At the Space Academy

Man, I have been a Space Cadet all day today! My head's been a little stuffy and it must be affecting my brain because I have been in a fog since I woke up this morning. Hopefully I'm not coming down with something, because my stomach wasn't real happy this morning either. At least I didn't space out during the training ride. It was a typical Wednesday morning ride up on the levee with everyone taking longish pulls at sustainable speeds. My legs still don't feel quite recovered, though. I spotted Realdo coming back from his ride this morning, so I can confirm that he's back from French Guyana, although I haven't yet gotten the 411 on how the races went.

So first thing I do when I get home this morning is decide to change out the leaky rear tube on my commuting bike so that I won't have to pump it up every morning. After that I headed upstairs and checked email, and while I'm sitting there I hear a loud explosion. The tire blew off the rim. Geez. Did I mention I was in a fog? So now I've got to do it all over again, which is starting to mess with my morning timetable. Running a bit late I decide to stop by the bank ATM to make a deposit and have to wait in line (on my bike) behind some idiot who is apparently attempting to conduct some sort of high-level financial transactions. She finally moves on and I go through the whole thing and then the machine tells me it "temporarily" can't handle deposits. The half-mile detour to the bank and the wait have now put me even farther behind my usual schedule, although I'm pretty sure nobody will be missing me this morning at the office. Unfortunately, I've got a box bungie-corded to my rear rack that I need to drop off at the UPS place on the way, but by now I've given up trying to rush and have decided to just go with the flow. I finally arrive at the office well after 10:00 nice and sweaty and the first email I read is telling me that, basically, Tulane is getting the short end of the stick again (funding-wise) because we acted quickly and got things fixed and operational after the hurricane, so now we don't appear to be as "needy" as certain other institutions of higher education that haven't done jack s*#t. Never mind that little matter of debt service on $150,000,000. I'll get down from the soapbox now, thank you.

Around noon I decide to retrieve the spreadsheet I had mailed to myself last night and do all the cutting and pasting to update the LCCS rankings on the LAMBRA website. This little process takes me a solid hour or so. I finally upload it all and get back to work until the emails start coming in about 45 seconds later telling me, basically, that they are all screwed up. Sure enough, I didn't do a final sort for some of the categories. Did I mention I was in a fog? Hopefully there aren't any other huge problems, but under the circumstances I wouldn't put money on it.