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!