Back to Work

After such a long stretch of being able to wake up naturally, it was quite a job to drag myself out of a warm bed in the dark this morning, especially after noting the outside thermometer. I decided not to be a hero today and instead dressed pretty liberally. I knew the 10-20 mph wind would take its toll on body heat, and there was no telling who might show this morning anyway. Indeed, the group was thin today, but at least there was a little easterly component to the wind that made the early going relatively easy. Just as we passed Central Ave., we saw Donald down on River Road waving. He had been delayed by a train - fifteen seconds later and he would have missed us entirely. So we slowed down long enough for him to catch up, and off we went. Chad was up there this morning with his super headlight. Damn that thing's bright. We picked up Eddie for a while, but he turned back early and in fact the whole group turned around at the "dip" today. My legs felt worse than they had on Monday, so I was taking short pulls. Howard joined in on the return trip for a while and kept trying to up the pace by a couple of mph every time he'd come to the front, but with a fairly stiff and cold headwind, nobody else was interested, so he just kept riding off the front and then dropping back to the paceline. Basically, this morning's ride felt like work to me the whole time.

Back at the house I boiled an egg, ironed a shirt, and headed out on the commuter for our first 2007 work day. Ten minutes after I arrived, one of the staff was standing in the doorway saying "my computer says it cannot find a boot device!" Luckily, it turned out to be that she had a screw loose - literally. The screw holding her laptop hard drive in place was missing (thanks to tech support that had rebuilt the computer last week).

Ahhhh. Back at work....

BTW, apparently there was a rather one-sided national news show yesterday about the "police shootings" in New Orleans on the Danziger bridge right after the hurricane. Just for the record, the police officers were not out popping off innocent black folks for fun as the media might have implied. From what I've heard, there was a gang of armed youths on the bridge that was shooting at them. Looks like in the confusion a couple of the victims got caught in the crossfire. The fact they were charged by our DA (who was found guilty of racial discrimination back in '05, yet is still in office) with first-degree murder seems, dare I say it, just plain racist or pandering or whatever you want to call it except competent. As I came over the Broad St. overpass this morning there were about a thousand police cars parked everywhere around the police station as the rank and file were showing their support for the officers who were there to turn themselves in.