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.....