I’ve grown quickly addicted to having my bicycle as an alternate mode of transportation. It’s a learning process right now; each mechanical error results in a half hour of learning for a fix that, in the future, will take minutes. As a result of wednesday’s tire, I learned how to operate the quick-release feature and took the wheel (much easier to fit into the truck of my car sans bike) past a bike shop on my way in to work. $10.45 and 5 minutes later, the flat was fixed. It took me 3 days, however, to figure out how to put the rear wheel back ON to the bike. (it was clear that something need to happen to move the brakes out of the way to fit the tire thru, but it took hauling my Mech-E friend over to look at the bike to figure out how to disconnect the brakes. Yay, bike fixed! When the SECOND flat occurred two days later, I decided it was time to learn how to fix a flat myself. I bought a patch kit, I had instructions (thank you dear internets), took the wheel off, figured out how to get the tube out. Used the bathtub trick to find the surprisingly elusive leak, then patched the tube. Scanning the tire surface carefully before reassembly revealed a teeny tiny thorn deeply embedded between treads, which matched the location of the hole in the inner tube. Gotcha! Mystery solved. It’s true that the bike shop fixed my flat in 3 minutes, compared to the 60 it took me from start to finish, but they didn’t bother to look for the thorn, which would have continued to cause me flats every third day.