Cold and Caffeinated

Saturday's Giro Ride was good and fast, but I spent most of the rest of the day taking it easy. The Daughter and Wife and I took the streetcar down to the new bookstore on St. Charles Ave., where I had a cup of Seattle's Best and ended up getting a copy of Stephen Hawking's double book "A Brief History of Time" and "The Universe in a Nutshell." Here's a sample from his discussion of relativity:

"This has been confirmed by a number of experiments, including one in which two accurate clocks were flown in opposite directions around the world and returned showing very slightly different times. This might suggest that if one wanted to live longer, one should keep flying to the east so that the plane's speed is added to the earth's rotation. However, the tiny fraction of a second one would gain would be more than canceled by eating airline meals."

There were a few tourists on the streetcar as we made our way back, so we did our part to fill them in with lots of historical facts and restaurant recommendations of questionable accuracy.

Saturday night the forecast was way too uncertain to make a commitment to the northshore Sunday ride. So when I rolled out of bed early in the morning, the first thing I did was shuffle down the dark hallway to check weather.com's radar. Outside, the streets were mostly dry, but there was a lot of green on the screen. It looked certain that the northshore was going to be wet for at least the next few hours, but the southshore looked a lot better. I sent out a few text messages shortly after 6 am that mostly said, "I'm staying on the southshore and riding the Giro today." A little cool front had dropped the temperature back down in the general direction of normal, so I dug up the arm and knee-warmers and took off into the north wind for the 7 mile ride to the lakefront. The sky, of course, was cloudy, and there wasn't really any hope of seeing the sun today, so I knew it wouldn't warm up very much.

The Giro Ride was a little unusual today. There were only a few riders who seemed interested in pushing the pace, and consequently they spent a lot of time off the front. Jay and Woody and maybe someone else were way up the road by the time the main group hit Chef Highway where Robin got things organized into a nice circular paceline to make the battle with the headwind a little easier. Even at 23-24 mph, it was a bit of an effort taking pulls at the front, and after a few miles the number of people in the rotation started to fluctuate and riders dropped back for a little extra recovery time. Even so, things were staying together reasonably well until we a mile or two from the turnaround. There were a couple of surges and things really started to disintegrate. Michael, who recently moved to town, looked over at me and said, "we must be close to the end." After the turnaround, the handful of riders who had stayed at the front regrouped with those who had been off the front, but the main group had turned around really early, so we had to chase for a while just to catch back up. Right after we caught, though, Woody and a couple of others rode off the front. The group didn't respond, though, and the return trip was pretty civilized. When we got back to the parking lot, Michael, Mignon and I stopped by the local coffee shop for a while, which was nice. The only problem was that I started to get pretty cold. I ended up riding hard all the way home just to keep warm.

On the way, though, Michael and I stopped to see the Flamingo Creche in front of a house in Lakeview. I really liked the baby Jesus portrayed as an egg with a little flamingo head poking out of it.

Right now it's just past midnight and I've recently determined that a rat has been inconsiderate enough to have expired somewhere up in the attic. Every now and then I get a little whiff. Perhaps tomorrow the odor will be strong enough to allow me to locate it. Damn, I hate when they die inside the house like that. I've been somewhat intentionally putting off responding to a number of work and LAMBRA-related emails the last few days. The Daughter leaves tomorrow afternoon, so I guess I'll have to get back to normal after that. I hate normal.