Northshore Ride

I met Charlie and Kevin early today at The Morning Call, and we headed across the lake to meet the Northshore winter training ride group. It didn't feel much like winter. I had packed arm-warmers and gloves, but I knew I wouldn't be wearing them today. The cruise across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway at this time of year always reminds me of long training rides. My first one was during the summer of 1971. It was hot and sunny and I had brought exactly one water bottle and no food. We rode 80 miles, from the Priory up to Bogalusa and back, and at around 60 or 70 miles I finally bonked. Someone else came off the back too, and he stayed with me until we turned onto Stafford Road. Then he reached into his jersey pocket, handed me a little box of raisins, and said "see you at the car." Those last few miles were very long, but that' was just part of the learning process for cyclists.

Anyway, this morning we had 10 guys and were planning on a 50 mile ride that turned out to be more like 55 I guess. Along the way, my trusty Campagnolo computer hit 48,000 miles. It felt great to be out on a real club training ride again, and although I knew I wasn't in very good shape, it was hard to resist staying at the front longer than I should have. Every now and then I would remind myself to get some rest back in the draft. We rode from Barker's Corner up through Enon and then over to Plainview, looking forward to the smooth and fast road from Plainview back down to Enon. Man, were we surprised. The road had just gotten the first layer of the dreaded chip-seal, so we spent about five miles riding over the slightly loose crushed rocks, getting pelted with them every time a car would go by. Finally, we emerged back onto the asphalt, which IMHO was in absolutely no need of repair in the first place. I guess we'll have to take that road off the itinerary for a while. Toward the end of the ride I actually started feeling better, and pushed the pace a bit here and there. Most of the rest of the group joined in easily, so we got a good workout all-around. On the way home I stopped over at Mike L's house to pick up a used blower motor he had to see if I could use it to get my house heater going again. It turned out to be smaller than the original blower and motor assembly, so I may have to do some street-level engineering to get it to work in there. As I was staring out the back window thinking about it, I looked at my downed TV cable and suddenly realized that I could reconnect it if I lowered the attachment point on the house a lot and used the connectors that had been installed earlier this year when it had broken during a tropical storm. Half an hour later, I had cable again. I'm not altogether sure that's such a good thing.

In the afternoon I got an email from Sharon, the Assoc. VP who runs our office, saying that she thinks we will have some temporary space in Gibson Hall on St. Charles Ave. to set up a temporary office. In a remarkable coincidence, just as I was reading that and thinking that I would need to be staying in N.O. if that happened, I got a call from The Wife who said that they were considering trying to move the Psych/Neuro office back to a temporary place in N.O., and that she had volunteered our house. So OK, here's the situation. The wife's sister is supposed to be moving in (she was supposed to arrive Friday, now it's looking like Monday), we may be trying to set up an office for five or six people in our living room, it's November, and our entire heating system consists of an unvented gas space heater in the living room fireplace. This is, unless I can rig up the blower motor or get a replacement one. Do you see how all of this is coming together? The only way we could get the office going here would be to somehow get high-speed internet installed practically immediately. Hmmm. This is starting to get interesting, eh? Of course, I expected that we would eventually be providing housing for somebody, which is why I was in a hurry to patch up the roof and get the place more or less in order.

Tomorrow I'll meet the contractor who will be fixing up The Mom's rental house, then I'll have to pick up The Wife from the airport, probably dropping off the contractor about the same time. I will of course need to be working tomorrow too since we have a number of extremely time-sensitive pots on the fire right now.

Life. Gotta love it.