the seven it took to remove the frayed end at lunchtime when I was already late after doing the usual thing of finding something intriguing in some test data just when I usually try to head outside to get the full hour of fresh air and daylight.