State of Emergency

So our mayor just declared a "State of Emergency." Now, there are a lot of things about this city (not to mention the national economy), and the Mayor's office in particular, that have been in a state of emergency for a long time, but in this case he was referring to the city. Although Hurricane Ike just gave the city a glancing blow last week, I guess the mayor has just figured out that if he declares a state of emergency then the city will qualify for federal money. I suppose it's sort of a retroactive emergency. When it comes to handouts, these guys don't miss a trick. Meanwhile, in Texas, things in Galveston still look pretty bleak and we're hearing a lot of the same things we heard after Katrina.

Today looks to be our last day to enjoy this little cool front. It was probably only about 70F when I went out in the dark to meet the group, and for the first time in a long time, I had my jersey zipped all the way up. The usual group was there, and once again it was a fairly large one, but the pace on the way out was relatively smooth. I took a few pulls, and then the next time I dropped back I ended up all the way at the end of the paceline. I think that was about the last I saw of the front. Somebody must have been short-circuiting the paceline somewhere up ahead of me and I was just too lazy to do anything about it.

The ride back from the turnaround, though, was kind of funny. Tim and somebody else rode off the front before the group had really gotten its act together, and although they weren't going all that fast we ended up with some sort of truly dysfunctional chase most of the way back. There was a pretty good headwind most of the way, but if the group had settled into a steady paceline at 24-25 mph we would have pulled them back easily. Woody noticed the trouble early and bridged up to Tim before the gap got too large. For those of us in the pack, though, the pace was anything but steady. VJ would go to the front and push the pace up to 27 or so, and then the next couple of guys would drop it down to 22, and then we'd get a couple of minutes at a steady 24, and then somebody else would take off solo or try to get us going 27 again. It wasn't working. You could see that the little group up the road wasn't pushing all that hard, they were just cruising at a nice steady speed. Nonetheless, they continued to pull away until we were near the country club where they eased up and rejoined the group. I ended up doing a fair amount of work, though, so it was OK.

Today is sort of an anniversary. Three years ago, today was the day that we finally got back to New Orleans to see the damage to our house (and the city). It doesn't seem like it's been nearly three years.

Hopefully I can get the Rocktoberfest details nailed down today. We'll probably go for Saturday the 11th and schedule the LAMBRA time trial championships for the following day. Meanwhile, I need to make some arrangements for this weekend's races up in Jackson. I'll also be doing 6-Gap the weekend after that. Hopefully the weather will cooperate for that, because the possible temperature scares me more than the climbing.