Hot and Humid on the Oil Coast

It's been a busy week thus far and shows no sign of slowing down any time soon down here in the oily part of the Louisiana. My riding has been hot, humid -- routine stuff for mid-June. Every day this week I've arrived back home after riding with sweat-coated sunglasses, a sticky wet jersey, and a craving for cold fluids. The BP oil spill, or oil leak, or simply oil disaster, has really been taking center stage lately. Nothing about this is good. Although there aren't any immediate direct effects on the city, I expect the indirect effects are mounting up rapidly. The universities are all trying to position themselves to respond quickly if research funding becomes available (aside from the $5M or so that went directly to LSU already), so we've been doing capability assessments, tracking current activities, etc., and even have a website set up (oilspill.tulane.edu). To tell you the truth, this whole oil spill thing has got me kind of in a funk. Just the thought of having oil all over those beautiful sugar sand beaches around Gulf Shores, Pensacola and Destin is pretty depressing.

I've almost gotten the LCCS results updated following the last two race weekends, the USAC post-event reports and payment for the Tour de La is in the mail, most of the race equipment has been put away, and I even fixed the bell! I'd bought a new brass bell for the LAMBRA race equipment collection earlier this year. It worked great for a while, and then it completely lost its ring. It just went flat. We knew there must be a crack somewhere but until I held it up to a light in a dark room last night I couldn't find it. Turned out it was cracked around its circumference where there was a groove that ran all the way around the bottom of the bell. Granted, I knew it was a cheap piece of foreign-made junk, but I did expect it to ring. Well, a few judicious blows with a ball-peen hammer neatly removed the bottom inch from the bell, so after a little filing and a field modification to the clapper it now rings quite nicely!

This morning's long levee ride had a nice group on hand, and although the pace got fast here and there it wasn't too hard for people to hang onto the paceline. I put in a good number of pulls on the way out, took a little break after the turnaround, and did a little work near the end. It was good. It was hot. One the way home, riding down Oak Street, I came up on that "little old lady" who we often see up on the levee. I managed to get off a couple of photos, but they aren't very good since I was (a) rushed, and (b) about to get run over by oncoming traffic. Gotta take what you can get sometimes.

Tonight I'm going to some restaurant that is donating part of its proceeds to some kind of animal thing - SPCA? I dunno. All I know is that I get to eat dinner and drink wine, and depending on how much of the latter I get into, I may or may not finish up the LCCS scoring later tonight.