Do I laugh or do I cry?

It seems rigging up another pannier rack with a light mount is more difficult that I had thought. After smashing the previous mount at Springbrook yesterday, and with the lighting regulations of next weekend's 600km ride in mind, I really needed to act today. The first part was easy, I scoured my garage for all of five minutes* to find some spare parts, and combined them with what I salvaged yesterday to re-build the smashed tail light.

There were two problems. Firstly, the rack from my MTB was proving rather difficult to transfer to my hybrid because of a slightly different positioning of rear brakes (there were only a few millimetres in it). The other was that I couldn't get the reconstituted light to mount on the rack securely (or at least not as securely as I'd like). After spending two hours (that's right, two hours) swearing at it and trying a number of unorthodox things, I finally gave up on the idea.

Then while fumbling around some other things lying around in my garage, I came upon another idea. Perhaps I could design my own tail light mount on the rack that had already been on the hybrid. It took about five minutes to put it together, with another five minutes making slight adjustments. It was that simple (although I might stop at a bikeshop on the way home from work tomorrow for one more part to complete the design). I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. On the one hand, knowing how easy it is to construct something like this, and knowing what I need to construct it should give me the confidence of having just one more "emergency" that I can cope with next time around. But did I really need to spend two hours on it? If I'd thought about that idea sooner, the whole thing would have been much easier.

* Incidentally, "the garage floor" is a legitimate storage option. It's called "filing it under 'B' ". I have five minutes worth of proof!

A final note: The 2.3 regular viewers of this page would have noticed I've made some changes to the template. This will be an ongoing project for however long it takes me to do it. I wanted to give the page a more balanced look and create space for more links.