Factor X

Someone once said that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Some other brainiac said that the best laid plans of mice and men... I call it the X factor. The one element not planned for but changes everything.

I thought I had everything in order for this year's SteamPunk ride except for dicking around with my SteamPunk attire. The pith helmet was ready after I used carpenter's glue to fasten a dollar store cowboy hat into the helmet's insides since it's liner had been eaten away from years corrosive, salty sweat. Next I opened the vehicle's doors where I was storing our decorated bikes and I discovered my atomic power boosters on the floor. My carefully placed circuit boards lay scattered like a house of cards that has collapsed. Stands of wire ribbon were strewn about the car's interior. The temperature inside the car must have been well over 40 degrees Celsius.

All the glue gun glue holding all my accesories had dripped down my folding bike in patterns similar to old candles from horror movies. And horrified I was to discover this mess with only minutes to go before my daughter Jackie and I were to leave for this year's SteamPunk bike ride.

What to do? What to do? I forgot that a person was not supposed to panic in a situation like this. My frantic search for the glue gun failed to produce any results. I blasted into my wife's woman cave and hastily shoved aside stacks of papers and files. A quick survey of her space came up negative.

Jackie was busy talking to someone at her garage sale and I rudely interrupted her to find out that she had no idea where my pistolet a colle was to be found. She offered her gun if I had the time to sort through the myriad of boxes in her part of the basement. No time.

In my desperation I decided that since my glue gun wasn't where I thought it would be, then the logical thing to do would be to check where I thought it wasn't. Why look on the tool rack where years ago I had so carefully traced the gun's outline in magic marker? I never put things back where they belong!

They say that necessity is the mother of invention so I invented the novel thought that perhaps for the first time in my life I had put something away where it was supposed to go. Jackie was giving me a minute by minute countdown as to when we needed to leave and it was with seven minutes to go that I found my glue gun. On the tool rack. Even on its designated black markered silhouette.

While I was only able to mount one nuclear reactor on my bike and my circuit boards flapped off my bike frame as though they had wings of their own, I did manage to thwart the X Factor and ride one of the two decorated bikes in the SteamPunk Ride.