Home Alone

Dropped The Wife off at the airport this morning at 5 a.m. to catch a flight to Tucson where she is working a meeting through the weekend. On the way back I dropped off about a thousand meeting flyers that we had spent a few hours working on (sticking on mailing labels and stamps) at the post office and still had plenty of time to iron a shirt before heading out to the training ride.

The 4:15 a.m. alarm sure had come fast, though. I guess I should have gone to bed earlier but I was fooling around with three laptops last night, none of which are quite fully functional. My usual workhorse Gateway has been sick lately and keeps freezing up. After some experimentation, I am beginning to suspect a device problem, specifically the modem or associated software, since it seems to occur only when I'm online. More research will be needed on that one, however. My usual backup laptop, an old Pentium 2 Dell that lacks a battery and functional charging system (after a co-worker spilled a cup of coffee onto the keyboard) and was rescued from the office a couple of years ago, suddenly stopped listening to the keyboard in mid-sentence a few days ago, so everything seems to work fine except that I can't type anything at all despite the fact that device manager doesn't indicate any problem with the keyboard. So after laptop number one locked up on me and laptop number two wouldn't let me type, I booted up laptop number three - The Daughter's old Pentium 2 Compaq from high school - which works OK except that it's very slow and you have to fiddle with the display sometimes to make it work (bad cable I guess) and the power cord connector on the computer end is bad and only works if you force the cord to bend in a specific direction, usually accomplished by wrapping it around the display a certain way and being careful not to move it. If there had been a fire at my house last night they would have found my charred remains tangled up in computer power cords and phone lines beside my bed. At any rate, I apparently have a very hard time accepting the demise of electronic devices. (Yeah, well OK, I know that probably extends to bike components and tires as well.)

So this morning's ride was cool enough for long tights but otherwise fairly nice, although the sun never managed to peek out from above the wall-to-wall cloud cover. Apparently the big surge in speed toward the end of yesterday's ride had been instigated by our visitor from Penn State and a couple of the guys were talking about that. Personally, I didn't have a problem with it at all since it was right at the end of the ride and it's always fun to kind of blow it all out at the end. I think Andy had brought us up to something like 34 mph before pulling off. Imagine that. A bike racer who likes to go fast. This is a surprise??

Anyway, all was good this morning until we were a few miles from the playground on the way back when I noticed my front tire going soft. I was in denial, though, and refused to look at it for a while until Clayton or Jeff said something about it. It was going down pretty slowly, though, so I made it to the playground before it bottomed out. Robin, whose Mercedes mini-van always seems to have a mini bike shop in the back, helped me change the flat and had even brought me a used tire with a nice slash in the sidewall because he knew I could sew in a boot and probably get another couple thousand miles out of it. As I rode home I noticed that the computer wasn't picking up speed any more. I guess the pickup got moved when I was fixing the flat.

Lots of action at work this week should keep me pretty busy. I was here 'till after 7 last night trying to sort a rather messy little inter-institutional grant collaboration controversy that could threaten some earmarks that we're working on for next year. The conference call about it this afternoon should be very interesting!