Friday Already!

I always seem to be a little surprised when there's a race I'm planning on going to and it's suddenly Friday. As usual, I haven't given much thought to actual race preparation. In fact, I'd still like to find myself a ride so I don't have to leave The Wife carless for the whole weekend. I headed out the door early this morning with the idea to do a short easy ride to give myself some extra time to attend to some things at home. I was expecting to be riding by myself, actually, but as it turned out I ran into Mark on his TT bike and then Donald and a couple more, so there was a nice little group. It is getting warmer and the sun is coming up earlier, which I like, and as I rode along the river I noticed that the water is getting higher and higher on the batture. Perhaps it's the Spring thaw, or perhaps just a lot of rain somewhere between the Rockies and the Appalachians. Anyway, I turned around at Williams Blvd. and rode back mostly by myself. As I got nearer to town I ran into Victor who was on his way to work at Ochsner. He's one of the many people who commute along the bike path - in his case, pretty much the whole bike path. His bike was making an odd noise and we stopped to investigate. I noticed that the last two cogs on his cassette were just a little bit loose, so maybe the lockring just needs to be tightened. Then again, it could be something rattling around in his seat bag or a problem with his bottom bracket. He said he'd have the shop take a look at it soon.

As I rode down Pine street back to the house, I passed the big green truck that picks up recyclables, hopping up onto the sidewalk as I usually do to get around it. A couple of blocks ahead of it I passed a slow-moving pickup truck that had five or six full recycling bins in it. Amazing. The locals are out scooping up the aluminum cans ahead of the recycling truck, and taking the whole bins to boot! I wonder if the guy goes back and returns the bins. A couple more blocks ahead of this guy was another guy on an old bicycle with two huge plastic bags full of aluminum cans hanging from his handlebars. Man, the price of aluminum must be high!

So I'll be heading up to Brookhaven early tomorrow morning, somehow, for the Mississippi Gran Prix. Richard is supposed to be up there with his motor home again, so that will be fun. I think Realdo is riding up with him this afternoon in order to make the Cat. 1,2,3 TT. When I went to register online at active.com yesterday afternoon, I discovered that the masters race wasn't listed. Since I've used active.com myself for a number of years to do registration for the Tour de La, I had a good idea what had happened. I called Frank and he said that he knew it was supposed to be there because he had already gotten a number of entries, so he gave me his ID and password and I went to the event administrator site and discovered the problem. As I had guessed, the cut-off time for that particular class had been set to 12:00 noon rather than 12:00 midnight, so I fixed it and all was well.

Frank M. has finally succeeded in essentially reproducing the old Natchez Classic, that ended in 2000, in his home town! I am hoping that the convenient location, good prizelist, nice weather and reasonable entry fees result in a good turnout. I'm not expecting to do all that well in this one, since it's been a while since I've done an all-out 4 mile time trial, and not having a slick TT bike with fancy handlebars and super-aero wheels is a bit of a disadvantage. I'll be happy as long as I don't embarrass myself with a terrible time, though.

The daughter is doing well following her ankle surgery and was able to walk a little bit today (with the air cast, of course), and is currently off of the meds (anti-inflammatories and such) that she's been taking for the last couple of months. She said that the ankle actually feels better now than it did before the surgery.