Coming Up for Air

It's 12:30 at night and I'm just coming up for air after a busy couple of days. In less than five hours I'll be on the road to Baton Rouge for the annual Team Time Trials and Tribulations. Things started to stack up on Wednesday when I realized that the stuff I had to have finished on Friday would actually need to be finished on Thursday because of an office "staff retreat." So I stayed up way too late Wednesday working on a paper involving three of the University's Schools, five oil companies, and the African continent. I did get in a ride on Thursday morning, although I cut it a bit short so I could work on the paper some more before going to the office. Thursday, then, was pretty heavily involved with collecting suggestions and edits from four people to whom the draft had been sent, and finally hitting the "send" button at 4:58 pm.

This morning I went out early to log a quick 20 miles and was lucky to meet up with John R., who filled me in on his recent excellent vacation to the Virgin Islands, which made me just a bit jealous but was a welcome diversion. Back at the house I finally lined up our 4th Team TT rider (nothing like waiting until the last minute, eh?) and made a few other early phone calls because the rule at the office retreat was that all cellphones and blackberries had to be checked at the door. Then I headed off for a very pleasant ride down to the French Quarter. The retreat was being held at the apartment of one of our state lobbyists, which was in the Pontalba Building overlooking Decatur Street. It was really, really nice being in the French Quarter on this nice September morning.

After walking over to Cafe' du Monde to pick up six cups of Cafe au Lait and a handful of sugar packages (for me) from the take-out window, our meeting got underway. This was the usual type of semi-structured brainstorming session, complete with whiteboards and color-coded post-it notes. It went pretty well, as did our lunch at Muriel's. Then it was back to the Pontalba Building for more brainstorming, and then, finally, we broke out the wine and booze and kicked back on the balcony. There's really nothing like being on a balcony in the French Quarter watching all of the interesting people and things down on the street. Since the Tulane-LSU football game is tomorrow (unfortunately at the same time we'll be finishing up our team time trial) there were a few more people around than usual, one of which had two big poodles who had "LSU" and "Tigers" carved into their fur. I hear that they are from Baton Rouge and are regular football fans.

I finally rode the commuter back home, after three glasses of wine, not surprisingly thoroughly enjoying the ride through town just as the sun went down. By the time I got home, the wine there was already open, there were two people on the front porch, and a flank steak waiting for me to throw onto the grill. In the meantime, Ed Novak stopped by to pick up a pedal wrench for the TT bike he'd borrowed for tomorrow's race and Ed Kendrick called to say he was going to have to back out of the team he had spent two weeks painfully putting together because of a medical problem involving his daughter. Then the dishwasher went "poof!" and blew the circuit breaker, emitting a puff of that unmistakable burned wiring smell, so I spent some time on the floor figuring out what had happened, fixing some wiring, and reassembling it. Finally, it was time to head down to the basement to bolt the aero bars onto the ol' Cervelo Prodigy and fix the flat tire on my racing wheel. So here I am, after midnight, wondering why I'm not sleepy...