Home for Halloween

After an early morning lift-off we arrived back in the crescent city around 1 pm, and ignoring for the moment the numerous voicemail messages, we headed down the street for a long walk. There seemed to be even more activity than when we had left, and when we returned The Wife decided to dig out some of the Halloween decorations an drun out to buy some candy. OK, so we were being optimistic. As it turned out, we never had any trick-or-treaters at the house, and soon after dark we went over to the neighbor's house with some cheese, wine and beer, and next thing we knew we had almost the entire block over there. It was really very nice to get together with thge other folks on Neron Place. I drank entirely too much wine and beer, not necessrily in that order, and am still somewhat under the influence. Suffice it to say that a good time was had by all, and that some are still having a good time as I write. Nonetheless, it is time for bed and I am hoping to get in a ride in the morning before we have to return to Jackson. It will be a miracle if I actually make it onto the bike in the morning. We shall see . . .

Kicking Back in IC

With no plans for the day and a drizzly overcast sky, I wasn't quite sure what to do today. The time change granted me an extra hour of sleep that I didn't really need, and so I ended up at Starbucks for breakfast. Luckily, looking out the window of the hotel I could see that a big rowing regatta was underway, which turned out to be the annual Head of the Iowa Regatta . We broke out the umbrellas and took a long walk along the riverside path watching the races. Rowing is pretty much of a cult sport in New Orleans, and I've never seen so many boats. Competitive rowing has always appealed to me, and it's definitely something I'd love to try one day, even if I do end up stuffed into the bow barking out orders! At least the steady light rain kept me from feeling like I should be on the bike too much. Later in the day we went to the big mall with The Daughter, mainly just to kill time, and she bought me a nice pair of arm-warmers at the huge sporting goods store they have there.

This little visit to IC sure did cost us a lot more than I would have liked it to, but it was kind of nice to take a little break, visit with The Daughter, and zoom around town in her nimble Jeep Liberty. We'll be heading back to N.O. very early tomorrow morning, and I think we'll probably spend the night there before returning to our foster home in Jackson early on Monday. Perhaps I'll finally be able to get back on the bike Monday morning before we head out. I think I have now achieved full de-conditioning and am ready to begin winter training from the ground up!

Up North

As usual, our first day up here in Iowa City was busy. Also, as usual, I didn't get any exercise, unless you count getting into and out of automobiles. It was in the 30s when I awoke, and the view from the window at the on-campus hotel, located in the Student Union building, was beautiful. We borrowed The Daughter's car to drive back up to Cedar Rapids to check in at the Red Cross office to see if they were still offering discounted hotels, but no luck. Apparently that function has been shifted to FEMA, which pretty much guarantees it will be inaccessible. On the way back I stopped to get the oil changed in The Daughter's car, and discovered that the battery was in pretty bad shape. No way was it going to make it through an Iowa winter, so I picked up a replacement at the local Wal-Mart, along with a $2 adjustable wrench and a handy-dandy $4 "battery installation kit" since there was a lot of corrosion on the negative terminal. I had to wrestle with it a bit because I didn't really have the socket wrench that I needed to get the hold-down bolt out. Nonetheless, I eventually got it done without any significant blood loss. Around 5 p.m. we went with the team to a local school and helped them get set up for their Halloween Haunted House, constructing a nifty casket from old refrigerator boxes. Then it was off to the "Hall of Fame" for the gymnastics banquet where they gave out various awards from last year's season. Amazingly, the food consisted of fried chicken and cake. OK, they did have a fruit and veggies, but I mean . . . really! The teammate who was in the hospital yesterday is still not well, but the doctors are quite divided as to the problem. Now they are thinking it is a ruptured ovarian cyst, which I guess is a little better news, but the girl is still on some heavy pain meds.

Travel Day

I didn't bring the Cervelo down to N.O. this time, since we were only staying overnight, so this morning I pumped up the tires on the old Pennine. This was my first high-end racing bike, acquired around 1972 and custom built in England. For the then-princely sum of $110, you could specify the type of lugs, dropouts, fork crown, and tubing you wanted, where you wanted the chrome to be, what colors it would be painted, where you wanted braze-ons, etc. I headed out to the levee around 7 a.m., and was a little surprised how few people I ran into. Perhaps they were all doing the long ride today and since I had gone out late I had missed them.

Anyway, we eventually made our way out to the airport for our trip up to Iowa City. We flew Northwest, which means we took the long way. The first leg took us all the way up to Minneapolis. Then, we hopped onto a little turboprop for the second leg to Cedar Rapids where The Daughter met us to make the short drive to Iowa City. Along the way, she mentioned that one of her teammates had been in the ER all day. After we ate dinner, she found out that the girl has a bad case of endometriosis and they want to do surgery tomorrow. Man, this team just can't get a break. I think they are down to maybe 5 or 6 healthy gymnasts out of a team of 13.

So now I'm bikeless in Iowa and wondering what I will do tomorrow. I think I can get a free pass to the health club here on campus, so if get desperate enough, perhaps I will

Touch and Go

It felt really cold this morning - around 38F or so - up in Jackson, but I headed out anyway because I knew I'd be off the bike this weekend when we go to Iowa City to attend the annual awards ceremony. I had pretty much everything I needed to stay comfortable except for my shoe-covers and my helmet cover. I decided to do a little exploring this morning since I had noticed on the map that there was a road that bypassed the torn up bridge and connected back up with the road that makes for a nice 22 mile loop. I had ridden down that road a few weeks ago, but had turned around when the asphalt ended. This time I figured I'd tackle the mile or so of gravel and dirt and ride the loop for a change. It turned out to be really nice. There were a few patches of loose stuff, but it was mostly quite rideable and reminded me a lot of the roads we ride in the Rouge-Roubaix race. It's actually a lot more scary when you're going slow like I was today. When you're racing, you just fly through and don't have time to think much about how loose the gravel is. It's amazing that we actually race on stuff like that without killing ourselves. Anyway, this nice little road eventually crossed a small creek by way of a little low bridge that consisted of little more than a bunch of wood planks. Immediately after that was a long, steep climb before it connected back up with Jones Vaughn Creek road. I suppose that was Jones Vaughn Creek that I crossed. By the time I got back to the house, my toes were so cold they hurt.

It was a busy day at work. A bit depressing too, hearing about the people who were being laid off. We left a little bit early to pack up and head into New Orleans, getting stuck in the Baton Rouge traffic for a while along the way. We'll spend the night at the house tonight so that we can hand-deliver some paperwork to Accounts Payable which is back in some sort of operation uptown. Then it will be off to the airport for the trip to Iowa City. I will probably try and get in an hour of riding on the track bike or the old Pennine road bike in the morning.

Inching Forward

Things continue to inch forward all around. Yesterday morning is was very windy and cool, so I decided to do an easy ride down St. Charles Ave. and Prytania in order to avoid the unbuffered gusts up on the levee. Most of St. Charles Ave., especially around Tulane and Loyola, looks no different than it did B.K. (Before Katrina), and I even spotted a number of uniformed students returning to McGee's high school for their first day of B.K. classes. Back at the house I called Entergy about the leaking gas meter and got to work on the computer and telephone. It was great working out of the house where I had full telephone access, although the dial-up internet connection was a little slower than I'd like. I needed to leave by 2:30 to pick The Wife up at the Baton Rouge airport, so I was hoping that Entergy would show up sooner rather than later. Naturally, after fairly quiet day, everything started happening around 2:00. There was a little bit of a crisis with work involving FEMA, so I was on the phone trying to track a few people down when, of course, the doorbell rang. I pointed the Entergy guy at the gas meter in the basement, and while he worked replacing it, I ran around trying to pack up with my cellphone in my ear. I was about ten minutes from the airport when The Wife called. Her flight had arrived a bit early, but I was close enough and it worked out fine. So progress on getting the house back in shape is inching forward. I should hear something from the insurance company some time this week. The back yard is presentable again, the basement is somewhat reorganized. The gas leak has been stopped so I'll be able to light the pilot lights on the stove and we'll have at least a little heat from the old unvented gas heater in the living room.

This morning up in Jackson, LA., it was somewhere around 39-40F when I got up to ride. Luckily I had thrown a bunch of winter riding stuff into my bag before I left N.O., so other than cold feet I was OK and got in a 22 miles or so before work. I am definitely in winter training mode now, and it's especially difficult to make any hard efforts when riding alone on a quiet road. By the time I got back to the house my forearms and hands were cold enough to make it difficult to turn the key in the lock and my toes didn't warm back up for half an hour.

Beautiful

A cool front came through last night and the weather today was nothing short of beautiful. I left the house around 6:45 in semi-darkness, headed to the levee. It was a bit windy, and I was planning on an easy 30 mile ride. I was surprised how few people I ran into this morning, although I did ride most of the way with other people. I suppose a lot of people did the Giro ride or perhaps the Northshore ride this morning, but I had a long list of things I wanted to get done today and I didn't want to end up wasted until noon after a hard ride. I ended up doing around 35 miles, most of it at quite an easy pace. After riding I hit the back yard, taking down some of the broken tree limbs, cutting the grass, cleaning out the garage, etc.

That gas leak in the basement was really bugging me, so I decided to take another shot at pinpointing its source. I thought about it for a while, and then realized that I probably had the perfect bit of technology right in the house. After searching through the bathroom, I finally found what I was looking for. Bubble Bath!! I mixed it with water in a bucket, grabbed a sponge, turned on the gas, and went to work. It didn't take long. As I suspected, the leak was coming from the gas meter, so it looks like it'll be 1-800-Entergy. They'll probably tell me that I have to pay to relocate the meter to outside the house and it'll be freezing cold and Christmas before I have heat again. Just in case, I checked out the old portable electric heater to make sure it was still functional.

I wandered over to Bob G's house a few blocks down Pine St. to find him installing a new gas water heater in his now-gutted basement. Being a clever Ph.D., he had gotten the same model as he had before to make the installation easy. Nice try, Bob. He discovered that although the model number was the same, all the fittings were in slightly different locations, so he has a bit of plumbing to do.

So with winter fast approaching, I searched all over the place for my arm-warmers but couldn't find them. I think that perhaps I gave them to The Daughter, so I'll have to check out longscycle.com to see if they have something I can get for cheap. It's supposed to be even colder tonight and I'm planning on doing a very early ride before a few hours of work at home and then the trip back to Baton Rouge to pick The Wife up at the airport.

Pack in the Pack

Although I had hoped to ride out to the Giro ride this morning, there just wasn't enough time once the insurance adjuster rescheduled for 11:00 a.m., so I drove the car out to the lakefront instead. It was the first time I had been out that way since the hurricane, and coming over the I-12 overpass onto West End Blvd., I was shocked to see a huge mountain of hurricane debris piled up in the broad neutral ground between Pontchartrain Blvd and West End Blvd. Then, as I rounded the curve onto Lakeshore Drive, I could see the old lighthouse, leaning precariously toward the water. I honestly don't know what was holding it up. Anyway, a cool front came through last night and it was chilly and very windy out at the lakefront as the recently resurrected Giro ride headed out. We had somewhere around 15-20 riders this morning with only a few who wanted to go hard. Other than the wind, the weather was beautiful and things stayed reasonably calm all the way down Hayne Blvd. past rows and rows of flooded houses. When we got to that spot on Paris Rd. where we have to cross over two lanes of interstate highway, the idiots in the lead almost got everyone killed by crossing in front of a truck towing a boat in a curve going 60 mph. There was a lot of impatient traffic making the curve heading into Chalmette and a few of us had to wait quite a while before we could make it over to the right lane safely. Not to worry, though, because I knew that Eddie C. had a slow leak and was going to have to stop sooner or later, which turned out to be arond 6-Flags.

Chef Highway was interesting. Once we got out past Highway 11 where there are a number of ship-related businesses, we could see huge gashes in the asphalt where ships had dragged bottom across the road during the storm surge. There were a few along the edge of the road, and many more way back in the marsh up against a small levee where big cranes were at work trying to retrieve them. Anyway, it was nice to be riding with a group again, and once I got warmed up I felt pretty good. A few of us rode back ahead of the group to get a little more exercise. One thing I saw that really stuck in my mind was a business jet on the front lawn of the old Lakefront Airport. It almost looked like it had been parked there on purpose, except that the main gear looked partially collapsed. It must have gotten washed right out of one of the hangers.

So I get back to the car a bit later than I had expected, and figure I'll rush back to the house so I can take a shower and relax for a minute before the insurance adjuster shows up. I head down Pontchartrain Blvd. and am soon detoured all over the place. You still can't get onto I-10 into the city from Pontchartrain Blvd., so I had to take a circuitous route over to Canal Blvd. and stop at about fifty of the 4-way stop signs that have replaced all of the non-functioning traffic lights around town. The insurance person shows up about half an hour late after calling for directions and to through the house, select which photos she wants me to email to her, and she tells me she'll have a roofer come out next week to have a look at the roof. On the plus side, she said that they will cover the refrigerator. I spent the next couple of hours out in the back yard cutting down the tree that had fallen on the garage, and although there was lots more I could do, by 5:00 I was ready for a glass of Rouge Red Ale, so I swept up the thick dust that had accumulated on the porch and took a long break.

There is a lot of activity in my neighborhood, and the stench of refrigerators has been mostly replaced by clouds of dust that have made the air quality pretty dismal. The cool North wind today certainly helped, but we could really use a little rain around here. The Corps of Engineers folks were on my block today checking our houses that might need "blue roofs," which is their program where they put free blue tarps on damaged roofs. Problem is, they don't do that for older asbestos shingle roofs like mine (and many others in this area), so I got a little paper taped to my window indicating that I don't qualify for a blue roof. I chatted with them for a while and when one of the guys saw the roof rack on the volvo he said he recognized me and that he had done some riding off-and-on.

I'm thinking that tomorrow I'll go ride the levee. I really do need to attend to a bunch of stuff around here and although I'd love to do the Northshore ride, I should probably put those two hours of driving to better use.

Olfactory Overload

Headed out from Jackson LA this morning without time for a ride, dropped The Wife off at the Baton Rouge airport, and headed for New Orleans. It was pretty smooth going until around LaPlace. From there all the way into town it the speeds on the interstate were very erratic. There must have been an accident or something, but I never saw anything but one little fender-bender. So I finally get to the house, park the car and when I open the door it hits me. Oh man, it was bad. They had been picking up refrigerators, and must have basically emptied one of them right next to the house. There was nasty fly-infested refrigerator juice all down the gutter. I pulled the car up the street a bit and spent about an hour with the garden hose washing that rank stuff down to the storm drain. I never did get rid of all of the smell, but at least I got it down to a tolerable level. One of my mother's tenants, a Tulane student, was coming in from Houston to clean out her stuff from one of the flooded apartments and was supposed to be in around 10-11:00, but she got a flat somewhere along the way and was delayed, so I decided to turn on the gas and light the pilot lights on the stove. Well, that went fine, but when I went down to the basement later, I could definitely smell gas. I ended up turning the gas off again, and much later in evening I went around with a spray bottle of Windex, which BTW is great for finding leaks in gas lines, tires, etc. I found a couple of tiny leaks at some of the valves and tightened them up, so I'll seen how it smells in the morning. Next, I discovered that the toilet was running nonstop, which of course meant that crud from the water lines had clogged up the valve, so I shut off the water and disassembled the float valve, cleaned it out, and got it working again. Yeah, it was just handyman heaven around here today!

Anyway, I eventually met the tenant over at the apartment and helped wash down a bunch of her stuff with bleach and water and brought most of the furniture over to my basement for storage until the Spring semester starts. That took most of the afternoon, but when I drove past the neighbor's house (whose roof I had patched up last week) on the second trip to put stuff in the basement, she came over with three bottles of Rogue ale. Better yet, they were cold!! Not having a refrigerator at the house right now, a glass of cold Red Ale really hit the spot!

I'm planning on making the Giro ride tomorrow morning and then meeting the insurance adjuster at 11:00. She called to reschedule this afternoon because there was a death in her family and she needs to drive back up to Alabama tomorrow. Wish me luck!

On the White Line, In a Fog

It was really hard to get up this morning because the fog made it seem so much earlier. Granted, I usually get up well before sunrise, but this morning it seemed darker than usual. I was again riding with arm-warmers and a vest, and this morning there was the added attraction of a pretty thick fog. I was glad that I had gotten fresh batteries for my lights, and in fact I used them for the entire ride. There's always something kind of neat about riding in the fog. That is, once you manage to forget about the little matter of the car that might run over you at any moment. Luckily, my route on Hwy 421 has little traffic, and this morning it seemed even more quiet than usual. I could hear the water droplets falling through the forest on either side of the road, and when I was going slowly enough I could even hear the light click, click, click of my cadence sensor as the magnet in my pedal spindle opened and closed the circuit. By the time I was five miles down the road there were occasional droplets of water dripping from the front of my helmet and the fronts of my arm-warmers were white with mist. I stopped at the turn-around for a second just to listen to the quiet. There were dogs barking so far off that it was barely audible, but the only other sounds came from the birds. It's nice to hear nothing sometimes.

Tulane has officially said that a small group of people will be called back to work on Nov. 1, followed by another group on Nov. 15 and everyone else by Dec. 19 (which is about when Christmas holidays start, isn't it??). Anyway, it is good to hear that there are some dates now that people can plan on. They are also promising to make an announcement about housing for people who need it by Nov. 11. I suppose the Psychiatry office will linger here for a while before moving back into the Tidewater Building, which probably won't be ready for full-time occupancy until Nov 15 at best. I hope to begin spending a bit more time in New Orleans over the coming weeks, since I can do most of my work from home. We'll see.

So I'll be heading in to N.O. tomorrow after dropping The Wife off at the Baton Rouge airport for her trip to Toronto. She is going to freeze here butt off since she has no winter clothes with her, but I guess she'll end up buying a coat or something once she's there. I am hoping to be able to a couple of the group rides in the mornings, meet with the insurance adjuster, and continue the clean-up. There's a small tree that's leaning on my old garage out back that needs to get cut down, and I think I can handle that with my trusty little tree saw.

¿Que Pasa?

I rolled out of this antique 4-foot-high bed earlier than usual this morning so that I would have time to change the tube in my soft, but not quite flat, rear tire. It was crisp outside and I was glad to be wearing my vest and arm-warmers as I turned on my freshly re-energized flashing lights. The sun would not peek over the treetops for another half hour, but I took off anyway. It was a beautiful morning and I managed only a moderate pace for most of the way out. On the way back, a couple of rather large dogs who I have seen before came running out after me. The black lab in particular seemed interested in my left ankle, but eventually he tired and backed off. I was off to Baton Rouge a couple of hours later for a meeting followed by two back-to-back conference calls. I was glad to see the car's temperature gauge remain rock-solid for the whole trip!

First was my usual stop at the coffee shop on Laurel St. where I ended up having two rather large cups of coffee. I was wired the rest of the day. Then two one-hour conference calls, one of which I did on my cellphone. By the time I got home, I had just enough time to bang out a rough draft of the meeting minutes and send it off to the two VPs before we all headed over to St. Francisville to try out this little Mexican restaurant. I must confess that I am not a fan of Mexican food, unless of course you count Margauritas. It was a nice enough place, and people with me who purport to know something about Mexican food sait it was good.

Wimping Out

I have one thing in common with old cars. We're both hard to get started on cold mornings. OK, so it's not really all that cold by, say, Wisconsin standards, but it was cool enough this morning that I put on my old red Pearlizumi vest. I was already running a bit late - a victim of the increasingly shorter days - but I finally got dressed and grabbed the bike and headed out the door. I was already contemplating a shorter ride when, as I always do, I checked my tire pressure with my build-in thumb gauge. The rear tire was nearly flat, and that was just about all it took. I stared off into the early dawn sky and rather easily decided that it was a sign from the gods that I dare not ignore. I turned right around and thought to myself, "tomorrow's another day." So I skipped riding today. Sorry!

It seems that my temperature sending unit replacement of yesterday may have done the trick. Despite the cool temperature this morning, the car started up happily now that the computer knew what temperature the engine was really at. I am thinking that the occasional hard starting I've noticed over the previous month or so was probably a side-effect of a failing temperature sender. The car's computer was thinking that the engine was hot and was adjusting the mixture and spark accordingly, even though it was actually stone cold and needed exactly the opposite settings. I managed to talk with the folks at Orleans Sheet Metal and Roofing today, and they said they'd try and get someone out to the house this week to give me another estimate. I got one over the phone yesterday from Robin R's son-in-law (still need to call Robin back about that), so if these folks can manage it, it will be nice to have a couple of estimates in hand when I meet with the insurance adjuster on Saturday.

The Wife is heading up to Toronto, Canada on Friday morning, so I'll drop her off at the Baton Rouge airport and then head down to New Orleans for the weekend. The next weekend we're supposed to be flying up to Iowa City for some sort of preseason thing that The Wife feels we should attend. These little trips up to IC tend to cost $800-$1,000 each, and that's with me cracking the whip the whole time. I mean, two plane fares just about anywhere cost a lot of money nowadays. Don't get me wrong. I love travelling and I love flying. I just hate buying the tickets!

Well tomorrow will be a busy day. I've got a lunch meeting in Baton Rouge, follwed by two conference calls in a row. I also need to follow up with some people about some data we need from the Office of Research's database, housed on a computer in New Orleans, that I think they have just recently gotten access to. I hope they are able to get what we need.

Monday

When I got dressed for this morning's ride, I figured it would be a little chilly, but I hadn't seen the forecast and didn't have an outdoor thermometer so I was kind of flying blind. I slipped my trusty Defeet Undeshirt under my jersey and pulled on my arm-warmers for the first time this Fall and still practically froze my arse off for the first 10 miles. I had left a bit earlier than usual, so it was still rather dark and as it turned out, I was just a tad underdressed for the occasion. The next surprise, though, was the bridge. I always know when I'm close to the bridge because there are usually a couple of big dogs sitting in the middle of the street waiting for me. This morning was no exception. Rather than use dog psychology on them this morning, I decided to go instead with the brute speed approach and ramped it up to about 28 mph coming down the small incline. Indeed, I caught them a bit by surprise and they gave up surprisingly easily today. I think they knew something that I didn't. A bit farther down the road I came to the bridge that has been closed to traffic forever but is usable by bicycle. Well, apparently the decided to start actually tearing it up last weekend, so I had to turn around. There were a couple of guys in a pickup truck there and one of them rolled down the window and said he was there taking pictures of the bridge. Anyway, now the dogs were going to get a second shot at me, and this time I would be going uphill, so I shifted into my dog psychologist mode and as they approached started talking to them as if I were their owner. It always throws them off. So I got in a nice 25 miles this morning without any dog bites, although my feet were still cold when I got home.

I had to make a run into Baton Rouge this morning to pick up a new temperature sender and thermostat for the car. Then, after waiting an hour for the engine to cool down, I couldn't get the thermostat replaced because of an inaccessible bolt with a damaged head. I was able to replace the sending unit, although I don't think it's fully tightened. You really needed to remove the thermostat housing in order to get to the sending unit, but I managed to unscrew the old one and install the new one, and I think it's tight enough, but I won't know for sure until I get the engine good and hot. Let's just hope that my temperature gauge issues were being caused by a faulty sender.

This evening The Wife and I went for a 15 mile ride just before dark. I had intended to ride a loop that we had used for the district championships a few years ago, but missed the first turn completely and we ended up just riding out and back on the same road. It started getting dark toward the end so I turned on my little flashing rear light only to find that its batteries were toast. The headlight wasn't much better either, so I guess I'll have to spring for some batteries, even though two of them are rechargeables (for which the recharger is, of course, in New Orleans) and I have a bunch of new batteries sitting on my dresser in New Orleans. This nomadic life certainly makes it hard to keep track of your stuff!

Short Ride, Long Day

Sunday morning I woke up early feeling quite sore in all of the places where I used to have muscles, so I took my time and didn't hit the road until around 7 a.m. I rode down Carrollton all the way to the river just to see what might or might not be open. There were signs out that the Rue de la Course coffee shop at Oak St. was "Now Open" so I called The Wife so we could meet up there after I finished my ride. All over New Orleans, the neutral grounds are festooned with signs announcing businesses that are open, businesses that are looking for help, and contractors of all sorts. I was a few miles down the road when a small group of triathletes came past, so I latched onto them for a while until we came up to Robin and Steve J. and a couple other guys. I slowed down for a second to take a pic, and when I did, Robin and Steve jumped to bridge up to the triathletes, so I had to put my head down for a while and spin up to 28 mph to catch back up. The tri guys were holding 25mph pretty steadily, but Robin and Steve were afraid to get too close. They were all on their aero bars and so they looked a little squirrelly. Anyway, I hung on until we got to St. Charles parish and turned around there to head back. I ran into Rob and Realdo next and they turned around to ride with me for a while, and when we got to the Jefferson Playground, I saw The Wife coming toward us. I backed off as she went by, expecting her to turn around, but instead she kept going. Eventually I figured that out and turned around and finally met up with her after she turned around at the country club. So anyway, we came back by way or Oak St., but when we found the coffee shop there closed, we decided to head down to Magazine St. to see if CC's was open. They weren't, but there was a sign on the neutral ground for the Laurel St. Bakery, so we tried that out and it turned out to be quite nice.

After returning home, I had to go back out to The Mom's rental and clean out an upstairs refrigerator. My brother had removed all of the contents, but now I had to clean out all of the maggots and wipe it down with bleach. This was pretty disgusting work, as you can imagine. I could have filled a quart bucket with maggots. Back at the house, a number of the neighbors were home and I soon found myself up on one of their roofs doing some temporary roofing. When we were running around the car started giving us trouble. The "check engine" light came on and the temperature gauge went all the way into the red, but there was no steam or other sign of overheating. Watching the gauge, I could see that it was fluctuating all over the place, so I decided it was probably either a failing thermostat or a bad temperature sending unit. Anyway, we made it back to our foster home in Jackson La., by early evening where I hit the sack early.

Mycology 101

I went out early enough this morning to need my lights, and was already eight or ten miles down the levee before running into Charlie D. who was coming the other way. I turned around and rode with him to the Jefferson Playground where the Saturday morning levee ride was supposed to be starting at 7 a.m. We hung around for a while waiting for a few of the guys to get their acts together and finally headed out with a nice-sized group. Since I was supposed to be meeting at my mom's rental house for 8:00, I couldn't ride with the group very long, and I turned around once again near the country club. As I headed home, I met up with Realdo, and rode with him for a while until I had to turn off of the levee and ride through Carrollton back to the house. Along the way, I rode down Maple St. to see if PJ's or Starbucks was open yet, but no luck.

Once we got to the house, we met my brother, his son, one of my sisters and my mom, and spent most of the morning hauling out the tenants' furniture, a refrigerator, the lower kitchen cabinets and other stuff. We spent some time on the phone with the tenants, letting them know what was going in the trash and what wasn't. Some of the stuff was completely ruined from the flooding and subsequent mold, and that all went into a huge pile in front of the house. The salvagable stuff went either in the upstairs apartment or, if it had gotten wet, under the shed in back of the house. It was easy to see which walls were sheetrock and which were plaster, because the sheetrock was covered with a thick and colorful growth of mold. The plaster had much less mold, and what was there was actually growing on the old painted-over wallpaper. One of the apartments was all sheetrock and the mold there was particularly heavy. We decided to leave that whole apartment for the professionals, since it was clear that all of the sheetrock in there was going to have to be torn out and replaced. As overwhelming as the whole thing seemed, I reminded myself that a lot of people had a far worse problem to deal with. We headed over to Cooter Brown's for lunch (a hamburger and a cold Turbodog), and then spent the afternoon ripping our sheetrock, wallpaper, kitchen cabinets, etc., finally ending the day by spraying fungicide throughout.

Tomorrow the weather should be great and I'm planning on heading out to see if I there will be Giro Ride. We have some more work to do at the rental house, and then we'll have to head back to Jackson. The car is acting up right now and I'm a little worried about it. The "Check Engine" light came on today and the temperature gauge shot way up into the overheated zone, but there was no sign of steam or anything, the coolant tank is full, and the temperature guage is acting really flaky, so I'm hoping it's a bad sensor or connector, or perhaps the thermostat. Whatever it is, it just proves that Rosanne Rosanadanna was correct when she said "it just goes to show you, if it ain't one thing, it's something else."

Back to the City Again

I skipped riding this morning because I had to make a meeting in Baton Rouge. The ride would have been far more satisfying than the meeting was, as it turned out. The folks at the Board of Regents still seem stunned and confused. More so than usual. Anyway, it is a beautiful day and I would love to be on the bike, but it isn't going to happen. Tomorrow morning I'm going out in the dark if necessary. I mean, this is getting ridiculous!

I'll be heading back to New Orleans later this evening to meet my brother and his son who are bringing my mother back from Orlando for her official return to the city. Saturday and Sunday we will be working at her apartment house tearing and throwing out whatever is wet and moldy, which will probably include a lot of sheetrock and college student furniture. Whatever, I fully intend to get in a couple of long rides in the early morning. My mileage has been really low for the past couple of weeks and I am really starting to feel it, so the bike is going on the roof of the car for this trip.

I got a call from my insurance adjuster!! Whooohooooo! I'm scheduled for a week from Saturday, so that's fine. In the meantime I think I will try to get a roofing estimate. I also called BellSouth and they said that they could get me DSL at the house in the usual 7-10 days. I may hold out another week or two before I bite the bullet on that one, but anyway it was nice to hear that it won't be a problem.

The reality of the hurricane's financial impacts are starting to hit home now, and the federal government just doesn't seem to understand the urgency of the situation. The city and the state will need some federal bail-out funding if the economy around here is ever to survive. Things are improving in the city daily, but many people who had minimal damage will still not be back to stay until '06 if they have children who are currently enrolled elsewhere. Likewise for people who are now working outside the city. The people don't want to come back until the businesses are back in operation, and the businesses can't get back in operation without the people.

Tulane's clean-up is progessing quite well, actually, and I think that the biggest issue will not be the buildings or the facilities, it will be housing for faculty, staff and students. Some of the local universities like Xavier are saying that they will be thrilled if they only lose half of their students. Tulane itself is expecting to lose at least 25%. That's a lot of $30k tuitions. The ball is in the federal government's court. They can either throw the city to the sharks or come to the rescue. FEMA has been a huge disappointment, to put it mildly, to everyone. The university has gotten absolutely no help of any kind from FEMA.

A Day in the Big Easy

Pumped up the tires on the track bike, laced up the old track shoes, put on the yellow Limar helmet that I crashed on last year and headed out brakeless early in the morning to squeeze in at least a ceremonial ride on the levee. I only got in 10-15 miles, since time was short, but I did run into Rob K. and turned around to ride with him for a while. He said that there was a Giro ride last Sunday! I got an e-mail from Jeff today, and he mentioned the Giro ride as well. There will be another next Saturday f'sure. Anyway, it was great to be riding on familiar turf for a change. Negotiating the debris-strewn neighborhood streets on the way back was a little dicey on the track bike. Good thing there was practically no traffic!

The city currently smells like a dumpster full of bad Mexican food that has been sitting out in the sun for six weeks. The smell is everywhere, and the streets are lined with duct-taped refrigerators full of putrid food. Progress appears to have been rather slow in many areas of the city. We spent a couple of hours in the Tidewater Building downtown this morning finding important files and hauling boxes down the stairwell. I guess I made seven or eight trips up and down from the 3rd floor to the 10th. Ordinarily, we would have been able to drive into the parking garage all the way up to the 7th floor, but they had just had a diesel spill on the 7th floor where one of the generators is and there was fuel all over the place, so we weren't allowed to drive into the garage at all, which meant much more heavy lifting.

After that we drove out to the home, near Esplanade on Bell St., of someone from whom nobody had heard since the hurricane. The house looked fine, but showed no sign that anyone had been there since the storm. The owner works at Tulane and had an older relative who lived on Almonaster in N.O. East, and we are quite worried that they may have tried to stay there during the hurricane and were caught in the flood.

Driving through mid-city, the amount of work that will be needed to fix up all those houses with water marks five and six feet above the ground is overwhelming. There are crews here and there working on houses, but they are surprisingly few and far between. Most of the houses just look abandoned.

Uptown near the universities things look a bit more lively, although still nothing near normal. We stopped for lunch at the Maple St. Cafe, which was one of the few restaurants open along that normally busy stretch of Maple Street. P.J.s Coffee and Starbucks were both closed but undergoing repairs. Despite the stench wafting in every time someone opened the door, it was nice to sit at a table with a real tablecloth and pretend to be civilized. Of course, reminders of the reality of the situation were unavoidable. While there was the older woman near the window having her regular lunch with a glass of Chablis, next to her was a long table occupied by special security guard types (probably the ones Tulane has hired) who were dressed in black and had guns strapped to their hips.

It has been a nice visit, and I think I will be able to return regularly on the weekends at least. I'll definitely bring my bike this weekend and try to make the Giro ride if I can.

Lights!!

It was chilly this morning for my ride, and although I was wishing I had put on arm-warmers and gloves, I warmed up pretty quickly and had a nice, but somewhat short, ride. Work was pretty much non-stop until early afternoon, and by then I was already thinking about our planned trip into New Orleans. We finally hit the road around 6 p.m. in two cars, since we were going to drop off my mom's car at her condo in town. Along the way both of my sisters called and wanted to get together for a bit when we arrived, so we decided to try for the little grill behind Madigan's on Carrollton, since we knew it was open. By the time we arrived, though, they had put out a sign that they were closing for the night, probably because they had run out of food, so we went over to my sister's place and made a few sandwiches.

The city smells like you would expect for a place where the garbage hasn't been picked up for a month and a half, but there are signs of life here in the Carrollton area. There are signs all over the neutral grounds announcing businesses that are open and seeking employees. If we can just get all the garbage and putrid refrigerators off the streets, it would be a big step forward!

We had planned on staying at my mom's condo, but decided to swing by our house on the way. As we drove up we could see that the street lights were on. This was a very good sign. I went into the basement and headed straight for the breaker box. Seeing the lights come on when I flipped the main was truly exciting! Lights!! Better yet, Air Conditioning!!

So here I am in my own house, in my own bed, connected to Tulane's dial-up. There's a midnight to 6 a.m. curfew, which means that instead of the usual traffic noise from South Claiborne, we have quiet! There are a few folks out walking their dogs, and looking down the street it looks like a few people are home. Tomorrow we'll have to head downtown fairly early, so I probably won't have time to ride. Maybe if I wake up early enough I'll sneak out for a quick ten miles although I didn't bring my shoes or anything.

I'm excited that the NOBC Website is back up!! Unfortunately, the server isn't accepting my ID and password, so I can't get in to make any changes yet.

Twenty Miles

We made the final leg of the drive back from Iowa City today, leaving West Memphis around 8 a.m. and finally arriving back in Jackson LA around 1:30. Along the way, we stopped in the other Jackson (Jackson, MS) for some coffee at a Barnes and Noble bookstore. In addition to the coffee, we bought a hot-off-the-presses book on Katrina. Of course, it was mostly just photos, but some were quite interesting. I guess that, for us, it was mainly more of a souvenir more than anything else. All-in-all, despite the surgery and the 28 hours of driving, the last few days felt rather like a vacation. By 3:00, though, we were back in our little office at the hospital going full blast until I was rescued by the director who rides bikes and wanted to go for a little spin after work. We managed to get in about 20 miles just before dark, and it felt sooooo good to be on the bike again! On the way back I got on the front and pulled for a long time. I guess I was a little uncomfortable because it was starting to get dark and I hate riding in the dark, especially when I don't have a light.

It will be another busy week. A trip into New Orleans on Wednesday (we may actually drive in tomorrow evening) with Psychiatry to retrieve more stuff from the offices there, and a conference call I will somehow have to squeeze in at 2 p.m. Then on Thursday I have to be at a meeting up in Baton Rouge. My brother is driving in from Orlando with my mom on Friday, so it will be back to N.O. to spend the weekend working on her rental house, ripping out sheetrock and carpet and that sort of thing so that it can all dry out. I am hoping that I will find that power has been restored to my house. That would be nice. Very nice.

Highway 61

We headed back from Iowa City today around noon, taking a short-cut down to St. Louis, Mo. that was largely along Highway 61. Highway 61 is often called "The Great River Road," since it roughly parallels practically the entire length of the Mississippi. It runs right through New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and is only a few miles from our temporary home in Jackson, La. It's a little strange seeing those familiar U.S. highway markers way up in Iowa and Missouri, and passing through towns like Hannibal that are featured in Mark Twain books. There is even a memorable road sign for "Louisiana," which in that case refers to a town in Missouri. So anyway, after stopping by The Daughter's house for a while we finally hit the road again at noon and had a very nice and scenic trip down to St. Louis. The Daughter seemed to be feeling OK under the circumstances and had already written a paper and taken an online quiz for one of her classes. It's going to be a bit of a challenge for her to get to classes on crutches, but she has a lot of support from her team and I'm sure she'll be fine. If her recovery goes as expected, she should be able to get back to regular training in about six weeks, so there's a good chance she'll at least get to compete in a few meets before the season ends. The picture here is the doctor's sketch of her knee and what he did, which was quite a lot.

It's actually Fall up here and the trees are just beginning to show their colors, so it was a bit of a treat for us to see that. It's just not something you ever get to see in N.O. We finally called it a day around Memphis, and The Wife, who had registered with the Red Cross last week, used her registration to get us a free room at the Hampton Inn, which has free wireless. Thanks Red Cross! Tomorrow morning we'll make the last leg of the trip back to Jackson La., and will go straight to the office. I expect we'll be there around noon or 1 p.m.

So now what I've been basically sitting on my ass since last Thursday, I guess it will be Tuesday before I am back on the bike. Oh well . . . Saturday my mother is coming back from Orlando for the first time since the hurricane, so I'll be going there too. My brother and his son are driving The Mom over and then we will start ripping out walls and carpet and whatever at the triplex that she owns and rents out to college students. It will be a hard weekend, I'm sure. I don't know if power has been restored to my house yet, although my sister who lives nearby now has power. Perhaps I will be able to bring the bike and make it out for an official training ride on the levee!!

Hanging Out at the House

Dropped The Daughter off at the gym this morning and then headed over to Sears to have a couple of new tires installed. One thing I always notice when I'm up here is that the people working the counter at places like Sears Automotive are so much more helpful and corteous and expecially quick than I'm used to. We wandered around the big mall in nearby Coralville while the they put on the new tires, getting back to the gym just as The Daughter was having the team trainer change out the wound dressings. Mike the trainer seems to be very knowledgable and was in fact in the OR during the surgery. We got him to add footnotes to the photos taken through the scope and to explain in a bit more detail exactly what had transpired. It was nice to have someone on the inside. Tonight we'll be heading over to the head coach's house for some chicken gumbo that The Wife made last night, but right now I'm sitting in The Daughter's room at The House taking full advantage of their WLAN. Meanwhile, she is snoozing on her bed thanks to the painkillers, with the laptop on one side and her crutches on the other. I think that the knee is hurting more than she admits. I have some photos of the surgery diagram that I'll put up when I get a chance.

Back on the home front, it feels kind of like the Fed is starting to backpedal on their very public promises to rebuild New Orleans. Congress adjourned last Friday for two weeks leaving nothing new on the table but some lame plan to let the cities along the Gulf coast apply for loans. These cities, and more specifically their economies, need support right now in the form of cash that can be paid to citizens. Long-term loans are not going to help in the short term and if there is not more help in the short term the long term will be very long indeed.

Chillin' in Iowa City

We were up this morning at 4:30 a.m. and by 5:30 were at the very nice University of Iowa Hospital for Danielle's knee arthroscopy. It was a long wait, as usual, and the news was a mix of good and bad. On the good side, there wasn't the chondromalacia or arthritic complications that they thought they might find. On the bad side, there was a lot going on in that knee. The lateral meniscus was torn, which they knew from the MRI, and so they snipped off the offending piece. The surprise was that the medial meniscus was partially pulled loose and since the section involved has good blood supply it was sutured back in place. That meant a more extended rehab than anticipated at 4-6 weeks. They also discovered that one of the four strands of hamstring tendon that had been used a few years ago to repair the ACL tear that started all of this had come loose and was kind of flopping around inside the joint, so of course that was removed. The Daughter handled it all quite well and finally we got a wheelchair and headed out to the garage, which, by the way, they call a "ramp" here in Iowa. Surprise! We had a flat tire. It was no surprise to me, however, that the POS lug wrench couldn't budge the lug nuts that had been installed by some gorilla of a mechanic in Dallas, so we whipped out the AAA card and called for help. Tomorrow, we'll have to buy a couple of new rear tires. I shouldn't complain too much since those rear tires probably have at least 60k miles on them, but the timing was nevertheless bad. Anyway, we did some grocery shopping for The Daughter and ended up over at the coach's house until around 10:30. It was a very long day. It was also a very cold day. I borrowed one of The Daughter's many sweatshirts for the duration, but I've still been generally freezing my ass off. I didn't bring the bike on this trip, although I could have, because I knew it would be cold and I don't have any cool weather riding clothes at all. I'll be lucky if my next ride is Tuesday. There always seems to be something this time of year that serves as the coup de gras for the ol' training program, doesn't there?

Road Trip!

Heading out early this morning for a little unplanned road trip to Iowa City where The Daughter is having some hopefully minor knee surgery on Friday. Hey, it's just a 13 hour drive! Yesterday morning I did a nice hard morning ride, but not hard enough to make up for all the riding I'll miss. The low temperature in Iowa City tonight will be 34F. The warmest piece of clothing I have with me is a long-sleeved cotton shirt. I have a feeling there will be a trip to the mall.

Again!

Today again I wasn't able to ride. I had to make the 40-minute trip down to Baton Rouge for a 9:30 meeting at the Board of Regents building near the state capitol. If I had thought to pick up my lights when I was at the house last weekend, I could have gotten in a decent ride before leaving, but as it was, it just would have been too much of a rush. This meeting had representatives from most of the research universities in the area, and it lasted until around 1:30, after which I headed over to Starbucks on College Drive for a Frappucino and a place to sit down and write down all of the phone numbers stored in my cellphone. I was planning on taking it over to the local Alltel place I had spotted alongside the interstate because the cable to my charger is about on it's last leg. After battling traffic for a while I finally got to the Alltel place, only to find it closed. I guess they have moved to a new location. Anyway, it was a long day, I didn't get to ride, and I'm tired!

Back on the Bike, Back in Jackson

It seems like it has been a long time since I was on the bike, and so it was nice to be out on the road again this morning. I was running a few minutes late, thanks to an extra glass or two of wine last night, and that fact at least kept me from slacking off too much. On the way out on Highway 421 I saw the same doe I had seen a few days ago, standing in the same spot in the middle of the road. I startled her and she lost her footing on the asphalt, nearly falling before dashing off into the underbrush. As nice as it is to ride around here on the smooth and quiet roads, riding alone every day does get old. It's not like I haven't done it before, of course. Throughout much of the 80s and 90s I did most of my morning training rides alone. Now don't get me wrong. There are some very good things about doing solo training rides. In fact, I've felt like I should do more of them myself.

The exciting news today was that the tulane.edu mailserver is back up!! About friggin' time. It's still a little slow, and my mail reader, Eudora, often times out before getting a response from the server, but at least we can finally go back to using the regular Tulane IDs. Hopefully the website will be back up soon as well. I will be heading into Baton Rouge in the morning for a meeting of the Post-Katrina Research Task Force, which should be interesting, but it will also be long. We'll start at 9:30 and plan to finish in "mid-afternoon." Since it's a good 45 minutes into B.R. from here at that time of the morning, I probably won't be able to get much of a ride in.

I got an IM from The Daughter today casually mentioning that she was going to have some surgery done on her problem knee on Friday. She's had trouble with a torn meniscus in the knee for a while and they've finally decided to take a shot at fixing it. I hope it all goes smoothly and doesn't cause too much discomfort for too long.

Progress!!

Just got my first e-mail to my tulane.edu ID since Katrina!! WWL TV has moved back into its New Orleans studio. A number of public schools are planning on reopening Nov. 1.

Weekend in the City - Long

I returned to my foster home here in Jackson, LA an hour or so ago after spending a 3-day weekend back in New Orleans.

Saturday was a busy day! Unlike Friday, there were lots of people in the neighborhood on Saturday and I got to share stories with a number of my neighbors who I hadn't seen in a month. Since The Wife wasn't due to arrive until around 10:00, I decided to tackle the roofing job first. I needed to patch a fairly small area on the edge of the roof that I could easily get to by standing on the nearly flat shed roof at the back of the house. It was incredibly convenient. I did a pretty nice job of it, working in the asphalt shingles amongst the older asbestos ones, and I'm quite confortable that it will hold up for a long time without leakage as long as we don't get another hurricane. I then replaced a fairly large area of the shed roof from which the old covering had been neatly removed by Katrina. This wasn't quite so easy, as I had to wrestle with a big roll of roll roofing, but I got it patched up and after a liberal application of roofing cement I think it will keep the rain out for a while. It felt good to get the roof job finished. No, I STILL haven't heard a peep from an insurance adjuster.

Just as I was finishing the roof, The Wife called to say that they were going straight over to Dan's house in Lakewood South, which is a "restricted" zone. Residents aren't supposed to be allowed in, so they had with them a sheriff's office deputy, who is also a psychiatrist, to ensure that they could get past the soldiers or policemen guarding the exits into that area. They said that they didn't think they could have gotten in without him. Well, I headed out to meet them there (without any deputy sheriffs) and slipped past one of the checkpoints thanks to my knowledge of the local streets, meeting them at the house shortly after they had arrived. This house had gotten about five feet of water, so the furniture had floated around and everything was covered with mud and there was mold growing on almost everything on the ground floor. We removed a lot of what used to be valuable antique furniture, leaving it on the covered rear patio to dry out gradually in hopes that it might be salvagable. It was smelly, slimy work, but I think the house can be fixed. It will involve completely gutting and rebuilding the ground floor, of course. The swimming pool in the back yard looked like a big science experiment. I plopped in about ten big chlorine tablets to try and slow down the growth rate.

Although we were in a supposedly restricted area, there were lots of people working on their houses in this upscale neighborhood. I guess half the homeowners in this development are doctors, so they all had managed to get past the border guards somehow. It made the problems with my own house seem pretty trivial.

After that, The Wife and I headed back to our place and proceeded to throw out the rest of the damaged stuff from the basement, creating in the process a little wall of black garbage bags along the street and a moderately sized junk pile across the street on the neutral ground. By the time we were done, the basement was looking and smelling a whole lot better. Just as we were leaving, three college students with a hand truck and roll of duct tape walked by and asked if we needed a refrigerator moved. Whooo Hoooo! For $30 these guys taped the beast shut and wrestled it through the house (without getting much of the horrible contents on the floor) and down the steps. It was perhaps the best $30 I've spend all year. We got word that The Mom's condo had power (and air-conditioning), so we locked up and headed over there for a while, but eventually went over to The Dad's place in River Ridge where there were steaks on the barbeque. It was a good day's work, but yet another day off the bike.

Sunday: This morning we grabbed our old mountain bikes that had been hanging from the ceiling of the basement and took off for a little ride around 8:00. As we got to the levee bike path at Audubon Park, I was happy to see the remnants of the morning's Levee Ride heading back. We turned around and chatted for a while with Tim, Charlie, Realdo and everyone, and later saw Todd on St. Charles. Realdo and his family have moved back into their apartment on St. Charles Avenue. Todd said that his shop in Metairie was fine and he had been open for a couple of weeks already. He's probably the only open bike shop in the city right now. GNO Cyclery and Adam's were not so lucky, and GNO had been looted. I'm sure these two will eventually reopen, although Todd said that some of the other shops probably won't. I don't know if Bayou Bicycles intends to reopen. Mark and Alfred are currently working at Richardson Bike Mart in Dallas.

We rode around the area hoping to find an open coffee shop (CC's on Magazine had been open the day before), but no luck, so we headed back home and resumed the cleanup. I threw out another pile of junk from the dirt floor side of the basement while The Wife cleaned up the sidewalk and street. We had to wait quite a while to start because all morning there was a huge dumpster parked alongside the house that they were filling up with some of the tree branches that the power company and its cleanup krewe had left behind the day before. The Wife wanted to go to church and since the church on Carrollton near Oak St. had a sign out on the neutral ground saying they would be having mass at noon, we went over there. There were no lights or a/c, but with the large doors open the church, lit only by the sun shining through the stained glass, was pretty cool. Around the time we were finishing up, a Salvation Army truck came by and offered us some cold gatorade and snacks. When there's no refrigeration for miles around, a cold gatorade really tastes good!

Kenny B. sent a link to a bunch of great photos taken while he was working with the California National Guard. Here are a couple of them.

Anyway, by the time we left we had gotten a lot accomplished. Now we just need electricity, a new refrigerator, a new dryer, and a new blower motor for the heating unit and we're good to go! The more permanent repairs to the roof and ceiling can wait until we hear from the insurance company, and since there are people with much bigger problems than we, I'm not going to get pushy.