Morning Bowl of Blog

It's 9:30 a.m. on a Saturday and I'm writing in the blog. "Yeah-yu-rite." This weather kind of sucks. It was a bit too dark this morning when I got up, so I woke up the computer to check the radar. The weatherperson on the news last night had promised the rain wouldn't get here until late morning at the earliest, but I had my doubts. Surprise! There was a carpet of bright green on the radar everywhere west of here and it was moving this way. The hour-by-hour forecast had 60-80% chance of rain between 6 am and 10 am. Not lookin' too good. It was cool enough that I wasn't too excited about a long ride in the rain, so I considered my options, finally deciding to head out to the levee to try and get in a couple of hours before it got bad. It was dry for the first twelve miles or so, and then the light drizzle started. Not too bad. I continued on and went out to the regular turnaround. It was raining more steadily by then, but still not too bad, and the sky didn't have that really dark threatening look. I figured I'd head back and if I was still reasonably dry I could always turn around again or do some laps around Audubon Park. A couple of miles later, the raindrops got bigger and I started thinking about warm clothes and hot coffee. I met the 7:00 levee group and turned around to ride with them for a little while, but when the rain continued a couple of us turned around again and headed home. Luckily, it never rained hard enough to fill up my shoes, so I guess the Giro ride was probably OK too, but I got in a good couple of hours, so think I made the right call today.

Yesterday was a very long day dealing with our "NSF Day," but I think things went pretty well. I discovered that the new university center has installed some kind of third-party internet access system and that by signing in as a "guest" I could get a basic connection to check my email, view websites, etc. The system wasn't too happy about checking my yahoo mail via my MS Exchange connection, but I guess that's to be expected. Anyway, we had around 200 actually show up, representing every university in the state, plus seven presenters from the National Science Foundation and one from the Board of Regents. The afternoon sessions constituted a 7-Ring Circus, with meetings spread out over three buildings, all of which needed functional LCD projectors and someone who could make them work with the random laptops that the speakers provided. No big problems, though, and everything stayed right on schedule. Naturally most of the outside faculty members who were attending ignored the information on my website telling them that they would have trouble finding a place to park and should park down at our University Square location and take the shuttle. I guess they all got tickets, but I'm sure they'll ignore those too. Anyway, the real result of that was that they all arrived at about the same time, which was half an hour late. My favorite?? It had to be a woman whose name was Love. Yeah, you got it. Dr. Love. She was absolutely certifiable, too, and couldn't understand why we didn't have a pre-printed name badge for her, since she had faxed here registration to D.C. only two or three days after the deadline.

The Daughter (you should check out his photo!) is in Illinois today for a meet tonight. Hope they have live scoring online.