Borderline Conditions

When I went to sleep Wednesday night I knew the chances were slim. A seventy percent chance of rain for Thursday was not very encouraging. It was, as it turned out, quite accurate. By 6 am the streets were wet, but it wasn't actually raining. The radar looked threatening, but it was impossible to tell when, or where, it would rain. At least it wasn't too cold. I thought about riding. Riding wasn't really out of the question, but to me, at that time of the morning, the conditions seemed borderline. Ultimately I decided to err on the side of dry feet and skip riding today. Instead, I left for work early and stopped off at the Maple Street Starbucks long enough to have a cup of Verona, check my email, work on the results spreadsheet for this weekend's Time Trial, and watch all the beautiful people order up their favorite complicated beverages.

I had packed a change of clothes, and indeed I arrived at work a bit damp, but a quick change of shirt and slacks put everything in order and aside from the wet cap drying on my desk the rest of the office was none the wiser. It looks like a cool front will push through overnight, so tomorrow should be much nicer. That's good because I'm planning on riding downtown so I can vote early since I'll be up in D.C. on election day. I think this might be my fifth presidential election for which I've been at the NCURA meeting watching the returns on the television in the hospitality suite in between glasses of hotel wine.

So right now I'm watching the end of "2001, A Space Odyssey" on a tiny black and white tv next to the computer, which somehow seems appropriate. The first time I saw the movie, the special effects were amazing, 2001 seemed like an impossibly long thirty-three years in the future, and it wasn't all that unreasonable that by then there might actually be a facility on the moon and a shuttle going routinely back and forth. I even had the sound track on 8-track tape. Here we are in 2008 and we haven't been to the moon in decades, much less Jupiter, and the shuttle, which never went beyond low earth orbit, is almost ready for mothballs. I find that all quite disappointing.

And I still don't understand the ending.