Happenings

Things were going along fairly normally yesterday, and when The Mother called in the afternoon to say that my brother would be in town that evening it was easy to accommodate. Kenny was doing a little criterium clinic on the City Park course where the races will be this weekend, but I didn't really need to be there, so it was no problem.

I left the office around 2:30 and stepped out onto the hot sidewalk to ride uptown for my last follow-up visit to the orthopedist. It felt like someone had left the blast-furnace door open out on the streets. The appointment went fine and he basically said "you're done." If the lump on my shoulder gets to be a problem, he said he could scope it and to just let him know. I guess I'm a little bit on the fence as to whether to go that route or just live with it as it is. Anyway, around 6:00 we got into the car to go over to The Mother's house and I realized I'd left my cellphone inside. "Oh well," I thought, "I won't need it tonight." So we visited with family, drank some wine, ate dinner and headed back home around 9:30 or so, and the first thing I heard when I entered the house was a beep from my phone. Four voicemails and five missed calls. That didn't sound good, because I'm really not that popular.

Jenn, who is a faculty member at Tulane, had been out at City Park practicing criterium skills, had fallen and broken her collarbone! I think we should post a quarantine sign on all roads leading into the city because there's obviously a collarbone epidemic here. That makes five broken collarbones this year. Jenn and Brady were at the ER until I guess around 2 am. The clavicle is broken in at least two places, and as I write they're at the orthopedist (the same one I saw yesterday). I would guess that this one is going to be a surgical fix. Brady said he thinks that one of her cleats was pretty worn and she might have pulled it out when she started a sprint. Anyway, she went down pretty hard, so there's some significant road rash to deal with too. Paul said she even passed out briefly when they were loading her into Kenny's truck for the trip to the hospital, although they weren't convinced she'd had enough of a head injury to do a CAT scan.

So this morning I did the long levee ride, which was pretty good. We had at least 15 people, which makes for a very long line on the narrow bike path. Later, on the way to work, I went by two houses that had collapsed the previous afternoon, shortly after I'd passed on my way to my doctor's appointment. They had been abandoned since the hurricane and had been leaning precariously for a couple of years. This morning there was a film from the local TV station, along with the power company, cable company, and a demolition company. The neighbor, whose house had been hit by the ones that collapsed, did not seem too happy. He'd been trying to get some action on the properties for years with no success. As I pulled up to the Tidewater building at work I could hear a pile-driver across the street. Finally!! After at least four years of on-again off-again planning, interrupted by Katrina and delayed by contractor problems and state funding issues, the New Orleans Bioinnovation Center construction (OK, well probably just the test piles) is finally underway.

Sure is a lot happening around here lately.