How to Not Ruin Your Stuff

I'll pass that on to Sibling; my parents have an old bike gathering dust that they're thinking about taking. ...Actually, any advice about rehabilitating it since it has been gathering dust, beyond "do all the cleaning and tightening stuff up there with extreme prejudice"?

 

Since it's been sitting unused for a while, I'd take it to bike shop for a tune-up, if that's an option. They'll be able to tell you if anything needs replacing, etc.

 

I can't really suggest anything beyond what Quicksilver suggested; unfortunately I don't have much experience with dealing with bikes that haven't been used in a while, I just know the maintenance for when you're using it regularly or semi-regularly. the most my dad ever had to do was check his bike over after not using it in the winter, and then he mostly just checked the tires and their inflation level, tightened all the screws and bolts and all, and cleaned the chain.

 

Any advice on how to fix a shoe with a fucked-up insole, at least temporarily? My flats are kinda falling apart in general (and I plan to replace them ASAP, but I dunno when that'll be), but the only part that affects me much is that the insole on one of them is like...half torn off the shoe, and gets rucked up sometimes, and that's not exactly comfy to walk on! (@chaoticArbiter may be able to confirm that I had to adjust my damn shoe a LOT the other day. :P)

Would it be easy to just buy cheap insoles and remove the old ones somehow to keep me going until I can replace the shoes? (They're not expensive shoes, but we're waiting until my dad gets paid to even consider replacing them, because money.)

 

I'd think it would be easy to just buy cheap insoles, yeah? There's usually cheap-looking ones hanging on the display hooks in grocery stores and Walmarts and such; you can just rip the busted insole out, once you've got something to replace it with. But I don't actually know how much they tend to cost, so - if you can't afford them, the next option would be to glue down the busted insole. Get whatever kind of superglue you've got in the house (gorilla glue works best, in my experience) but regular craft glue should work fine if you don't have superglue. Dampen the underside of the insole a bit, and squeeze out some of the glue so that once it's dried it'll hold the insole in place where you need it to be. Settle the insole over top of the glue, smooth it flat and put something in there to keep it from moving while it dries (something you don't mind glue getting on, just in case).

Let it sit and dry for about a day, and then take a look to see how it settled. It should work okay, but my only experience with trying this out is when I tried to fix the insoles on a pair of heeled sandals I really liked and that didn't work out so great. (I mean, to be fair, they were cheap heels that I've had for years and which were my go-to for wearing around outside the house long enough that they were going to break down at some point. But the insoles didn't really properly stick back down to the wedge and I'm still not sure what went wrong there.)

 

Does anyone have any basic advice for taking care of nice old-ish books you really don't want to ruin? I have an original edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves my mom got me as a birthday present, and it's a large, close to 50-year-old paperback that feels kind of delicate to me, and I want to make sure I'm as careful as possible so it can stay in good condition. Aside from not putting it anywhere it will get actively knocked around or beaten up, is there anything I can do to take better care of it? Does wrapping books in something or putting some kind of cover over them help? I feel like those are silly questions, but I just genuinely don't know if there's anything I could/should be doing here.

 

oh dang I would honestly love some advice for that too. I don't have any old books of my own yet, but....better to be prepared?

 

Don't put it anywhere near direct sunlight because it'll fade the cover. Especially don't put other books on top of it and then put it in direct sunlight because it'll fade the cover unevenly. xP

 

I'm pretty sure that putting a dustcover on it would help, but I...kinda don't have a lot of experience with being gentle with books? Most of my old paperbacks are held together with scotch-tape, because the way I tend to hold them while reading tends to be hard on their spines. (I do know you're not supposed to use scotch-tape, at least? There's a special kind of book-repair tape that has ridges in it to give extra support. Would not recommend it for if you need to fix the pages though - you can't read through it. Try using a bit of scrap paper and regular white glue.)