Not Too Bad

Despite my own comedy of errors on Saturday morning, this weekend was not too bad at all. We have had marvelous, if not windy, weather all weekend, and so I've gotten in a couple of nice rides. The holiday season looms over the city now, and The Wife has begun the annual torture of non-stop Christmas music. Not that I have anything in particular against Cristmas music, it's just that after the first ten or fifteen CDs, it starts to get a little tiring. After the next 10 or 15 CDs, it starts getting on my nerves, and by Christmas I am anxiously awaiting the shelving of the Christmas music collection for another year.

Friday and Saturday, The Wife was in charge of a Psychiatry meeting downtown at the Intercontinental Hotel - one of the many very nice hotels in the city. Friday night was a party for the meeting participants and faculty/staff of the Psychiatry/Neurology department so I got to attend that. We also had a comp room at the hotel (with a comp bottle of wine waiting for us!). The party was a few hours of boiled shrimp, raw oysters, turkey, beef, Chinese food, and Kendall Jackson merlot (one of my most favorites). For entertainment, we had a local favorite - Charmaine Neville, who was, as usual, wonderful. After she finished her set, she had a bite to eat, chatted with us for a few minutes, and rushed off for one of her regular gigs at someplace like Snug Harbor, one of the well-known jazz spots down on funky Frenchman Street in the Faubourg Marigny.

So after all of the nice music, copious food, and ad-libitum merlot, I naturally screwed up and set left the alarm clock in the hotel room showing the alarm setting rather than the actual time. I had set it for something between 5 and 5:30 a.m. so I could drive home, change and get out to the Lakefront for the Giro Ride. I wake up early and look over at the clock and it's about time for me to head out. I get dressed, retreive the car from the garage (validated parking - whoo hooo!) and head out in the dark for the house. Along the way, I check my watch and discover it is 3:15 a.m. S*@t! Well, too late to go back, so I figure I'll get a couple of hours more sleep at the house. No such luck. First, there's a house alarm down the block that's going off like clockwork every half-hour. Then, around 4 a.m., I'm awakened by the now-familiar sound of someone crashing through one of the concrete lamp posts along S. Claiborne Avenue. They sure seem to have trouble negotiating that curve late at night (when they are drunk). I look out the window and there's a pickup truck that has come to rest across two of the three lanes. The driver tries to drive away, but the collision has broken the propshaft, which I can see hanging on the ground beneath the car, so he's going nowhere. The police arrive, lights are flashing, people are talking, and I get no sleep. The walls and windows of this old house are pretty thin and so you can hear people on the street talking from about a block away. Anyway, I finally make it out to the Giro ride, which was OK except for a few of us getting dropped on the way out as we were trying to help out a new rider who was opening gaps and having trouble hanging on. I end up doing a harder ride than I had planned, and after I get home discover that my rear tire has a slow leak. No wonder my legs were starting to hurt!

Sunday's long ride in the country was great. We had a dozen riders, and the route Bob had mapped out had lots of nice little hills and smooth low-traffic roads. A couple of the guys were pushing the pace early, and I figured they'd eventually have to pay for that. They did. One was among the 6 riders who took a short-cut back at around the 55-mile point, while the rest of us ended up with around 70. The other was really suffering on the climbs over the last 10 miles or so. My legs were a little sore, but I was feeling pretty good. The weather was great and it turned out to be a bit harder than I had planned, but then who can resist hammering up a hill or two on a day like this?

The legs will be sore tomorrow.