Fridays seem to come in two basic flavors. There are the quiet, laid-back ones where the phone doesn't ring much and most of the emails are junk, and then there are the hectic ones where three things absolutely, positively have to get finished before the weekend. This particular Friday started out like the former and is looking like it will end like the latter.
I had gone to be early Thursday night, hoping that a little extra sleep would shift me out of the worn-out rut I've been in. I suppose it helped a bit, although I predictably woke up a number of times during the night, each time surprised that it was still far too early to get up. Nonetheless, I still managed to fall asleep after I turned off the 5:45 a.m. alarm, leaving me to rush out the door with fewer than ten minutes to make the trip to the levee. There were only four of us today, and we kept a nice easy Friday pace for the most part, rarely exceeding 22 mph. At the start the wind was calm and the air was humid and, well, it was a typical Friday morning in August. As we were finishing up the ride, somewhere near the playground, I remembered that the odometer should be getting somewhere near the 90,000 mark, so I pushed the button to check and, sure enough, I was just a mile or so away. Well naturally I had to stop and take a picture when all those zeros popped up. So that was pretty much the excitement for the morning.
I was expecting a quiet day at work today. I had to finish up a rather simple Department of Energy grant application for Phase II of our Clean Room project, but I didn't really have much else on my radar. I got everything together around lunchtime, and decided to make the ride over to Whole Foods for one of those expensive sandwiches with the fancy bread. Just as I finished and was getting up from one of the tables out on the sidewalk I looked over and saw Courtney busily clicking away on her cellphone or blackberry or whatever. It turned out that she was, at that very moment, sending me a text message because she had just seen someone in street clothes arrive at the bike rack with a full-Campi Pinarello with those expensive titanium zero-gravity (or equivalent) brakes. She was wondering if it might be hot. My guess is it wasn't since it looked to be in good condition and the seat and handlebars were still in their correct positions. It's just not the kind of bike you expect to see locked by just its top tube to the bike rack outside the grocery store. It would have taken about sixty seconds to walk away with a nice set of Mavic Ksyrium SLs. Speaking of badly locked bicycles, Bike Snob had some good examples the other day. And speaking of nationally recognized bloggers, I must sadly report that the Fat Cyclist's wife passed away on Wednesday.
Anyway, back at the office I assembled my little stack of paperwork and rode over to the main campus to drop it off at the Dean's office for signatures, taking a little extra time to check out the new clean room modules that are currently being installed in the engineering building. It's going to look really cool when it's completed.
So tomorrow is the team time trial. As usual, there are still people emailing and calling around trying to get the required 4-person teams together, and in the midst of all that I got an email from the promoter telling me that the big results spreadsheet I'd sent him was screwing up the placings. Sure enough, I'd forgotten to correct the formula, so I had to fix all of that and send him yet another version. I think we're going out to dinner with the neighbors tonight, so I won't have a lot of time to get things ready tonight. Hopefully I won't forget the championship medals or other stuff I need to take with me to Baton Rouge. Since I will need to get up around 5 am, I probably won't be thinking too clearly, so I'll have to stay up long enough tonight to get my act together. If that's even possible.....
No comments:
Post a Comment