Just call me Mr. Fixit

I am not what any reasonably observant person would call handy. Never have been. In junior high, my shop class bird house was so unappealing birds chose to go homeless, sleeping under tiny bird newspapers outside the school. The scale model wall frame I built might actually have been condemned. I don't remember.
For the most part, tools and I have an agreement. I don't try to use them to build or fix anything and they don't horribly maim me or anyone else unfortunate enough to be nearby when I attempt a tricky home maintenance task like installing a doorknob or replacing a light bulb.
I know this about myself and I'm generally OK with it. I have rarely had much urge to build anything. All of which makes a recent decision to tinker with an old bike especially puzzling.
I've had this particular bike, a Cannondale, since shortly after I graduated from college 10 years ago. It served me well for a few years, but I didn't care for it well and eventually, as I started to get more serious about biking I replaced it with something newer and lighter and all-around spiffier. The chain rusted. The gears rusted. It started refusing to shift in weather colder than about 80. So, I decided to strip those troublesome gears off, strip off everything related to shifting and rebuild the bike with a single gear.
The logic seemed sound at the time. If the project failed, I'd only have lost a bike I didn't ride anyway. If it worked, the bike would have new life as something on which I could cruise around town.
Plus, I'm pretty sure chicks dig guys on singlespeed bikes. Right?
Caught up in the excitement of the moment, I didn't give any consideration to my significant and well demonstrated lack of mechanical ability. I didn't care about little things like whether I'd be able to put everything back together again. I just wanted to start pulling things off the bike.
In fairness to me, the pulling-parts-off part of the job went pretty smoothly. Then again, I've never had a problem breaking things.
In retrospect, I probably didn't plan quite as well as I should have. None of the parts I ordered right off the bat seemed to work together. The chainring, that big gear wheel in the front of the bike that looks kind of like the disc weapons Xena, Warrior Princess used, was the wrong size for my pedals. New pedals were cheap on e-bay, but they didn't come with the right bolts to hold them to the bike. And nobody I knew seemed to have the right tools to either take everything apart or put it back together.
I never gave up, though. And after multiple online bidding wars, several trips to the bike shop for new tools and slightly less cash than it would have cost me to just by a new bike I had everything put back together.
Still, the completed project didn't exactly inspire confidence in the people around me. My brother said he wanted to be there the first time I rode the reconstructed bike. Not, I suspect, to share in my moment of triumph so much as in anticipation of the whole thing falling apart and me hitting the street face first the first time I tried to turn the pedals.
I chose not to invite him to the bike's maiden trip around the block. He would have been disappointed, anyway. Much to everyone's surprise, the bike held together. To my even greater surprise it has continued to hold up under the few short trips I've taken on it since.
The bike isn't fast. If my bike that replaced it is a greyhound then the newly be-singlespeeded Cannondale is, I don't know, a three-toed sloth. Only a lot heavier. It's like a cross between a three-toed sloth and a particularly lethargic moose.
That's OK, though. I built it. It stayed together. If only those snooty birds could see me now.