Work, work, work

It never fails. Whenever I'm expecting to spend the weekend racing bikes, work starts to pile up on me. After retreiving The Wife from the airport last night, I tried again to get TurboTax to update itself ("one-click updates"), and again it crashed my computer. I ended up uninstalling and reinstalling the software and trying again, and finally it successfully downloaded and installed its updates. It took substantially more than "one click." By then it was approaching midnight and, continuing my long-standing tradition, I put off actually doing my taxes until the night of the 14th. I figured I needed the sleep anyway.

This morning my legs were feeling the Wednesday training race, my lungs felt congested, and I was generally just tired, but I went out to the morning training ride anyway, with the firm intention of taking it easy. I get to the meeting spot about a minute after 6:15, and again there's nobody there, so I ride down to the playground where I pick up a few more. Eventually I think we accumulated seven or eight riders. We ended up turning around at the dip, where the pipes cross over the levee, rather than doing the whole ride. I wasn't the only one with tired legs, and the wind was still pretty strong, so it was an easy decision today. On the way back, The Donald installed himself at the front and just motored at 23-24 mph for five miles or so, after which Luke, still on his TT bike, came around on the right, politely asked permission to pull for a while, and stayed up there for another five miles. I took a few pulls, of course, but nothing very long or fast. These old legs probably won't be recovered quite in time for Saturday's criterium, but there's no point making it worse!

By the time I got home, The Wife was pacing up and down awaiting a pick-up from the car rental agency (she rented a car for the 5-hour drive to Destin). They were already about 45 minutes late, and there was no way she was going to make a scheduled 1 p.m. meeting at the SanDestin Hilton, so she was not a happy camper. Finally the elusive driver showed up. Then she picked up the car downtown and drove back uptown to the house to load up a whole bunch of meeting stuff - boxes full of agendas and programs and that sort of thing, and finally headed East around 9:30.

I'm spending today trying to get extensively revised budgets from three faculty members who have better things to do, which means that I'll get them at the last minute and then have to stick around to consolidate them and correct the inevitable errors and finally send the consolidated Tulane subcontract budget off to the folks at LSU who will be the prime contractors if the proposal actually gets funded, which probably wouldn't be until some time around next Thanksgiving. At any rate, I can't stay around here very late today because I'm supposed to meet up with Jack Bertel and the Bike Tulane folks at Fresco on Maple Street at 6:30, and then of course, there are those pesky tax forms to fill out . . .