Art show!

Wow, it's been a busy week, with plenty of double scheduling in there. Right now I just want to curl up and take a nap. I have a cold, yes, but I'm also recovering from being so many places all at once. Last night was the annual elementary school art show, and it turned out really nice. They had the gym labeled as "the Louvre" and various other wings as other galleries. The gym was the main exhibit, though, and you could "buy" your child's art with a donation to the PTO art program. They had cookies and lemon water and also some pretty high quality music. This is SE Idaho, where everyone plays a stringed instrument, after all. So they had an 8th grader on the violin, spelled off by a 7th grader on the piano. Um, but if you didn't look, you'd think it was a professional pianist playing a grand piano--it was art gallery type music, and the kid played about a thousand times better than I can! I'm told it was the principal's son. Seriously, if you have Julliard in your future plans? You'll fit right in around here...

So the kids had a great time showing off their art, and there were some particularly nice projects there, like ones inspired by various picture book illustrations (there was a class who did self-portraits in a Mo Willems style that I particularly liked), and some nice shading projects (chalk pastel planets on black paper, with black shadowing on them--they really popped out). Then we turned the radio on as we drove home, and caught the end of Moussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition," which was of course quite fitting. Now I'm ready to rest, though! Would like to write, but my head is feeling cold and mushy. We'll see how it goes.

Hope everyone is having a nice (tornado-free, yikes, midSouth) day!

How to fix bike brakes?

So...any bike repair experts around? We've all had to move up a size in bikes this year, and after MUCH looking, I finally found a used bike for my 13YO. Everything looks good on it (only three of the five gears appear to work, but the thing runs smoothly)--but the back brake is stiff, and doesn't actually stop the bike. You depress it, and the brake pads contract, but not tight enough to actually stop. Questions:

1. Is this the sort of thing a normal person can just fix? Or is it a bike repair shop sort of thing? (I don't want the bike repairs to cost more than the actual bike did.)

2. Do you just buy a whole new brake set? Or is it something like replacing the cable? (And no, I really don't know what I'm talking about by that.)

3. Or is it something where if I just spray enough WD-40 on the bike, everything will work smoothly?

4. Or do cables loosen up somehow? Should I be tightening it or something? 

I just feel like I don't know enough to know what questions I should be asking or what I should be even googling. (Yes, I'm aware Google exists. That's where I find videos of bike repair enthusiasts from Sussex, England throwing around jargon that I don't think even exists over here--it would sound mighty odd, let's say--and waving around bike parts that don't look like what's on this bike at all.)

I realize you can't fix my bike for me. But um, if anyone knows what questions I should be asking, I'm all ears.