Mid-Week Grumbling

How can it possibly be Thursday already? Well, at least we had some nice training rides on Tuesday and Wednesday. Tuesday's long ride was actually pretty fast, although I think that I wasn't the only one still feeling the effects of the prior weekend's race. Yesterday we had a nice little group for the mid-week ride. The pace never really got out of hand as it tends to do on Tuesday, but I wouldn't say it was particularly slow either. I got an email from Quentin, who was one of the guys who crashed in the Cat. 5 Road Race last Saturday. He said that the crash, which happened only about eight minutes into the race, was pretty expensive for him. His frame was "tweaked," which is a nice way of saying "bent," so he's had to order a new frame. It will probably be another week before he's got it all back together again. It's probably just as well, since it will allow some time for the road rash to heal now that he's picked all of the gravel out of his ass. Mike, who was also in that same crash, along with Andrew, said "In an interesting irony (perhaps) I ran over Quentin and Andrew ran over me. After I counted, I think 9 or 10 went down total out of 31." Hey, at least the team sticks together! Early this morning it was pouring down rain, but when I got up around 6:00 and checked the radar, I found that that nasty long line of red, green and yellow radar images had just cleared the city. The streets were still very wet, so I went out on the full-fender Pennine and got in a good solid hour plus.

So I finally got around to submitting the USAC event permit for the 36th annual Tour de Louisiane. All of the road use permissions are in hand, so to speak, and I think the only big thing we're waiting on is permission from the church on the road race course to use their property for parking. After using Active.com for many years as our online registration provider, I switched this year to BikeReg.com. Active is charging a fee of around $4.25 on a $50 entry, while BikeReg is almost a dollar lower, and Active has done basically nothing to improve their service in the past few years, despite promising me that they were "working on" a couple of the most irritating problems. So I guess we'll give BikeReg a try. Neither of them has bothered to set up a system for handling one-day licenses, although it would be easy, so this year I set up separate "categories" for non-USCF riders for the Cat. 5, Masters, Women and Juniors, so that people who need one-day licenses can pay for them when the register online. That way I can require USCF numbers for the riders who have licenses, which is good because BikeReg cross-checks them with the USAC database during registration, so I know they will all be correct. Hopefully, it won't cause too much confusion. On the down-side, I will have to keep track of the number of Cat. 5 entries myself, since there's no way to set up a 50-rider limit across the two (Regular and 1-day) categories. I'll also have to transfer the registration data over to the 1-day entry/release forms, since the ones that BikeReg provides will all be on the standard entry/release forms. The one-day licenses cause the most registration-day problems, so the more of them we can get taken care of ahead of time the better.

Back at work I'm busy procrastinating on a couple of tedious and unrewarding tasks, one of which is submitting our semiannual lobbying reports to Congress and providing lobbying expense data to our accounting folks for the institution's IRS filing. Whoo Boy, that's some fun stuff, let me tell ya.' I wasted all of yesterday afternoon at a Board of Regents session that turned out to be one of those damned facilitated workshops deisgned to provide expensive consultants with the illusion of progress and the participants with the illusion of participation. Since we just recently got royally used and screwed by the Board of Regents on the Post-Katrina Support Fund Initiative, where only one of our eight proposals was selected as a finalist while LSU Health Sciences Center - N.O. got 3 out of 3 and LSUHSC-Shreveport got 1 out of one, etc., etc. Something very fishy is going on here, and don't even get me started on why institutions in Shreveport and Monroe are even eligible for this program in the first place since the funds were originally set aside to help the universities affected by the hurricane recover. The fact that it's taken them NINETEEN months just to get to this point makes it all that much worse. For comparison, the big three LSU campuses (LSU-BR, LSUHSC-NO, LSUHSC-S) submitted 8 proposals -- the same number that Tulane/TUHSC submitted -- and got 5 of them forwarded to the panel, while we got only one. There were only three other proposals that were forwarded to the final review panel, so in other words, LSU proposals will constitute 5 out of the 9 being reviewed. So yeah, I'm a little pissed off about it because of all the work we did on this whole program going back all the way to October of 2005.