Bare Skin

I had to do a double-take on the outside temperature reading this morning when I awoke. Yep. It was in the mid-50s. Nice. I figured I could expose a few inches of bare skin under those conditions. In may case, that meant substituting knee-warmers for long tights and maybe four inches of unprotected skin, but anyway it felt good! Unfortunately, the sky was quite overcast and it stayed that way all morning. As it was, we were slipping in a ride just before another cold front came through. If fact, it's coming through right now and by tomorrow night it is supposed to be quite cold again. Anyway, we had a nice group up on the levee today despite a fairly brisk new wind. Luke was lobbying for an early turnaround, but he didn't get many takers and ultimately did the long ride with the rest of us. I must have been feeling pretty good this morning because Matt kept complaining about me surging when I'd come to the front. Really, it didn't seem like I was surging all that much. OK, maybe 1 mph., but we weren't going very fast anyway. It wasn't until the return trip when we picked up a few miles of tailwind that I finally had to briefly deploy the 53. It's hard to judge what gear people are in nowadays. Lots of them, even here where the biggest hills are about 200 meters long and measurable in inches, are riding 'compact' cranks. That means, basically, that they never use their small chainrings. I must be missing something there....

So yesterday afternoon I hopped on the commuter and rode back uptown to attend the dedication ceremony for the newly remodeled University Center. The actual dedication ceremony was in the pocket park next to the building, and naturally the focal point was a huge inflatable champagne bottle from which exploded blue and green streamers when the President gave the command via a cellphone interface (just like the car-bombers do!). My primary motivation was that I wanted to have a look at how far along they were with the project because I had just reserved a lot of the space for a late-January conference. The other reason was because I have a kind of connection with Tulane's UC. As a kid, we would often walk or ride our bikes over to Tulane's campus and run around the UC, sometimes talking our way into the WTUL radio studio down in the basement to watch the student DJ spin records (yeah, actual analog-style vinyl disks). As a swimmer, we often had big swimming meets there, too, and later in high school we often worked out at the Tulane pool where I would stare up at the record board on the wall and wonder how those guys could swim so fast. All through college and grad school I would occasionally put in a month or so of swimming at the pool as well, so it was kind of sad to see it (and the swimming team) go when they built the "new" student recreation center about twenty years ago. Even after all of the renovations and remodeling, there is this one big room with high ceilings and a water wall that occupies the old pool location, and for those of us who remember the pool, there is just enough there to remind us what it used to be like, and the room's environmentally friendly water wall, that functions also as part of the building's environmental control system, is a nice and appropriate touch. The photo here shows that room with the Lusher school's orchestra, which, BTW, sounded pretty damned good. So anyway, I was impressed with the new design. I remain impressed that this project, interrupted by Hurricane Katrina, was completed on time. The senior class that will be graduating this Spring had only one semester in the UC before it was closed for remodeling, so at least they will also have one semester in the new one.