I’m about 75% done with Garm. Hang in there.
Today I was out with the dog. 70 degrees on January 9th. Lots of people around. I was standing with my dog when someone came down the steps (by the beach) with their bike. There was a bang and they weren’t sure what broke. They kept saying it was the chain and I saw the problem. So I went over and helped. The back wheel had come off the mountain bike but still mostly held together because of all the connecting parts. I’m not a bike master, but I’ve been riding for…40 years. And so I knew exactly what was wrong and how to fix it. They were very thankful. But I saw I got tons of chain grease on my hands. That is some persistent, sticky gunk. I was like, don’t worry about it.
I went over to the side of the beach and scrubbed my hands with sand. I did that maybe three times and my hands were completely clean. Then I poured a little water on and the sand was gone. I’m sitting here typing, 30 minutes later and you can’t even tell I had bicycle grease all over my hands. It was like Borax soap. I think I’d read some stories where people did something similar, but I was really amazed how effective it was. Obviously, you do that a whole lot and you’re going to be down a few layers of skin. But from a sci-fi/fantasy perspective, it was pretty damn cool.
