Not Over Yet

It's after 11 p.m., I'm tired, and it has already been a long weekend, but it's not over yet. It all started early Friday morning with a nice easy recovery ride up on the levee. I was not really looking forward to going in to the new office for a day of unpacking, but that was the card I'd been dealt that day. It took until noon for them to get my telephone working, and since it uses the ethernet, it also meant I had no internet connectivity either. I spent almost the whole day unpacking and rearranging, but by 5:30 p.m. it was done and I locked the door behind me and had a rather pleasant ride back home down Pine Street. I'd been planning on spending Friday evening fooling around with the LAMBRA camera to work out how to get the laptop to capture the video directly, but instead ended up going out to eat with the neighbors. Well, a couple of bottles of wine later, the prospects for my planned finish line camera session had gone from bad to worse. As if that wasn't bad enough, I woke up at about 2 am and could not go back to sleep.

Undeterred, I took off half an hour before sunrise for the Giro Ride Saturday morning with firm plans to take it easy. On the way, I rode on the new bike path along Bayou St. John. They had just finished putting in the centerline, and otherwise it looked pretty much finished to me. Fortunately, the Giro Ride was a little thin today, perhaps because more than a few were planning on racing the Rocktoberfest Criterium tomorrow morning. On the way home I saw the work crew (only one of which was actually working) flaming down the "sharrows" for the short section between the bike path and the lake. Then, The Wife needed me to accompany her to Baton Rouge and back, which ate up much of the day. I squeezed in some time to make the registration and results spreadsheet for Rocktoberfest, download and print out the release forms for the pre-registered riders, and even managed to figure out how to do the video capture thing, which left enough time to make it out to UNO to watch the first bout of the Big Easy Rollergirls' season. We stayed long enough to see duMaine Attraction knock a few girls around, and then headed off for some dinner.

Throughout the day I'd been charging the batteries in the race clock and the radios. So now it's less than six hours before I have to get up to help set up and officiate Rocktoberfest. There's a huge pile of stuff down by the basement door waiting to be loaded into the car. Three bit water coolers, the race clock, the big LAMBRA kit with cameras, tripods, extension cords, radios, etc., along with our usual NOBC race kit, plus the big podium. It will be a tight squeeze. I can only hope it will fit. I'll probably bring my bike just in case it looks like I might be able to ride, but I'm not really expecting it to be possible. It feels like it's been a long weekend, but really, it's not over yet.