Incremental Improvement

Climbed back on the bike this morning. The sore throat is gone, but only because the congestion has moved down to my chest. Been here before. Now it will probably linger there for weeks, improving incrementally, almost imperceptibly. A well-evolved virus, smart enough not to disable its host - using me as a vector for long-term dissemination, keeping me in contact with lots of potential new hosts. The little critters are getting a nice windfall in that regard, because tomorrow I'll be spending a few hours crammed into a long aluminum cylinder breathing largely recycled air as I make my way up to Iowa for a two-day visit. I'm not looking forward to the two days off the bike, though, especially at this time of year, coming on the heels of a very short week. To make matters worse, I'll be missing Rouge-Roubaix, which on the one hand is like missing a root canal appointment, and on the other like missing a good friend's birthday party. Since I'm still basically sick, I guess it's just as well that I won't be doing it since it always involves a number of dangerously painful efforts, and many miles of sketchy dirt roads ridden at ridiculous speeds on standard road bikes. I'm hoping that Realdo and Jason have good luck and finish well. There are two things that play a big part in Rouge-Roubaix. One is experience. The other is luck. This is one race where brute force alone just won't cut it. On the plus side, the weather this year should be pretty good by early spring standards.

There was a nice little group for the Friday morning ride today and the pace was a bit faster than the usual Friday pace. I suppose I might have been responsible for some of that. Despite the head cold I've been battling and the lingering soreness in my lower legs and feet from my Mardi Gras hike, my legs felt pretty fresh and they wanted to be going about 23 mph. On the way back from the turnaround, the group split quite accidentally and the front part didn't wait for the back part. I was in the back part, and we were only going about 18 mph, talking and watching the other group slowly roll away from us, so I pushed the pace up to 22 or so at a rate that I though was gradual enough not to drop anyone. It wasn't, though. I guess that, being Friday, most of the guys were all set for an easy ride, so I ended up all alone in no-man's-land. Since I knew the lead group wasn't going all-out, I decided to make the bridge. After a couple of miles at 24 mph, I connected and rode in with that group.

As I was leaving the house this morning there were trucks and bulldozers and other heavy equipment on the corner tearing up the road to, hopefully, repair the water leak that's been oozing up out of the middle of the street for the last few weeks. It's quite exciting to see these things getting fixed so quickly, under the circumstances. I don't think you can go five blocks anywhere uptown without finding at least one water main leak. The underground plumbing in New Orleans is quite old and every time anything happens to make a significant change in the moisture content of the ground, everything starts to shift and naturally all of the old pipes start to break. The combination of a flood, followed by two months of drought, and a big increase in heavy trucks rolling around on these old neighborhood streets has done a lot of damage to this fragile network.

So as we speak I'm uploading another 40 meg folder to the NOBC website. This one has all of the 2002 photos. Since I reorganized a lot of the directory structure, which was badly needed, adding some new folders and re-naming some files, it will take me a long time to sift through all of the html pages and fix the broken links. It's needed to be done for a long time, though. It'll probably take me another couple of weeks to get everything going back to 1995 uploaded. I just wish that the other websites with links to the old site would fix them so that the search engines can find the new site.