How A Bike Rack Tried To Kill Me

I wanted to post this earlier but I was afflicted by an upset tummy.  I have noticed this happening more and more and seems to coincide with the days I get up to get Rowan off to school.  This is part of my reasoning for wanting to homeschool.  I think my body is rebelling and saying, "You did the school thing growing up and now I'm not getting up early anymore!  I will make you pay for getting me up too early."  And it has.  Lucky for me Jace is getting her up tomorrow.  I don't suppose I could homeschool only on days that I have to get up with her. 

Speaking of bad attitudes about school, Rowan was sent home a sort of test.  It has come to the teacher's attention that many of the kids can identify every letter of the alphabet and numbers and colors...when they are at home, but not in the classroom.  Rowan is one of these.  Our conversation at the last parent teacher conference consisted of the teacher saying she might not be cut out for school and should probably find a nice career in prison.  She could only identify 5 letters and 3 colors.  At home it's a different story.  She can identify 24 of 26 letters, she can count to 30 and knows all her colors, she's doing kindergarten level math, and we've started working on reading.  A classical example of not being able to test under pressure.

Now to the bike rack.  In this weekly stroke of genius, I thought I should get a bike rack.  This is to help me get my bike to town so that I can spend hours and hours of riding with a gentle breeze through my hair and sunshine on my face. 

My first obstacle was finding the darn thing.  I finally found one at Walmart.  It listed my car as acceptable for using this rack.  And no assembly!  Oh, how hard could this be? 

I opened it.  So far so good.  I managed to make it look like it did in the picture.  Then I got tangled in the straps.  All I could think was Jace was going to come home to find me bound up in this rack thing unable to move.  I finally managed to get untangled and get the thing outside. 

Once outside I did manage to put the bike rack onto the car fairly easily.  But then I had it too high, then too low.  That back window wiper thingy kept getting in my way. 

Now that I had the bike rack on the car, I had to put the bike on it.  I had to lift the bike.  Hahahahahaha.  I'm a going to have to practice that.  I finally had to wait for Jace to get home to help me figure it out.  But we managed to get it strapped down and I drove around a little to see if it was stable.  It's still on there.  I'll let you know if I'm actually going to be able to manage to use it in town or if I'm going to just drive around looking cool like I might ride my bike somewhere.