Catch-up

By Sunday night another weekend of insufficient riding was starting to mess with my head. Race announcements are everywhere this time of year, and even if many of them are out of reach for one reason or another, I still need to feel like I could hold my own if circumstances somehow found me on the starting line. I'm not exactly getting that feeling, though, and when I start missing the intensity of the weekend group rides, I know it's getting serious and I feel the need, if only psychological, to "catch up." So I headed out the door a little bit early this morning to put in an extra 10 solo before meeting up with whoever might show on a Monday morning after the first JazzFest weekend where Bruce Springsteen apparently brought everyone to tears with "How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" I should have been there for that. Anyway, the weather this morning was practically perfect - temperature in the mid-60s, almost no wind, clear blue skies. I did my 10 miles of solo work and then met up with a couple more guys along the way, arriving back home feeling a little bit more satisfied. Just after I met Joe F. this morning we came across Sally D. on the side of the bike path just beginning to fix a flat. Sally and her husband Billy did a fair amount of racing back in the 80s and were still doing a lot of riding into the 90s until Billy crashed rather heavily one morning and did some major damage to his elbow. I don't think he's been on the bike in the last three or four years. Anyway, she has taken to riding Billy's bike lately. While helping to fix her flat I noticed that the rear tire, tube and Mr. Tuffy were all practically melted together into one crumbling mess. It had apparently been a very long time since that tube had been changed! She said that Billy had just been through two back surgeries, spending about six weeks in the hospital, and was now back home recovering.

On my commute in to work this morning I noticed that the traffic is essentially back to the pre-Katrina norm, at least along my communting route. The cars are screaming past me on the Broad St. overpass at 50 mph despite the 35 mph speed limit, as per usual. A couple of months ago my ride to work was a whole lot more peaceful. The workers on the roof at work are about finished with the side of the roof that I see out my window and for the first time since the hurricane it is beginning to look almost normal. It's interesting that many of the guys working on this job seem to be from Eastern Europe, maybe even Russia. Of course at work we are still focusing a lot of our energy on securing federal and state supplemental funding to help offset our losses, and at home I now have a "supplemental" insurance adjuster who will probably get me a few more dollars so that I can put a proper roof on the place. I was glad to see that between my patch job and the three buckets in the attic catching leaks that the strong storm Saturday night didn't cause any more noticible ceiling damage.

Got a TM from GeVo last night saying that she didn't ride Athens, and was feeling just a little bit better. Probably a wise decision, actually.