Change of Routine

It was around 5:00 a.m. when the phone rang. I figured it was one of those calls I get now and then in which there's an unintelligible and heavily slurred voice on the other end asking for someone with an unpronounceable name, to which my groggy reply of "you dialed the wrong number, you drunken dumbass" just doesn't seem to register. I picked up the phone anyway, probably just out of morbid curiosity. Surprisingly, on the other end was The Sister In Law who was calling from her neighbor's house after having accidentally locked herself out of her FEMA trailer while putting out the garbage. I'm sure that any inner-city kid old enough to talk could get into a locked FEMA trailer with little more than fingernail file, but then FEMA would probably take three weeks to fill out the forms and reports to get the lock fixed. So I was up a little early today, taking a little tour of the city to retrieve her spare key from a contractor who had it in his truck, and luckily getting back home just in time to suit up for the long Tuesday levee ride.

I could tell that the wind had already started to shift around to the southeast, and along with it had come a low blanket of clouds and slowly increasing temperatures. The group this morning was relatively small, and we were lured out to the turnaround by a nice little tailwind. My legs were feeling a lot better after having taken Monday off, and the group was content with a nice sustainable pace that made the ride enjoyable, if not particularly memorable.

Meanwhile, back at the homestead, The Wife was taking the day off from work and offered to give me a ride to the office. This of course was just a thinly veiled excuse for a stop at Starbucks, but anyway it would have been rude to decline. Things at the office are showing no real signs of slowing down, which is actually a bit of a change of routine, but I think that for the most part what doesn't get done after tomorrow will probably be stalled until January unless it's really urgent. Fortunately, thanks to laptops and cellphones, we can all continue to work unabated all the way through the holidays unless we are bold enough to actually contemplate use of the "off" buttons. It's looking like we'll have mild weather all the way through the holidays this year, which means the riding routine won't suffer too much. The Daughter should finish up her undergraduate career in the next day or so, which doesn't seem nearly as exciting to me as I thought it would. That's probably because I don't really know what she's going to do next, which reminds me more than I'd like of myself.