Sunday Monday Tuesday

Yeah, I've been pretty tied up lately, so here's the Reader's Digest recap:

Sunday
Sunday began with fun and ended with work. After Saturday's local training race, I was excited to be heading across the lake for my first ride in the country in quite a while. It was already comfortably warm when I met up with Charlie and Kevin at the Morning Call at the relatively civilized hour of 8 a.m. DST. Once on the causeway we noticed there was no traffic coming the other way. As it turned out, the third car this month and the second in a week had plunged over the side and into the lake. This time the driver was rescued. It has been suggested that this is indicative post-Katrina stress and that people are having trouble keeping their minds on what they're doing.

There was a group of six waiting for us on the other side for a planned 60-mile training ride. I was up for a moderately hard ride and was trying to ignore the fact that the plastic POS that serves as a poor excuse for a locknut on my rear wheel had broken once again and was being held in place, more or less, by a couple of rubber bands cut from an old inner tube. We headed out around 9 with a nice little tailwind to ride what has become our "standard" weekend route. Although I could definitely feel Saturday's training race still in my legs, I felt pretty good and was particularly enjoying the little climbs along the route. It was a bit frustrating that we had a few mechanical and other issues that broke up the ride more than I would have liked, but such is the nature of group rides.

I had only a few hours after returning home before I had to get dressed up and head downtown to the Marriott for the start of a 2-day Katrina Forum organized by the Board of Regents. I wrote this on Monday morning while sitting in the 3rd row of a presentation on the social aspects of disasters, pretending that I was taking copious notes. Actually, I'm pissed that I couldn't ride this morning and will also have to miss tomorrow's group ride. Text Message late last night from Gina V: "racing sux. lost fitness from crash. next weekend is sea otter. gonna get killed." Yeah, I feel the pain. . .

Tuesday
So here I am again. Even with DST in effect, I still got home too late for a ride yesterday, and again this morning I had to get downtown by 8 am. I'm holding out some slim hope of making it out to the lakefront this evening if I can escape from this place early enough. Of course I'm now a couple of days behind at work and with a trip to Iowa coming up on Thursday it is not looking to be a good week of training . . . again. I guess I'll be riding one of those broken and badly fitting hotel excercise room bikes this weekend while everyone else is racing.

The meeting I'm in is unfocused and boring and I think it's just providing a justification for certain people to do what they were going to do anyway which is to spread around the money intended for the hurricane-impacted universities. Right now I'm listening to a guy from Woods Hole talk about ecosystem stuff. He's presenting a recycled ld presentation and has obviously not taken the time to relate it to either Louisiana or the effects of Katrina. I can almost hear the people behind me snoring.