Restoration Row

This morning's long Levee Ride seemed hard to me for some reason. Maybe there's still a little lingering tiredness from last weekend, although if there is it isn't being manifested in the usual way -- sore legs. There was a good-sized group today, and we were already rolling pretty fast when I saw "Double Champion" Realdo go by in the opposite direction. Rob was out on his TT bike today, relentlessly pushing the pace, and every once in a while on the way back Howard would get on the front and take it up to 30 or 31 mph. It seemed like every time he did that, though, it was when I had just taken a pull. I hate it when you're dropping back after a pull and you're going faster than you were when you were on the front, and then you have to accelerate another couple mph just to get back in to the paceline. Anyway, I definitely got in a workout even though I didn't spend a whole lot of time on the front. At least the rather thick morning haze moderated the early morning sun a bit. I'm hoping the 20% chance of rain brings us a little summer afternoon thunderstorm to cool things down a bit before I head home. When the weather's like this, strong little heat-generated thunderstorms just pop up at random, dump an inch of rain on a few square miles, and dissipate as quickly as they formed. Trying to actually forecast where they will be is completely impossible.



It's another hot day in the big city today with a thick grey haze from all the moisture in the air. I had to stop by the ATM machine this morning on the way to work, but it wasn't as easy as usual. You see, my regular bank, which is only five or six blocks away and has been operating out of a trailer since Katrina, has finally started to rebuild the actual building and moved their operations about half a mile down busy Carrollton Avenue to another trailer. My best option now is to ride over to Tulane's uptown campus where there is a whole collection of ATM machines. So I head over there and discover that they've moved all the ATM machines into the new UC. After hunting around for a while I finally found them and got that taken care of, and decided I just had to pick up a cold coffee Granita at PJ's on the way so that I wouldn't be a bucket of sweat by the time I got to work. The nice thing about a Granita is that it comes in a plastic cup with a lid and it doesn't slosh around while you're riding your bike.



Shortly afer I finished it, about a quarter mile from work, I noticed a lot of activity along a row of classic New Orleans shotguns that I pass every day. The first one now consists of only the front wall, tentatively propped up with 2x4s. This is necessary because as long as you leave a wall (actually I thought it was two walls) standing then the job is technically a renovation and you don't have to request new zoning variances for setback from the property line. Since all these old houses are built right on the street, it's always an issue. If you had to satisfy current zoning setbacks on these tiny lots, you wouldn't have enough room left for FEMA trailer. Anyway, I stopped to take a photo and some of the workers who were sitting on the stoop asked "We gonna be in the paper?" I laughed and asked them if they were going to restore all of the houses. They said "Yep, come back in a few months and see." Hopefully they'll preserve some of the original character of those little houses.

We'll see...