The Sunlight Effect

I was surprised how many riders there were for this morning's long levee ride. It must have been the Sunlight Effect that brought them out. The winds have shifted and it's warm and humid again around here, and I guess that contributed a bit to today's fast pace on the way out to Ormond. Howard was, as usual, surging when he'd come to the front, constantly looking behind him to survey the damage. Most of us weren't really having any of it today, though, and so various little groups occasionally loitered off the front, only to be reeled back in to the pack once the excitement wore off.

So it is still 90 degrees in the office, and I'm about to bail. There's a replacement pump on order for the a/c, but nobody is making any promises as to when it will arrive. Since I've got a late afternoon meeting on the uptown campus, I think I'll just hop on the bike and head to the house where it's at least a little bit cooler. It should be a good night for the trick-or-treaters, and I think it will end up as a little neighborhood party like last year.

From Headlights to Sunglasses

What a difference an hour makes! It always amazes me. The lights that have been permanently attached to the bike for the last month or so are gone and this morning I rode out to the morning levee ride with my sunglasses on. So nice. Although the temperatures are on the rise (especially in my office . . .), it was still nice and cool for the morning ride. This morning there were only Scott, Joe F. and Bob P., which is typical for a Monday morning. Scott, having just returned from a trip that kept him off the bike for an extended time, rolled us up well past the Monday morning speed limit, and I heard Bob say something about not wanting to go that fast as he dropped off the back. We throttled back a bit and kept the rest of the ride at a pretty consistent 21 mph, which felt just right. I was glad to see that they haven't started any of the scheduled resurfacing of the bike path yet, although the suspense is kind of disconcerting. I wish I knew what the plan was.

I almost have photos of all of the LAMBRA LCCS winners, so maybe tomorrow I'll be able to put them up on the LAMBRA website. Still need to get the track LCCS results together, though.

When I walked into the office this morning it was walking into an oven. Apparently the chilled water pump had broken over the weekend and our office was getting nothing but heat. The temperature in my office was 90F. Sheesh! Luckily it was reasonably cool outside so we opened a bunch of the sliding glass doors to the roof and that made it at least tolerable. It won't be fixed until some parts arrive, and with the temperatures expected to be higher tomorrow, I'm not looling forward to that very much.

Halloween tomorrow! That's usually a fun time in our neighborhood. A few of the neighbors are supposed to come over tomorrow evening, so I'm sure it will be the usual mad rush for a couple of hours. Since we don't have a big halloween light display, or halloween flags, or huge inflatable halloween pumpkins, I feel like we're kind of slacking this year.

A Working Weekend

The weather this weekend has been awesome, and although it would have been tempting to spend a lot of time on the bike, it was instead time to get some things done around the house. The plan was to do the Giro rides Saturday and Sunday, and spend the rest of the time catching up on some of those "deferred maintenance" chores. There were plenty to chose from. So Saturday morning I unenthusiastically got up in the dark for the last DST Giro of the year. It was about the coldest morning we've had so far this Fall, and although I was dressed warmly, when I hit that cold 25mph North wind it took me only about two blocks to decide it would be a good day for a "rest day." I pulled the ripcord and put my energies instead into making some nice hot coffee. Sometimes it's nice to act like a "normal" person and sit out on the porch with a cup of coffee. Once the caffeine kicked in, I started a long string of chores. There were hedges to be trimmed, things to be painted. I think I checked email once, via the Palm Pilot, just in case there was something urgent, otherwise I was mostly offline all weekend. I even took apart the furnace flue where it ties into the old chimney in the basement to clean out the branches that were down in there thanks, no doubt, to something that had nested up in there. By the end of the day, before I went out to feed my sister's dogs and my mother's dog, both of whom were out of town, I took on the tedious task of repainting the front screen door and other woodwork. I was sore and tired by the time I reset the clocks and hit the sack. Meanwhile, at the track in Baton Rouge, Jaro was riding the district track championships. I had briefly considered going, but it wasn't too hard to convince myself otherwise. I haven't been on the track bike in over a year, had never gotten around to gluing on new tires, and of course needed to take advantage of the weekend to do all that stuff around the house.... Anyway, Jaro did well.

Sunday was still quite cool, but the wind had died down, so I was determined to make the Giro Ride. I knew the temperature would rise by well over ten degrees between 6:30 a.m. when I leave home and 10:00 when I get back. This called for arm-warmers, double jersey, un-D-shirt, DeFeet gloves and DeFeet shoe covers, much of which ended up in my pockets by the time I got home. The ride itself was one of the most civilized Giro rides we've had all year. The pace stayed around 23 mph for much of the way out until finally on Chef Highway Howard couldn't take it any longer and drove it up long enough and fast enough that things came apart. Then, not too long after the turnaround, he and one other rider rolled off the front. As usual, the pack didn't worry about them for a few miles, but eventually we started chasing in earnest. For the last two or three miles VJ got on the front on his TT bike and pulled at like 30 mph until we finally caught. I was impressed. Things eventually regrouped and we resumed our conversational pace. It was good.

Back at home, though, there was more work waiting. While The Wife sanded and stripped 70 years of old paint from the kitchen windows, I took on the re-painting of the front steps. More sanding, caulking, painting, re-painting. My back will be sore tomorrow!

It was a dark and stormy morning ...

and the rain fell in torrents...

Can't say the forcasters were too far off this time. With the wet streets, tornado warnings on the television, and more rain moving in, I figured it would be a good day to sleep late and take the car in to work, stopping along the way at the recently reopened Starbucks on Maple Street. By the time we were halfway to the office the rain was coming down hard, blowing sideways down the streets. Even at 10 a.m., the tops of the taller buildings downtown still fade into the low-hanging clouds and there is not even a hint of sunlight. Still, there is a certain amount of satisfaction in knowing you made the right call about riding. Don't you just hate it when you skip a ride and then when it's too late it turns out that the weather isn't as bad as you thought?

Well, that wasn't the case this morning. Got to admit, though, it was kind of fun driving to work in that weather!

Another One in the Dark

It was even warmer this morning with a strong and humid breeze blowing out of the Southeast. I know it shouldn't be possible, but it seemed even darker this morning than it did on Tuesday. Perhaps it was the overcast skies that we couldn't even see until we were ten miles up the river. With only six or seven of us and the prospect of a long battle into the wind on the return trip, no objections were raised to the suggestion that we turn around early at the "dip."

The usual levee runners and walkers have recently taken to carrying flashlights or flashing lights, which is great because they really do come up on you suddenly. Riding in the dark always makes it seem like you're going faster than you really are, doesn't it? We were probably going between 20 and 23 mph in the dark, and although we had lots of the usual flashing lights, nobody had anything that could really help us see what was up ahead, so we were being pretty careful and calling out anything we saw. At one point, though, I guess we scared an oncoming runner because as we went by he had bailed out down the levee and said somehing like "hey, watch it!" as we went by. Sorry 'bout that, dude. Anyway, the tailwind on the way out was pretty sweet, but the whole time there was this little voice in my ear telling me that it would be brutal on the way back. Actually one of the voices I was hearing was Ronnie's! It wasn't long after we turned around before we got organized into a nice circular paceline, which was just about as stressful as the dark had been on the way out. We were each taking short pulls of maybe ten or twenty pedal strokes, which made the run into the wind much easier.

The good news is that, at least for those of us who do most of our training rides in the morning, the batteries only need to last a few more days! Tomorrow the weather is supposed to be lousy, but behind the lousy is rumored to be another cool front. Hot - cold - hot - cold..... Welcome to Fall in New Orleans.

Of Rats and Riders

The alarm clock beside my bed is probably 25 years old, and as such has only one simple alarm setting. Since my morning ride time varies by 25 minutes during the week, I just leave it set for the earlier time, around 5:50 a.m. On those days when I'm meeting the 6:40 group, I usually just take my time getting out of bed, but every now and then, as was the case this morning, I reach up, turn the alarm off, and promptly fall back asleep. Of course, my own internal clock somehow knows that I'm supposed to be on a bike by 6:30 regardless, which is when I awoke, again, this morning. I knew I'd miss the group, and it was garbage day today, besides. When there's only one garbage pickup a week, it is not to be missed, so I grabbed the bag out of the kitchen and headed downstairs, only to be confronted with a recently deceased rat lying conveniently next to the garbage can. Nice way to start the morning. Anyway, I had a nice moderate pace solo ride out on the levee, meeting the group around Williams Blvd. for the ride back. It was considerably warmer today, but I wasn't quite ready to dispense with the arm-warmers yet.

So I was thinking about the proposed USCF two-earphone ban this morning. I've never felt the need to listen to music while I'm traning, much less racing. I tried it a couple of times, in fact, but found it quite distracting. Anyway, aside from the obvious hearing and awareness issues at hand, I always wonder what people are listening to. Are there special tunes they use just for races? Time-trial music? Motivational recordings? What's the deal?

Long, Dark and Cold

Today was the last Tuesday morning ride before we switch back to Standard Time on Sunday, and you could tell. It was cool enough that I skipped the arm-warmers and went straight for the cozy Pearlizumi Kodiak today, zipping the high collar all the way up to my chin to combat the morning chill. I was right on schedule to meet the group when I rounded the corner at the end of Willow St. only to find a train at a dead stop blocking the road. I rode up to it and looked down the tracks and could see it was blocking Oak St. too. After a couple of minutes, I finally heard the clink, clink relay down the cars as each one in turn started to creep slowly forward. This train was in no hurry, and since it started so slowly there was already a steady stream of cars moving down River Road when I got there, so again I had to wait until there was enough of a gap to jump across to the bike path. Between the train and the dark, we started out more than a couple of minutes late today, but at least there was a decent-sized group of a dozen or so.

It was just downright dark when we started out, and although it was even colder than yesterday, at least the wind had died down. My legs still felt stiff from the prior three days in the wind, though. It wasn't until we got to Williams Blvd., about ten miles down the road, that I felt comfortable turning off my front flashing light. Those ten miles had been exciting, too, as runners and walkers kept appearing rather suddenly in front of us. We weren't going all that fast, though. We're not quite that crazy. Anyway, it was a pretty nice ride and we finally got warmed up somewhere out there by the turnaround. Perhaps the worst part of having to leave before sunrise is that we end up riding back with the rising sun directly in our eyes most of the way. We had to hit the brakes at one point when an old man with a fishing pole suddenly materialized out of the glare. Our late start, combined with a delay to fix a flat along the way, got me home about fifteen minutes later than usual, so I hurried about and soon discovered I'd need to iron a shirt. Halfway through that miserable process I noticed some light scorch marks on the white shirt and when I went to check the temperature knob it fell off in my hands. It had disintegrated way down inside the iron which was apparently now locked into "burn" mode. Sheesh. By the time I got another shirt ironed I was a good half-hour late.

But there is a bit of good news today anyway. The maintenance guys are up here today fixing all of the holes, scrapes, gouges and marks in the office and stairwell sheetrock that resulted from the transport of all the heavy equipment and stuff going to and from the roof over the last year of repairs, so in a way that's another sign that we are slowly returning to something like normal. If that's not nice enough, well, the view from the roof today is just awesome.

My First Time

The cool front that came through yesterday dropped the overnight temperature into the 50s, and so, as I had expected, this morning was my first time riding in long tights this Fall. It was also the first time I rode in full-finger gloves. Granted, I could have survived fine in shorts, but I would have been cold for the first half-hour and that's just not a good way to ease into winter, at least in my book!

Accompaning the cool, dry air, was the usual strong northwest wind, and I wasn't too surprised to find only Joe F. up on the levee. Joe just got back from a couple of weeks in Vermont, so while I was all decked out in long tights, arm-warmers and gloves, he, having already acclimated to the cool weather, was in his usual shorts with just a long-sleeve jersey to keep the chilly air at bay. Come to think of it, I have rarely seen him wearing long tights. Riding this morning made me think about what I was doing this week a year ago when we were just preparing to move back from Jackson into our house permanently. I have a feeling that this whole year will be defined by comparisons with "a year ago today." I find myself making those comparisons frequently.

My legs were surprisingly sore this morning, no doubt a result of battling the wind all weekend on the Giro rides, and although I was planning on an easy spin, today's wind demanded a bit more effort than I would have liked. Just holding 19 mph for the long headwind stretches took a little pressure on the pedals, even though I was staying in the light gears and trying to keep it easy. On the plus side, the weather is really beautiful today with a clear blue sky and really low humidity. People who live where this kind of weather is the normal fare can't possibly truly appreciate it like we do this time of year.

The "real" cafeteria at the Medical School finally re-opened last week, and it's been very popular. It has been a long time since we could get a nice selection for lunch that hadn't been wrapped in plastic and refrigerated for four hours. Meanwhile, on the Microsoft Exchange front, I switched two more people in the office over to the Exchange server last Thursday. Both of them use Blackbery handhelds, and one of them keeps having problems with his BB getting shut out from his Cingular server until he re-enters his password. Apparently they are "working on that." Also, since Tulane didn't buy the Blackberry Exchange Server software, they can only sync their email, not their calendars or anything else, without plugging into their computers. I think there are some 3rd party solutions for that, but I haven't had time to investigate yet. Turns out the President uses a Treo. I'll bet it'll sync with those!

Windy Weekend

Saturday morning, 6 am, it's cooler than it's been and the streets are wet. To Giro or not to Giro? That was the question. Fire up the laptop and check the radar and there's practically nothing there. Search around for the arm-warmers I haven't used since Spring and head out to the Lakefront. Cool, dark and very windy.

The Giro ride was fast and fragmented. On the stretch down Hayne I was sitting toward the back when a gap started to open a couple of riders ahead of me. By the time I realize the those riders aren't going to do anything about it, the gap is large and growing, so I go around with Lawrence and we chase our butts off until they finally ease up around Paris Road. A mile or so later we have to cross the interstate and the front of the group cuts across in front of a couple of cars going 70 mph around a curve. Another long chase all the way to the service road. Finally things regroup on Chef Highway and I think things are going to settle down for a while, although we're still going pretty fast. A couple of miles before the turnaround there's a big surge and another gap opens, I think the guy in front of me is going to close it, but all of a sudden he sits up and pulls over. I chase but the sprint to the turnaround has started and I finally blow up. Oh well! Got the LCCS rankings all updated and posted, filled out the post-event forms from Rocktoberfest, and just need the check to arrive from Laura so I can forward it all to the USAC.

Sunday morning the streets were wet again and there were only a dozen or so on hand for the Giro Ride. It was also even more windy than Saturday because a cool front had just come through. A small group on a windy day means only one thing: hard ride. Other than the flat I got on Chef when a bent nail punctured my tire, it was a pretty good ride, but the wind really made it hard. The rest of the day was pretty nice, so I even broke down and replaced the disintegrating aluminum screen on the porch door.

Red Wine Headache

Right after work on Thursday we crammed six people into the car and headed over to City Park for the annual Red, White and Blues wine-tasting. When we walked into the jam-packed room one of our group bought each of us a plastic wine glass with three little colored LEDs in the base. Very classy, eh? Anyway, since there were literally hundreds of wines to taste, it was obvious that I'd need a strategy. I decided early on that I'd skip the long lines at the food tables and stick to the cheap merlot wines. With the eight-page list in hand, I started going from table to table, carefully marking down each wine I tasted. Somewhere along the way, around the fifth or sixth wine (no, absolutely no way I'm spitting out the wine!) my "scientific method" began to deteriorate, though. I do remember that the $7.99 Bogle Merlot, $9.99 Cycles Gladiator Merlot and $15.99 Barnard Griffin Merlot were pretty decent for the prices, and the $8.99 Royal Bitch from Chile was practically undrinkable. The rest is pretty much a blur. Took some photos of the entertainment with a friend's camera, but she never could figure out how to email them to me. How do you have a digital camera and not know how to save the photos and email them??

When I awoke up this morning, the temperature had dropped into the lower 60s, and my head was still reeling from the previous evening. I guess I should have had more to eat and maybe something other than wine to drink. Anyway, I reached up, turned off the alarm, uttered a low groan and went back to sleep. So to get my exercise for the day, I walked down to the French Quarter at lunchtime, picked up a nice shrimp po-boy, and went over to the Moonwalk to eat overlooking the river. I'll just chalk that up as "cross-training." Got the 1-day licenses from Keith today, so hopefully we can wrap up all of the USCF Rocktoberfest paperwork and I can do the final LCCS rankings. Actually, I think I have them just about finished. Adam discovered one rider in the 1,2,3 race who was one lap farther down than he had reported to me, so I'll have to fix that, but it won't affect the LCCS rankings because neither the Cat. 1,2 nor the Cat. 3 fields were big enough to count. Guess it'll be the Giro ride for me tomorrow. The weather should be awesome.

Stray Bullet

It was as humid as it was dark this morning when I rolled out the door at 6 o'clock. Riding down Carrollton, there were a couple of sections where I just had to hold on to the handlebars and hope for the best because the streetlights were out and my flashing headlight is not up to the task of actually lighting the road. When I arrived at the levee I knew immediately that Brady was up there thanks to his ultra-bright helmet-mounted headlight. We were glad to have him in the group today because the first half hour was basically in total darkness. I suppose it was also the darkness that kept people at home today. There were only five of us, so we decided to turn around at the "dip" as we did last Thursday because otherwise we end up getting home a little too late. The extra two or three MPH that we get from having a big group is what makes it feasible to do the whole bike path, and so when there are only a few of us on hand the pace, while not particularly easier, is considerably slower. For some reason my legs were unhappy today and didn't start to feel normal until the latter part of the ride. By then, I was absolutely soaked with sweat, as was the inside of my glasses. It turned out to be a good thing that we had turned around early because we had a flat on the way back. Don't you just love changing a flat when there's sweat dripping all over everything? Hard to believe it was 7 a.m. in mid-October! A cool front has been inching its way in our direction, and the heavy rain is somewhere just East of Baton Rouge right now. Hopefully it will pass through here before this evening when we are supposed to be going to this outdoor Red, White and Blues thing at City Park.

Yesterday The Wife showed me the brand new bullet hole in their office window. The evening before, between the time they left the office and the time the cleaning crew came in and discovered shattered glass on the carpet, a presumably stray bullet had dropped in for a visit. The office is on the 10th floor of the building and the bullet had penetrated the heavy double-pane floor-to-ceiling glass window, but hadn't made it much farther than that (they found the bullet). The fact that that side of the building overlooks the housing project that they are now filling back up with the exiled Katricians from Houston is probably no coincidence. Needless to say, this bullet didn't come from somebody's little .22 caliber handgun, either.

Life in the (not so) big city.....

Demotivation

With things winding down on for the season on the bicycle racing front, and nothing but busywork on my to-do list at the office, I've been feeling very demotivated lately. I'd dearly like to wrap up the LAMBRA Cycling Cup Series rankings, but it will be a day or so before I have all of the nessary information from last Sunday's Rocktoberfest (Check the photos!). I suppose that part of my mental sluggishness can be attributed to five days off the bike and that nagging feeling of fat accumulating around my middle. This didn't happen when I was 25! I did manage to write up a summary of last weekend's USA Cycling meeting, which you can read if you're so inclined. Otherwise, I've got lots of stuff to do, but none that I want to do. There's the progress report I need to finish, a bunch of stuff I need to read, a grant proposal I need to comment on, and some long-term projects on which I should get started. Nothing exciting, though.

The weather this morning was humid and still with overcast skies that made the pre-dawn part of the levee ride a bit darker than usual. As usual after so much time off the bike, I felt sluggish. Almost as sluggish as my shifters, which are, I presume, all gunked up from a summer of sweat and humidity. At some point I'm going to have to break down and give the Cervelo a complete overhaul. Anyway, apparently we're supposed to be going to some sort of wine and music thing at City Park some day soon, but as usual I don't seem to have the details on that. All I know is that the charge for the six tickets The Wife bought cleared my bank account!

It's raining hard right now despite last night's forecast of record heat. Doesn't look like we'll have anything resembling Fall for another day or two, though. Feeling the need for a very long bike ride...

Free Wireless

Sitting in the Colorado Springs airport, looking out the window to the East as the first glow of sunrise begins to define the unremarkable horizon. The laptop is plugged into the wall by the window so I'll have lots of battery time for the long Denver - N.O. flight later this morning. Like many of the smaller airports, this one has free wireless internet access. It always seems that the smaller hotels and airports have free wireless and the bigger and more expensive ones don't. I just paid $10 a day for wired internet access at the Doubletree hotel where I was staying. That is the kind of thing that I really find irritating. I can only presume that they don't particularly care how irritated I am.

There is a lot of excitement going on to my left with a flight that's running late because they are missing a crew member and things are tied up with people getting through security. Also there seem to be two other flights that are having problems going to Chicago and San Fran. Speaking of security, I just donated a nice Swiss Army Knife to the TSA, having forgotten to remove it from my messenger bag. Damn. Although the weather is crisp and clear here, the weather in New Orleans is supposed to be bad for the next few days, so I guess I'll get my first Fall dose of off-the-bike time this week. I can see a lot of big rain in southern Louisiana right now, and the forecast for today calls for a 90% chance of rain with 1-2 inches, and 20-30 mph winds. Hopefully it won't screw up my flight(s) today too much. I have about two hours between flights in Denver, so at least I have a little flexibility.

More USAC

It was another day around the table in the hotel conference room. We started out with a quick look at some of the new USA Cycling website pages that are still under development, and of course everyone had lots of comments. In general, I thought it looked fairly good, although maybe a bit busy on the home page and aimed more at the general public than I'd like. There were a few key racer-oriented items that need to be easier to find. The rulebook, for example, was still pretty well buried. Perhaps they will listen to our suggestions and make that and some other things easier to find.

Speaking of the rulebook, a few proposals are interesting. There's a proposal to re-redefine Stage Races so that the term covers only time-based events and defining Omniums as those that are based on points. There's a proposal to fine promoters who publish open registration before their event permits have been approved. Another proposal would increase the Cat. 5 minimum field size to 75 (yikes!). There are the usual annual proposals to mess with the Junior gear restriction, ban earpieces (i.e. iPods), and of course numerous proposals to mess with Masters Nationals age groups. There's even one to basically remove all of the details about state/regional championships. No telling what will ultimately happen.

We spent a pretty long time on the National Events topic, especially considering the registration disaster this year at Silver Springs where a lot of good riders got locked out because the fields filled up really quickly thanks to the event being near a number of big metro areas and onling registration having been opened up so early. The USAC will be doing a new UCI Pro Tour in the U.S. (invitation-only, with 5 international teams required). There will also be a new ranking designed so that our domestic pros can compete. Bids for the NRC are still out, but the NRC calendar should be out in December.

Nationals will again all be in Silver Springs like last year, but it sounds like the concept of having all of the championships at the same time at the same event is not likely to happen after '07. The courses for '07 will be different than this year. This year's were too hard for a lot of the classes. The TT course will definitely be flatter than this year. There is an ongoing conversation about some sort of pre-qualification scheme for Nationals, lots of possibilities there but no good clue what the Board is thinking yet.

Long session on insurance, release forms, special offers for members, etc. The lawyers are definitely steering this boat. The reason that the USCF release forms don't have a space to put which race you're entering is because the lawyers are afraid that if someone ends up riding in a different race it could be a problem. Anyway, lots of important stuff that I wish I didn't need to know about. Kind of like communicable diseases.

Finally wrapped it up around 5 p.m. I'll try and write something up for the LAMBRA officers and club reps and whoever else wants it.

Meanwhile, back at home, Keith and Mark text-messaged me to say that Rocktoberfest went off pretty smoothly, although it got really windy and there was one crash in the Cat. 5s when a 60+ rider in his first race hit the deck.

Long weekend. I'm done.......

Conferencing . . .

Yesterday was a full schedule of "conferencing" at the hotel. Some interesting talks by some of the USAC "Affinity Partners." In particular, SportsBase Online, the online registration operation. Definitely planning on switching over to these guys. There was also a good discussion about the Results and Rankings system and what can be done to get more participation and make it more meaningful. Turns out it's one of the most visited pages on the whole USAC website. There's also this company called Zaavy that makes banners and things that we may be able to use. The USAC also has deals with Liberty Mutual for car and homeowners insurance (yes, you get a discount) and with Adventure Associates which sells accident insurance that can pretty cheaply cover those trips to the ER room for those who have high deductibles or no other health insurance.

I spent some time on the exercise bike this morning, mostly for psychological reasons. It's amazing that there is no fan in the room, so within ten minutes at a moderate pace you're dripping sweat all over the place. This morning we get to see the something of the new website that is under development so that we can rip into it and tell 'em what we really want. Should be interesting. Today will be another full day of sitting in conference room chairs and drinking bad coffee. I just wish there was at least a window so I could see the mountains.

For now, I'm about to head down to the lobby where there is a little Starbucks place so I can get the motor going.

Colorado Springs

Well, this morning I made the long flight to Denver, sharing my seat with the left leg and elbow of a rather large fellow passenger who had to leave the armrest up in order to squeeze himself into the window seat. Then there was a fun little hop in a commuter plane down to The Springs. I think there's supposed to be something going on this evening, but I'll have to call GH on his cellphone to find out the details, I guess. I ran into him briefly in the lobby just as I arrived but forgot to ask! Must be the low oxygen concentration up here.

There seemed to be some sort of problem with the Rocktoberfest flyer on the website, but it looks like it was actually a problem with a server that wasn't refreshing its web cache. Anyway, the flyer on the website is correct, assuming your webserver and browser aren't cheating and showing you the version from last week.

I think I'll go see if I can find the "fitness center."

Taste Test Committee Approved

Amy says that the prizes some lucky riders will get at Rocktoberfest this Sunday have been approved by the "Morvant Beverage Quality Control Taste Test Committee." She designed the label practically overnight. This could become a tradition!

Even though we don't start the Wednesday ride until 6:40 a.m., it was pretty dark this morning because of the clouds. At one point on the way out I pulled off the front and when I dropped back I went "Woah!" as The Mountain Bike Guy made a scary wobble in the middle of the paceline. Big Richard was riding cautiously behind him, and behind him was a gap. Behind the gap was Jeff, and as I dropped back past him he looked over and said he wasn't about to get any closer! I commented to him that the thing that scared me most about the Mountain Bike Guy were those grabby mountain bike brakes and the fact that his fingers were always on the levers. It couldn't have been more than two minutes later when we came up on some people and had to slow down suddenly. Mountain Bike Guy locked up the rear wheel a couple of times in the process, at which point Big Richard hastily backed away too. The rest of the ride was fairly smooth, even though we were being kind of extra-careful not to get too close.

When I got to work today the security guard smiled, opened the door and said "go on in, everything's open!" Apparently the email I sent yesterday had some effect, as the door to the bike room was now unlocked. Granted, that meant that it was open all the time, but at least the security guard didn't have to walk back and forth to open the door for everyone. Sounds like the meeting with FEMA went pretty well this morning, and so we're hoping things will speed up a little bit. The problem is only partially FEMA's. You see, all this funding has to go through the State. Putting FEMA and the State of Louisiana both in the loop pretty much explains why it's now 13 months after Katrina and the university has thus far received quite little from FEMA. This is a case of bureaucracy squared. Anyway, we're hopeful. Meanwhile, the LRA is allocating $200 million from the CDBG for Entergy, which is about a third of what they were asking for. I'm guessing my energy bills will be going up next year!

Just as I was leaving work this evening The Daughter called to say that it was starting to snow up in Iowa City. This is rather early for snow, even if it is just a little dusting. It will be down to 25F up there tonight. We're even getting a little piece of the cold front, which means it will dip down into the low 60s tonight, although the high will still be around 80. I'll be heading up to Colorado Springs on Friday, sans bike. I really have no idea what the plan is for these meetings, so it should be interesting. It won't be getting below the low 40s over there, so that's nice. Maybe I should pack shoes, pedals, helmet and stuff just in case there's a bike I can borrow?

Is it only Tuesday?

Man, it seems like it should be about Friday by now. It was plenty dark this morning when I met the Levee Ride group at 6:15. It's nice that there's a light on the big siphon gizmo where we meet because otherwise I don't think I'd be able to read my watch its so dark when I arrive. The group was kind of scattered on the way out today, for some reason. I guess part of that was because Howard was pushing the pace a bit and the rest of us weren't really wanting to play. Somewhere around the turnaround my computer's cumulative mileage hit 59,000 miles. Looks like there's at least a chance I'll hit 60k by the end of the year, for whatever that's worth. Mileage is nice, but you don't win races by mileage alone. Anyway, the ride back was nice and smooth at 23-25 mph. Nice. There was hardly any wind and the air was fairly cool, so the riding was good again this morning.

Back at the office last-minute surprises were the order of the day, at least for me. The Prez is supposed to be in a videoconference with FEMA tomorrow morning. While he and some of the senior administrators were in the car driving up to Baton Rouge, they decided to modify the PowerPoint presentation that I had put together for them to give at a meeting with the Louisiana Recovery Authority this morning so that they could use it tomorrow morning, so I'm getting Blackberry emails the whole time and then they found a fax machine and faxed me a marked-up paper copy. We were still making changes to it about an hour ago when I found out that they aren't even sure that they can use a powerpoint presentation in the videoconference. I'll bet they can, though. If there's one thing Federal agencies just love, it's fancy-dancy videoconferencing. When I got home, there was a long letter from Entergy, our utility company, strongly implying that if you don't want to see your energy bills go out of sight you'd better call your elected officials to make sure they give Entergy the $592 million that they are asking for out of the community Development Block Grant, which is the last big pot of federal hurricane relief money that the state has. It's really a pretty good letter, I must say. Of course, that's the same place from which we're trying to get more relief ourselves and that's the meeting the powerpoint presentation was for this morning. We still have over $300M in unrecovered losses, but the best we could possibly hope for would be maybe $10M, and there's certainly the strong possibility we will get a big goose egg out of the CDBG. Then there's the parochial school system that's also looking to the CDBG for some relief too. It will be a hard call whatever way it goes, I'm afraid. At least my homeowners insurance renewal, for which I just got the new rates, it only going up about $650 next year, including the usual increase in coverage amounts.

Finally this afternoon I got the complete results from the Raising Cane's road race a few weeks ago, so I just finished updating the LCCS rankings to incorporate the last three races plus a few corrections from the team time trial. I'm sure I'll be getting a few emails about mistakes tomorrow, if not tonight. It looks like there are around 550 riders in this year's rankings, including some duplicates who show up in more than one class/category, so that's fairly good for La/Ms. I guess total USCF membership for the two states is only around 350. I got a flyer for this huge 'Cross race in Iowa City today that naturally is over Thanksgiving and naturally this is the one year The Daughter decided to come home for Thanksgiving. Not that I'd be likely to dive into a big cyclocross race in late November in Iowa, you understand, but it might be fun to watch!

Another Monday

I did the Giro Ride again yesterday, and again the weather was practically perfect - a bit on the windy side, but clear and relatively cool. I had been expecting the Sunday ride to be fairly easy, but the first half of the ride turned out to be pretty fast and the list kilo coming into the turnaround sprint felt a lot like a ... sprint. It was fun! The weather was so nice, I hung around the parking lot after the ride for quite a while. I spent a couple of hours updating the LCCS rankings, but since I'm still waiting on the info. I need from Shane for the Raising Cane's road race a few weeks ago, I didn't upload anything to the LAMBRA website. I need to know which of the Cat. 5s, masters, juniors or women were racing on one-day licenses. Otherwise, I think I have everything about ready to go.

With the Rocktoberfest race coming up this weekend, we've been emailing back and forth this morning getting our act together for it. I'm talking here about the basic race organization, not the actual racing. We will need our club members to turn out in force to help with corners and that sort of thing when they are not racing.

This morning was another cool and clear morning, and when I saw that there was nobody up on the levee for a group ride, I decided to do a little easy riding and sightseeing, ending up with a few laps under the oaks around Audubon Park. We can just call it "on-the-bike recovery," and not split hairs about what exactly I'm supposed to be recovering from. I'm not sure if I'll have to go up to Baton Rouge tomorrow or not at this point. I'm hoping not . . .

Pretty

Went out to eat last night at an Italian restaurant on Magazine Street that's part of Semolina's but has a different name - Bistro Italia. Magazine street was really lively and we ate al fresco at a table out on the sidewalk next to a couple and a big German Shepherd. It was windy, but quite nice, and I spotted Kenny B. heading into the same restaurant. He said he'll probably get back on the bike soon. I don't doubt it. Anyway, I started out with a glass of wine, and then we (there were four of us) sprung for a bottle. We polished off the wine, but the food was too much and we brought some home in those styrofoam to-go boxes. The
Pasta e Pollo Arrosto (Fire-roasted chicken, tossed with angel hair pasta and marinara,
garnished with provolone and sun-dried tomatoes) was pretty good.

A little cool front has left us with some really nice weather today, if you don't mind the stiff wind that came along with it. Figuring it would be a pretty day, I stuck the expendible camera in my pocket and stepped out into the semi-darkness to ride out to the lakefront. I've found that lately I keep comparing my rides through the city with what they were like a year ago when we were just returning after Katrina.

Shortly after I stopped to try and take a photo of the sunrise (it didn't come out, did it?) I saw Realdo already heading down Lakeshore Drive. I started to go after him, but then I saw Tim coming up behind. I could see the Giro Ride group a bit farther back. So I rode with Tim until we got to the Casino Bridge. At the top I stopped to wait for the group while Tim continued on after Reo. I took a few pics of the group as it came up the bridge, and a few more once we were down on Hayne Blvd. The pace on Hayne was pretty nice. Not too fast, but not too slow.

There's one spot on the Giro Ride where we have to cross over a couple of lanes of Interstate to get over to an exit ramp. It's sometimes a little sketchy there, but this morning was really bad. There were a whole bunch of cars and trucks coming, but the front half of the group went anyway. That left the rest of us kind of stranded. A couple of the cars slowed down and waved us over, but by then there was a big gap and riders were spread out all over the place. We were all lucky that a truck of something didn't come flying around that curve behind the trucks that had slowed down to almost a stop. Anyway, we had to chase and a number of people lost contact, and it wasn't until we got to Chef Highway that the front of the group got the message and slowed up so people could regroup. It was otherwise a pretty typical Giro Ride, except that the last half of the ride back in was pretty easy. It was fine with me, though. When the weather's this nice at this time of year, it's nice to look at the scenery a bit.

Rockin'

It was just the slightest bit cooler this morning when I met Scott, Bob, Donald and that guy on the mountain bike up on the levee. We picked up Mark and a couple others along the way and although it was fairly windy, the pace stayed pretty even on the way out. Even though I didn't ride at all yesterday, I was happy to cruise along at a conversational pace today. The group kind of broke up a bit on the way back, perhaps because the pace crept up a notch or so, but it never got what you'd call "fast." We probably touched 23 or 24 mph a few times.

I was just about to hop on the commuter to make my way to work when the phone rang. It was The Wife. As always seems to happen with a new car, she had managed to have a bit of an accident. Hers are always rather controversial, it seems. I don't know about mine, as I've never had any. Anyway, as she was driving down Broad St. on her way to work, some guy getting into his car in the right lane swings his door open just as she goes by and catches the side view mirror. Of course, the glass breaks and the motor and wires pop out and are hanging from the housing. She pulls over and stops and the guy gets in his car and starts to drive off, so she stands in the middle of the lane and gets him to stop. Of course, he says he didn't realize his door had hit the car (it's hard to notice these things when you're stoned). Of course he has no insurance. Guess why. Meanwhile, his "brother" comes out of the house and starts screaming at The Wife about how she came too close to him (as he was illegally entering his car from the street side in order to illegally drive it). Wait! It gets better. So this other guy flies into this rampage and is looking dangerous. One of doctors in The Wife's department comes along and stops to help. Meanwhile, The Wife is calling 911. The dispatcher hears the crazy man in the background and sends the police right away. They arrive and quickly determine that the driver of the car has a suspended license. Gee, I wonder why. So anyway the bottom line is that it's going to cost me around $300 to fix since my insurance deductible is higher than that, the crazy guy gets a slap on the wrist, the illegal driver, I assume, gets off with a ticket he'll probably never pay, and I get stuck with the bill.

On the plus side, we were really Rockin' this morning with Darren getting the OK for us to use the James Business Park course for our upcoming Rocktoberfest. Just in the nick of time, too! The portable toilets have been ordered, the permits have been submitted, and all systems are "go." We were probably about 24 hours from having to cancel or postpone, so he really pulled the fat out of the fire on this one!

Falling Behind

It was a short and fast ride in the dark this morning in order to drop The Wife off downtown and get an early start driving up to Baton Rouge to pick up a little check for the Alma Mater. Hard to believe they would handle something like this with a paper check, but hey, what do I know? Somehow it just didn't seem like a good idea to entrust it to FedEx, or, heaven forbid, the U.S. Postal Service. Traffic coming into B.R. was backed up for ten miles, of course, but it was, in a way, rather relaxing sitting in the air-conditioned car sipping good coffee and listening to the radio. Anyway, I had a nice little meeting with the folks up there, stopped for another cup of coffee and an email check, and then drove straight back to our CFO's office. There was rejoicing throughout the land after I delivered the check. It lasted about half an hour. That brings us up to around $40M in federal relief funds at this point. There may be another $10M possibility, but that will probably be about it. The only problem was that all this driving around cost me half of the day and I was already falling way behind on a bunch of things. More computer issues at work, thankfully not my own, had me tied up for half the afternoon (Blackberry/Outlook sync problems probably caused by an attachment to an item in the task list), so it looks like I will be burning the midnight oil tonight because I absolutely positively have to get this presentation together for a meeting tomorrow. The real kicker was when Robin called while I was driving back from Baton Rouge to tell me that UNO was backing out of letting us use the course around the Arena for the Rocktoberfest race because they were afraid to irritate the people living in the FEMA trailers there. Spineless. Mau-Mauing the Flack Catchers should have been required reading. Anyway, the upshot is that we are scrambling to secure another course, which I'm pretty sure we'll be able to do in the next day or two, but I sure hate having things come down to the last minute like this. You would think that somewhere in this godforsaken city we could find a place to put on a little local criterium without major trauma. In the meantime, I got the official results for the Monroe races, found mistakes in the Cat. 5 LCCS results from the team time trial, and am still waiting for the official results from the St. Francisville road race, so I have a lot of LCCS scoring hanging over my head. Ordinarily I'd have done those things right away, but right now they are piling up, which I really hate.

Well, guess I'll have another Coke and get working on that presentation before I fall asleep . . . . .

Forward Progress

We were twelve miles down the road before I turned off the headlight this morning. Although a few of the usual suspects were missing today, such as Rob, Howard and Todd, we had a good-sized group and the pace stayed pretty fast all the way out. Mark G was still on an adrenelin rush following his win in Monroe last weekend. Perhaps he was also looking forward to the annual MS Tour coming up this weekend, too. I think that was his wife who was in the paceline today, too. She looks like a good rider. Charlie D was there too. Turned out he won the Cat. 1,2,3 time trial last Sunday! Not too shabby, even if the turnout was a little low. Jaro and VJ continued their tradition of doing time trials within seconds of each other. This time Jaro was only two seconds behind. Don't you hate when that happens? I mean, you KNOW you could have gone two seconds faster, right? At least when VJ beats you in a time trial you can always chalk it up to the titanium brakes or some other piece of unobtainium hardware! VJ has some nice stuff.

I was feeling fairly decent and had a pretty good ride. Once again we had two flats - one on the way out that the front part of the group never knew about and another on the way back. Both happened just after we had ridden through the gravel at the "dip" where the bike path dips down to street level. If you're at the back of the group when we hit that section, and the pace is fast, you really can't pick your line very well and you end up riding right over a lot of big rocks and things. Guaranteed to pinch-flat. Anyway, it was a pretty good ride even though the warm humid air is back in force lately. I got the results from last road race and time trial in Monroe up on the website this evening, but I still have to get the "official" results with USCF numbers for those two races plus the Raising Cane's road race from a couple of weeks ago so that I can update the LCCS results and upload results to the USCF Results and Rankings database. All that ain't likely to happen tomorrow, I'm afraid. There were a couple of people taking serious photos at the road race, so hopefully we'll see some of those shots at some point.

So this morning I dove back into the Microsoft Exchange / Outlook transition. As soon as I started up Outlook, I got a rather cryptic error message about another program conflicting with Outlook. Once I tracked down what that error really meant, a little lightbulb lit up above my head like in the cartoons. You see, the error was related to the MAPI, aka messaging application programming interface. Eudora, my old mail program, uses its own MAPI instead of Microsoft's, and can either swap them out when it needs to, or leave its own one in place all the time. I had always set up Eudora to do the following. Well, turns out Outlook chokes on the Eudora MAPI, so, long story short, I finally got the PalmPilot to sync via WiFi with the Exchange Server, and also via cable with Outlook. This was definitely some needed Forward Progress for my own personal Exchange project! Later in the evening, after setting up the laptop at home to connect to Tulane's Exchange Server via its html interface (some sort of security issue), practically everything is working. The PalmPilot can sync via WiFi with my Tulane email and Calendar. Outlook on both the laptop and the desktop can sync with the Exchange server to pick up email and calendar items.

Around 3 in the afternoon I got an email from Baton Rouge that THE check was ready for pickup, so first thing tomorrow morning I'll make the drive up to Red Stick to pick up a check for $13 million that I'll gladly put in the anxious hands of our CFO. I think the folks at the Office of Community Services were as excited about it as we are! Somehow I have to come up with a presentation for the President to give to the Louisiana Recovery Authority by the end of the day too, so I'll probably be up rather late tonight. At least we're making a little forward progress this week!

(Frustration)²

My easy recovery ride this morning turned out to be about the high point of the day today. You see, today was the day that my office email was being switched over to the Microsoft Exchange server. So first thing in the morning I set up outlook to talk to the new server and retrieve my mail. It worked OK, but trying to get the contact list and old email imported into Outlook was a royal PITA, to say the least. Despite uninstalling and reinstalling Outlook, the damned thing still won't sync with my Palm Pilot. Then I realized that Outlook was set up to delete the mail from the server each time it was checked, which would mean I couldn't get to it from home, so I had to basically start all over again.

It was about that time that The Wife called from the parking garage where she and a few other people were trying to extricate a kitten from the engine compartment of someone's car. The cat had been in there all the way from LaPlace, apparently. We called in the SPCA, and for the next couple of hours he and I disassembled the wheel well and stone guard with a pair of lousy pliers. It was extremely frustrating. Every time we would gain access to a new space, we would find it empty. We could hear the cat the whole time, but couldn't see it. Finally we found that it had wedged itself up into the bodywork above the fender and there was no way we were going to be able to get it out with the tools we had, so we sent the owner and The Wife down to the local body shop. The folks at the body shop thought this was a great challenge and they all dropped what they were doing to help. They had to remove the entire fender and then basically blow the kitten out of the compartment she was in with compressed air. Anyway, I guess the cat is back in LaPlace this evening. Frankly, I think she had a better day than I.

So I basically wasted the entire day fooling with Outlook to no avail and not quite rescuing a cat. When I got home I figured I'd see if I could get the laptop to check mail on the Exchange server. First, Outlook crashes when I try to run it and comes back telling me it needs to be updated, so I go to the Office Update site as instructed and wait half an hour for it to download a huge amount of software. It finally all gets installed and I run Outlook again, and it just locks up. WTF? Anyway, this whole Outlook / Exchange thing is not exactly going smoothly for me. Actually, it's not going at all and I am not a happy camper, especially considering that it has put me behind by another day on some work that absolutely has to be done by Thursday. Did I mention that my email and voicemail to the tech support person assigned to this little transition has yet to respond to either?

Quiet Week's End

I rode out to the Lakefront early this morning to meet the Sunday Giro Ride. I was wearing an old NOBC jersey. You know, the yellow and black one from when we were sponsord by GNO Cyclery. It wasn't that I was being particularly nostalgic. It seems we've been running a little behind in the laundry department. Anyway, even though the sun hadn't come up yet, I could already tell that the weather would be nice. I could still feel Saturday's race in my legs, so I wasn't planning on going too hard today. When I met up with the group on Lakeshore, I was surprised how small it was, but despite the low turnout, the ride out to the turnaround was pretty fast. At least it seemed so to me. In contrast, though, the return trip was mostly quite slow and I got the feeling that everybody was content to enjoy the nice weather. As we came over the top of the Casino bridge, I commented that it was probably the slowest I'd ever gone over it, and how nice it was to actually look at the scenery for a change.

Robin and I then split off to scout out the Kiefer UNO Lakefront Arena where we are hoping to have the Rocktoberfest races in a couple of weeks. It looks to me like it will work out pretty well. The 500 or so FEMA trailers and the entire temporary Southern University temporary building complex are both located so that we won't really interfere with traffic. I think it will be a fun criterium course. Hopefully we won't run into any of those last-minute problems that always seem to crop up with a new course.

It seemed particularly quiet in town today for some reason. I rode over to the riverbend area for a long-overdue haircut (the only kind I ever get) and there was practically no wait. By mid-afternoon I was half-asleep on the couch, not even thinking about all of the more productive things I should have been doing. It's just as well. It is looking like it will be a very busy work week judging by the ten work-related emails I've gotten already tonight.

Definitely an easy ride tomorrow morning!