well, i *was* going to bike for groceries tonight..

but. my new ortlieb panniers had never yet been mounted to my bicycle. i somehow assumed that this would take but a few minutes.

i was wrong.

ok. now, it may help to know -- just to put things in perspective -- that i'm in general fairly well able to visualize how things are supposed to fit together. i can do pretty decent tech drawings, query a database, and if i ever needed to again, i could program and set the clock on my vcr. and i had that one old, crappy set of panniers for 15 years or so and knew how they went on the bike, and what about them drove me half off my nut.

so i'm not clueless. even so. ortlieb's 'instructions' are .. um .. wanting. and it was hard to find any information on the web. but i finally did. h/t to karen lipkow. the forum where i found her instructions omitted her e-mail address, so i can't thank her directly; and the date was also removed, so i don't even freaking know how *old* her post was.

anyway. the panniers have some movable parts that should be moved until they fit your rack, then tightened down so they don't move anymore. the point (*this* would have helped me, ortlieb), is to set the hooks so they are between cross-braces on the top of the rack. the hooks are not a super-tight fit (although the panniers come with some spacers that snap into the hooks to take up most of the extra space). but freakishly, the hooks don't really need to fit super tightly. this is counterintuitive; but their front-to-back placement keeps the bags from sliding forward or backward. there's also a movable, rigid plastic tab/hook thing on the bags themselves. the hooks should be set with the open sides toward the rider, so that if you brake suddenly and the bag has a bunch of stuff in it, the bottom of the bag won't swing toward you.

once these facts are known, you stil need tools. you need (for my model of pannier, but probably for all) a 3mm allen wrench; and if you need to move the female end of the threaded bit for the hook part, a thin, not-too-broad-bladed (get that?) slotted screwdriver (it seems to really want a star screwdriver -- i couldn't find one), and a wrench to hold the hex nuts on the inside of the bag. i used a small ratchet with the 12mm hex socket, which worked extremely well.

then i futzed with it, until the bags appeared to be going *nowhere*. of course, right now they're empty, and by the time i'd finished the process it was too dark to run my actual errand. grrr.

this would not have taken long at all, had i not futzed with it for a rather long time before i managed to locate karen's lovely instructions.

so shopping by bicycle will happen tomorrow. which is when i will begin training myself to make sure that the hooks are truly locked onto the bag before i start riding.

until then, we are foodless, and critically lacking orange juice. but i think i'm going to like these bags.