Yesterday's News

With a tropical storm pounding the Texas gulf coast, the weather forecast for New Orleans was not looking so good Thursday morning, but it wasn't raining (yet) so I pushed the little buttons on the blinky lights and headed off the the rendezvous on the levee. Attendance was a little bit below normal, but not by much, and although there was a little sprinkle of rain along the bike path, it thankfully came and went while we were still way upriver. So I got back to the house without being rained on, which was good, but a few minutes later the skies opened up and a rather severe rainstorm came through, complete with gusting winds and torrential rain. I checked the radar and saw that it was fairly isolated, and that the big band of rain associated with the tropical storm was still a good hour away. Once the rain stopped I packed up the messenger bag with my dress shirt, adding a pair of socks just in case I got wet during the commute. As usual, I threw in a cold coke wrapped in a paper towel to cool me off after I arrived at work. The streets were wet but when I got to work I was pleased that I'd successfully slipped in between thunderstorms without getting wet. When I reached into my bag to pull out my shirt, however, I had a surprise. Somehow the coke can had punctured and half the coke had leaked out, only to be absorbed by my shirt. On the plus side, since the shirt had soaked up all the coke the rest of the bag was dry. On the minus side, I spent all morning at work wearing my "Racing Rapides" T-shirt until I could get the car from The Wife to drive back to the house for a replacement. By then it was storming big-time and I ended up getting that fresh shirt wet anyway.



When I checked the GeoVisitors button at the bottom of the blog yesterday I noticed there had been a visitor from the middle of the Indian Ocean, a few hundred miles east of Madagascar. It looks like Realdo must be up and running over there in Mauritius!



This morning I'd planned on taking Courtney's TT bike out again, but it looked like it might rain (it didn't) so I rode the road bike instead. There were just a few of us up there today and we had a pretty easy spin, although things did ramp up a bit toward the end. Somewhere on the way back Russell Bernard slipped into the paceline on a nice Cervelo. I'd heard a rumor that he had recently bought a new bike. Russell's in this photo from 1984, taken in front of his house as we got the team van loaded up for the Race Across Louisiana.