Misadventures on two wheels

Even after a week of workshop days and nearly a full week of school, I'm still maintaining a good schedule of bicycling almost every day. The last couple of days I noticed that my back tire seemed a little wobbly. Before going riding tonight, I checked the spokes and noticed some looseness there, and even one broken off at the center. Spokes help keep the wheel straight and stable -- who knew? We thought they were just for sticking baseball cards in to make it sound cool. I decided I'd better go straight to the local bike shoppe and have it fixed. When I was a block or two away, I hit some kind of small hole in the road and heard something snap, and my back wheel became essentially inoperable. I walked the bike (holding the back tire off the ground) the rest of the way to the bike shoppe. Larry, the bike shoppe guy, took one look at it, and figured I needed a complete new wheel, it was bent so badly out of shape. I left it with him and walked home. Maybe an hour or so later, he called me, said he'd changed three spokes, and the wheel straightened out remarkably. I was amazed that the fix was that easy (and relatively inexpensive). He told me that there were three spokes broken off in a row (two had to have come when I hit that pothole), and that caused the extreme warp in the tire's rim. I walked back over to the shoppe, and rode back home, having abandoned my regular ride for the evening. I'm glad to have the bike back so quickly; I was afraid that I wasn't going to be able to ride at all this weekend.