Tuesday on the Levee

Monday evening we headed over to my father's place in River Ridge where we promptly disposed of a bottle or two of wine before dinner. Then we decided it was a good time to go over to his apartment building and pick up the small refrigerator he said we could use. Well, this wasn't quite the "small" I had been thinking of. It was a typical apartment-sized refrigerator, and it was a good thing it was dark because I wouldn't have wanted too many people to have seen two somewhat inebriated guys trying to stuff a refrigerator into a Volvo. We did get the monster in there, but it was a little too long for the hatch to close, so I hooked a bungie cord to the latch mechanism of the hatch and secured the other end to the underside of the car. Then, the refrigerator slid just a tad farther forward and .... click! Great. Now the hatch was closed with the bungie cord hook stuck in the mechanism. I could neither open or fully close the latch, and it wasn't until this morning that I crawled into the car alongside the refrigerator and hack-sawed through the bungie cord hook in order to get the hatch open again. Just for the record, it's not a very good idea to load refrigerators into automobiles while drunk.

This morning's long levee ride was good. It was surprisingly warm when I headed out there - I guess around 70F. There were maybe 15 guys initially and the pace was mostly moderate until Todd (or at least I think it was Todd) ramped the pace up near 30 mph and the front part of the paceline started shedding riders. We ended up with maybe eight who did the whole ride and I got back a bit later than usual because we had to stop for one flat tire and then again to tighten a loose pedal back onto a bike. It looks like a cool front will push through here over the next day and by Thursday we'll have lows in the 40s for quite a while. I guess I should get busy and install that blower motor in case we decide we need to fire up the central heating unit.

Things in my immediate neighborhood are really starting to look better, but five or six blocks away there's still a lot of work to do. It's so strange riding to work because although both Gibson Hall and my house are on relatively high ground, the area between the two got some pretty significant flooding. The nicest thing, though, is being able to look out the windows of Gibson Hall toward the entrance of Audubon Park where everything looks just completely normal.

I'm back at our temporary office in Gibson Hall today where I'm hoping to get a couple of telephones installed soon. They tech guys were just up here looking at the phone lines and said that the most they could put in here were two phones and maybe one or two ethernet lines. I guess that will have to do for now. It is looking like we will probably stay camped out here through December, even if our office in the Tidewater Building becomes available, because most of the other people we need to work with are here as well. We'll see.