Chillin' in Iowa City

We were up this morning at 4:30 a.m. and by 5:30 were at the very nice University of Iowa Hospital for Danielle's knee arthroscopy. It was a long wait, as usual, and the news was a mix of good and bad. On the good side, there wasn't the chondromalacia or arthritic complications that they thought they might find. On the bad side, there was a lot going on in that knee. The lateral meniscus was torn, which they knew from the MRI, and so they snipped off the offending piece. The surprise was that the medial meniscus was partially pulled loose and since the section involved has good blood supply it was sutured back in place. That meant a more extended rehab than anticipated at 4-6 weeks. They also discovered that one of the four strands of hamstring tendon that had been used a few years ago to repair the ACL tear that started all of this had come loose and was kind of flopping around inside the joint, so of course that was removed. The Daughter handled it all quite well and finally we got a wheelchair and headed out to the garage, which, by the way, they call a "ramp" here in Iowa. Surprise! We had a flat tire. It was no surprise to me, however, that the POS lug wrench couldn't budge the lug nuts that had been installed by some gorilla of a mechanic in Dallas, so we whipped out the AAA card and called for help. Tomorrow, we'll have to buy a couple of new rear tires. I shouldn't complain too much since those rear tires probably have at least 60k miles on them, but the timing was nevertheless bad. Anyway, we did some grocery shopping for The Daughter and ended up over at the coach's house until around 10:30. It was a very long day. It was also a very cold day. I borrowed one of The Daughter's many sweatshirts for the duration, but I've still been generally freezing my ass off. I didn't bring the bike on this trip, although I could have, because I knew it would be cold and I don't have any cool weather riding clothes at all. I'll be lucky if my next ride is Tuesday. There always seems to be something this time of year that serves as the coup de gras for the ol' training program, doesn't there?