West of the Front

The outlook for this morning's ride had not been looking very promising last night, and when the 5:45 am alarm went off I reached out and silenced it without thinking. Half an hour later I convinced myself to have a peek out the window, if only to confirm the predictions. The streets were indeed wet, but surprisingly it was not actually raining, so I got up and hunted down the Palm Pilot for a quick look at the radar. "Well, well," I thought. It appeared we were already on the west side of the cold front, and that meant that the threat of heavy, sock-soaking rain had passed. Nonetheless, I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about all the water and grit that I'd be eating over the course of a ride, so I pumped up the tires on the good ol' Pennine just for the benefit of its full fenders. Actually, I just pumped up the rear tire because the front one was flat. That one got temporarily swapped out with another wheel.

It was windy but still relatively warm -- somewhere in the low 60s, I guess -- and of course there was little activity up on the levee. You can guess the rest of this story. Anyway, I was glad to have gotten in a bit more than an hour's riding at a fairly decent effort level today, because it wouldn't have taken much for me to have stayed home, under the circumstances. Unfortunately, the cold front has been moving slowly and instead of the usual clear, crisp weather, it's been dreary, overcast and drizzly so far today.

Lots of things to do LAMBRA-wise since the meeting. I spent most of last night building a little "website in a box" for a friend, so I didn't make much progress on other things. I've been trying hard to keep LAMBRA from consuming most of my day, and that has meant some unanswered emails and loss of focus, but work has been busy too and as they say, "first things first." I have a bullet list of things from the LAMBRA meeting that I need to flesh out so I can send a draft summary to the people who attended (in case I got something terribly wrong), I've contacted most of the people whose events have calendar conflicts, Michael's moving forward with production of a brochure, the LCCS awards are ready to be picked up, I still need to contact the winners to get jersey sizes (hoping I have enough of the right size jerseys), I need to make the draft revisions to the bylaws and LCCS rules, get in touch with a CPA to straighten out the IRS requirements, I want to see if we can do an awards banquet at Rouge-Roubaix, etc., etc., etc.