"Greyscreen" - Insufficient Data

I awoke a few minutes late this morning and made a mad dash for the levee to meet the group. The first thing I noticed was that my ErgoBrain's screen was blank - nothing but a lifeless grey rectangle. Last Sunday it turned over 54,000 miles. Hmmmm. I know that the battery was starting to get weak, so hopefully that's the problem. It was strange to be doing the training ride without a functional computer, though. You really don't realize how dependent you are on them until they are suddenly gone. I mean, the ride felt fast today, and maybe it was, or maybe it wasn't. Maybe I was surging when I hit the front of the paceline? I kept looking at the computer to check my speed and gearing but it was like trying to get useful information from Level 1 Tech Support. So anyway, this morning was kind of a throwback to the old pre-computer days. The ride itself was a typical Thursday ride. Fast but not ballistic with a number of people sitting on in back. After the turnaround I rolled off the front accidentally and decided to just keep rolling until I got caught. Eventually I heard some wheels coming up from behind but it turned out it was only VJ on his TT bike. We did a few rotations with VJ taking long pulls and me taking 50 strokes or so and then Howard showed up, so the three of us traded pace until we were around Williams Blvd., when Howard pulled off to head home and we slowed down a bit. We picked up Dan a little while later when he made a u-turn to join us, and then finally the rest of the group caught up somewhere around the country club. It was a pretty good ride, although it's certainly starting to feel like summer. I had sweat dripping from my helmet most of the way back.

Back at the house there are machines and people from the streets department all over the place trying to patch up the hole that they left about a month ago when they fixed the water leak there. Yesterday when we got home from work we found a truckload of rocks where we usually park, and I spent an hour or so shovelling a lot of them off of the grass and into the street. I've been watering the grass out there between the sidewalk and street for weeks trying to get it to come back after all of the mistreatment from the hurricane and the drought that followed and the piles of debris. It was making great progress and then the streets department comes along and dumps a load of rocks on top of it. There are a few things for which I have a much greater level of respect than I did before Katrina. One of them is green grass. One of the others is working elevators. Anyway, after sitting around in the shade doing nothing for 45 minutes or so (yes, our local personnel are back), the guys finally started working about the time I left the house. Hopefully they will do more good than harm and I'll come home to find a nice smooth fresh asphalt patch covering the corner and no trace of leftover rocks or dirt or freshly broken concrete. I'm not too hopeful.