Gustav and Cipollini

I was up way too late last night doing mostly unproductive things, although I did put up some fresh photos from the Meridian-Cuba race on the LAMBRA website. I couldn't decide which of three photos, taken by Sharon Scheib, would be best, so I ended up pasting some javascript code into the HTML file to rotate all three of them. It's a little clunky, but I'll probably take it out after the next race anyway. The photo of the finish of the Cat. 4 Road Race is particularly interesting because in the background you can see one of the Tiger Cycling guys running up the hill carrying his bike. It looks a bit like he might have ripped his derailleur off by putting it into the spokes. Anyway, I thought it was a worthy photo.

The weather this morning was pretty nice, and we did the usual ride with everyone taking longish pulls at a fairly steady pace. Things were going along fine until, on the way back, my turn at the front came up and I stepped the pace up from 22 to 24 mph. This didn't seem so bad, since we'd already been up to that speed a couple of times already, but when I pulled off, the next rider (I think it was Jay?) ramped it up another few mph and next thing I knew gaps were opening up and we were going 27 mph. Eventually it all settled down again, though. For reasons I cannot explain, I was feeling pretty good this morning and found myself riding a bit off to the side in the paceline just to keep my effort level up.

So today the talk of the town is Hurricane Gustav. OK, well technically it's back down to a Tropical Storm this morning but we all know that's just temporary. The consensus model is still taking it straight for New Orleans, so everyone is on edge. Well, everyone except our esteemed Mayor who was up in Denver dancing around on the floor at the Democratic National Convention. The Wife called me before I got to work to tell me that the Psychiatry department is beginning to make plans to relocate operations to Jackson, LA, and I expect that by this evening we'll start to hear more from the University and city officials. You can be sure that none of them will be waiting around until the last minute this time. The city will no doubt sound the alarm particularly early in order to get an early enough response from enough people to minimize the crisis if this thing actually continues on its projected path. With my usual morning routine slightly interrupted by The Weather Channel and a check of Wunderground's tropical weather pages, I somehow forgot completely to shave! So I guess I'll be going for that Mario Cipollini look today. I guess I should have worn my Armani underwear. Anyway, although Gustav is going to be a problem for sure, it's still too early to tell where it's really going. As the Wunderground folks wrote this morning, "The official forecast is very similar to the previous NHC track through 72 hours and is shifted a little to the right by day 5. One should not read much into such shifts of the forecast track since the typical error of a 5-day prediction is over 300 miles." Nonetheless, I'll probably do some backups this afternoon. It looks like Saturday afternoon will be decision time on this one.