Another Year

In many ways, the end of November always marks the end of another year for me. By now I've been coasting through a month or more of training rides, content to enjoy the scenery, such as it is. By early December, I'll be thinking about 2008, working on finalizing the LAMBRA calendar and making decisions about which of my rapidly aging bike parts can't possibly make it through another season without replacement. At work, things will also slow down, and by mid-December people around here will start getting hard to find. Just to add an exclamation point at the end of all that is a recent birthday and the realization that I'll be graduating to yet another age group.

This morning there was a light drizzle falling, providing more than ample excuse to steal an extra hour of sleep. The last few days have been busy. There was, of course, the essential turkey on Thanksgiving, followed over the next couple of days by leftover turkey, pecan pies, wine and family. On Friday we made a little trip down to the Quarter, which was very busy, for a rendezvous at Cafe' du Monde. The place was packed, of course, and the one beignet that I managed to get my hands on amid the feeding frenzy was delicious. We wandered down to the newly renovated flea market, past the gilded statue of Jeanne d' Arc and the not-yet renovated part of the French Market. The weather was still nice, although windy and a bit chilly as the sun started to set. The next morning we dropped The Daughter off at the airport and things got suddenly very quiet. Appropriately, the weather changed right on cue and the clouds moved in.

Sunday was our annual LAMBRA business meeting where we try to set up our initial racing calendar. The weather was pretty miserable, but luckily we had a great meeting room at Tulane's university center. I had spent a lot of time on Saturday putting together a little PowerPoint presentation for the introduction, and of course there were a lot of little details that took up a lot of time as well. By the time I had everything together - awards, handouts, projector, power cords, computer, etc., etc. - it was a lot more than I'd expected. So Sunday morning I snuck out for a short ride since the rain hadn't quite moved in yet, and then headed off around 10:00 to pick up the food I'd ordered the week before from the local Whole Foods. At the last minute I though I should ask Mark to pick up the drinks, plates, etc. so that I wouldn't have to make an extra stop for that. Somehow I had a premonition that things wouldn't go as smoothly as I was hoping. Naturally, they'd lost the order for food and would have to put it together at the last minute. That meant I'd have to come back and pick it up an hour later, at 11:00, for a meeting that was to start at 11:30. Well, anyway, after much driving around we finally got the meeting started on time and spent the next four or five hours going through the calendar, discussing changes to the points series and bylaws, etc. The meeting went pretty well, although it felt kind of rushed. I think maybe we are at a point now where we should have a separate meeting to set up the calendar, and then another one for other LAMBRA stuff. That, or we need to go to a whole day format. It's really great to get most of the area club reps and race promoters in the same room for an afternoon. So the bottom line is that I have a lot of followup to do on the calendar. The big thing, I think, will be the road race championship. The main promoter from last year won't be able to handle it this year, and there may be some issues with getting the course for as long as we have in the past, so I'll be exploring the possibility of splitting the event into two with one date and location for a separate age-graded championship, and another for the regular categorized championships. Anyway, I have a ton of real work to do here at "work," so although I'd like to jump on all of the LAMBRA stuff right away, it will have to take a back seat until tonight, at best.