Ash Wednesday in NOLA

At midnight last night the police, followed by the street-cleaners, came down Bourbon and cleared the streets, both literally and figuratively. At least that's what is supposed to happen, and I assume it did. Perhaps one day I'll stay long enough to witness that. Today is Ash Wednesday, and befitting a day that reminds one of the inevitible, it started out gloomy, dark and rainy. So once again I skipped the morning ride and headed in to work early through a light rain. How depressing is that? At my age, I hardly need more than a look in the mirror to be reminded that I am well on my way to ashes! I can only imagine what I would have felt like this morning had I done the whole Mardi Gras thing down in the Quarter. Then again, maybe it would have been worth it......

By noon, though, the wind had shifted and the sky had cleared and I was left wishing I was out on the bike rather than looking out the window. The temperatures are supposed to stay a bit on the warm side for a while now with highs around 70, and I'm pretty happy about that. I desperately need a solid week of riding at this point as I have had to resort to calorie restriction the last couple of weeks to keep from getting fat! Meanwhile, The Wife's desktop computer at work finally crashed big-time and she had to go home to work on her laptop. That was right after I fixed my flaky cellphone.

Over the past week, my cellphone has started acting up. I would go to make a call, or receive one, and could not hear anything. After some experimentation, I discovered that everything seemed to work fine when it was in speakerphone mode, so I guessed that the problem must be with the earpiece speaker itself. Surgery was called for. It was a little bit of a pain removing the tiny Torx-head screws with my Leatherman needle-nosed pliers, but once I got the circuit board out I saw that the connection to the speaker depended on a couple of spring-loaded contacts. Hmmm. That's never a good thing. In fact, I've found it to be a common cause of bike computer problems as well. Cleaning those off with a piece of paper towel seems to have solved the problem, although I suspect that the phone's dying battery has had a role in the problem too. Anyway, that's likely to be my biggest success of the day. I think that if the phone continues to work properly for a few more days, I'll spring for a replacement battery.