Early Enough

Yesterday afternoon I headed downtown to check out our office space up on the roof of the Tidewater Building. We'll have to give the classroom from which we've been operating back to the students in a couple of weeks, but still have to officially request permission to move back into our regular office space downtown. There's supposed to be a list of people who are allowed to enter the building, but when I arrived I just signed in and headed for the elevator. I guess since I had my Tulane ID on, the security guard figured I was OK. When I entered the office I was greeted by a big pile of construction tools and equipment in the middle of the floor, and noticed that the construction guys had apparently set up a television on the receptionist's desk. Otherwise, though, things looked pretty good. There's still a lot of work going on on the roof, and they've installed a big crane up there in order to haul up the big air handlers for the GLP lab (the year-old ones got trashed by the hurricane). We're kind of used to having the building maintenance guys coming in and out anyway, so that won't be much of a problem, and I certainly don't want to slow them down by getting in their way. I sat down at my desk for the first time since August, made some phone calls, and sent out the necessary emails to get us approved for re-entry on Friday. It was so nice to actually have a desk and a telephone all to myself! I had almost forgotten what a luxury that was. The maintenance folks said they could get the place cleaned up and the a/c working again by then, and some time around 10:30 last night the VP approved our request, so we should be good to go. I think Friday should be early enough. Once we're back, we'll have to be out of the building by 4:30 each day, and the parking garage still isn't open, and only one or two elevators are working, but it will still seem like one more step forward. I sure will miss my easy one-mile commute on quiet tree-lined residential streets, though!

I know that most of the rest of the country has already moved on, content that things in La and Ms are all patched up by now. Indeed, it's tempting to encourage that notion since we definitely want people to come down here for Mardi Gras and school and to work. The reality, however, is that everything is still kind of broken, even in the least-affected areas, and the road ahead still looks long, risky and difficult for everyone. Even the Federal Government's U.S. Postal Service still can't seem to manage to deliver my mail after over four months.

I actually woke up more or less on time this morning and arrived at the levee promptly at the usual 6:15 a.m. meeting time. It was still dark enough to see the stars in the eastern sky, and quiet enough to hear a little squeaking noise coming from my jockey wheels which haven't had any attention since around mid-summer. There was nobody up there when I arrived, but in a minute or so big Richard showed up and we rolled off toward the playground. It wasn't until we were there that we spotted a couple of tail lights ahead of us and realized that they had actually left EARLY. Geez! Like 6:15 isn't early enough? A few miles later I found out that there were two riders (guess who they were) ahead of the group. Anyway, nobody was interested in trying to chase down a couple of TT specialists who already had a couple of minutes on us, so we rolled along at a nice moderate pace until somebody's rear tire exploded loudly just past the "dip." It took a long time to fix since we had to improvise a boot from a food wrapper that required Howard to eat his breakfast a little early, so we turned around and headed back without going all the way to the turnaround. It wasn't long afterward that the morning's escapees caught us and as they rolled past I was surprised that nobody seemed interested in at least hanging on, so I made a little effort and latched on myself. The three of us were trading pulls at 25-29 mph, depending on the wind direction, but most of the rest of the group did eventually catch. I got in a good fifteen or twenty minutes of hard work before we eased up at the playground. It was a little cooler today, but not quite cool enough for me to pull on the long tights yet, and the weather now is pretty damned nice out there.