Typically Friday

It was a typical Friday morning ride today with a few of the regulars rolling at an easy pace through the thick morning air. Tim rode down the river and rode with us for a while. He was heading up to Memphis today to do battle against the MMW guys on their home turf at their big stage race. They had a good race last weekend over in Meridian. It looks like it will be a great race up there. I wish I was going too, but duty calls on the home front. I'll be at the district time trial just up the road in LaPlace trying not to embarass myself too much on the bike and then trying not to screw up the results too badly afterward. Maybe that aero helmet that Courtney kindly dropped off on my front porch will help? I can't quite figure out exactly how that thing should be positioned.

Meanwhile at work the Dept. of Ed. finally got the announcement for another big Katrina-related round of funding into the Federal Register bright and early this morning. As usual it referenced a website and forms that weren't available until late this afternoon, so we basically lose three days on some internal data collection that we need to do by Sept. 1. They also had two different dates in there as the deadline for the final proposal, so I had to call them up and set them straight. Come to think of it, maybe I was the reason that the website went up so late. Naturally the final deadline is the day after I'm supposed to be relaxing with a little vacation in Florida. Also, naturally, it looks like I'll be working while I'm there. This always seems to happen. I distinctly remember typing the almost-final version of my Master's thesis (on an electric typewriter, no less) in a Florida hotel room while everyone else was out on the beach getting sunburned. "A Partial Denaturation Map of Bacteriophage Ø29 DNA." Totally obsolete information with the advent of DNA sequencing a few years later. Threw out my only copy with the rest of the flooded stuff from my basement last October.

Now The Wife is on a new car kick, emailing me $22k used car ads. I find the prospect of borrowing large amounts of money to buy big, safe, boring cars more than a little bit depressing, actually.