Compromise

I woke up this morning to the sound of tires on wet streets. After staying up late to watch the good stuff from Italy (and I don't mean the freaking figure skating), I really had to drag myself out of bed to check the weather channel so I could see what was going on. The good news was that it looked like the rain had just passed through. The bad news was that the roads were still quite wet. So I decided to break out the old Pennine which is still sporting its slick old steel fenders. As I'm rolling it out the door, I notice something odd. The freewheel is not freewheeling! I had to take the rear wheel out and give the freewheel a nice bath in Triflo before it started to cooperate. I guess that last ride in the rain was more wet than I thought.

By now I was too late to meet the group, but I figured there wouldn't be anyone there anyway and planned compromising with a quick 20 miles or so since I needed to get to the office early anyway. I ran across Todd, who was going the other way on his TT bike, but otherwise was having a nice solo ride until I flatted on the way back. At first I thought I might make it farther, but no such luck. As I was changing it Todd came back from the other direction and gave me a hit of CO2 so I wouldn't have to pump the tire up the hard way. Since he owns The Bicycle Connection, I guess those cartridges come pretty easily! I heard there were a few guys who showed up for the regular ride, but since I turned around early, I never saw them.

At work it was pretty much a fire drill all day and I had to compromise on the report I was working on for a 3 pm meeting after having a major fight with the damned copy machine. There are two pieces of office equipment that I have never been able to get along with: telephones and copy machines. Telephones always have bizarre non-intuitive secret codes that you need to make long-distance calls, get your voice mail, etc. They're just way too stupid. Copy machines just basically don't have a right to exist. Everybody should just have one of those little tablet computers like they always had on Star Trek. The damned things never fail to jam, run out of toner, run out of paper, and generally drive you crazy any time you're trying to make a bunch of copies - especially if you're in a hurry. They are the only inanimate objects with which I've ever resorted to physical violence.

I did squeeze in half an hour or so of work on the "new" NOBC website, mostly fixing links and reorganizing the file structure. Much left to do to be sure, but at least the most basic stuff is accessible again. Now I need to move on to the LAMBRA LCCS rankings from the recent 2-Man Time Trial. Maybe I can wrap that one up tomorrow.