Passive-Aggressive

It's been a bit of a dull week so far.  The weather, while quite nice, has been virtually identical each day, as was the dull sinus-type headache that plagued me for the first three days.  I think I had a little touch of a head cold going on.  This morning I rolled the bike out the door and looked up at the stars wishing I didn't have to ride in the dark again.  Alas, Congress has decreed that we must ride that way until November before finally making the switch. My regular route takes me down Carrollton Avenue where there's a nice bike lane.  Unfortunately, the city has been digging up and replacing a long section of streetcar tracks for the past couple of months and all of the street lights along that stretch have been off for the duration.  On the plus side, they finally fixed the water leak and resulting hole along that stretch.  Unfortunately they still haven't fixed the other water leak where it's been coming up through a manhole cover for the past few months.  Since there aren't any street lights there, I sometimes don't see it soon enough, or if I do, there's a car coming up behind and I'm forced to ride through the water. It's not much, but somehow I just really hate having that little spray of water hitting my legs that early in the morning.  I can't imagine how on earth those guys can possibly be taking so long to fix such a small section of tracks.  If the first transcontinental railroad had been constructed at the same pace, California would still be a frontier.  Anyway, my dirty bike and I arrived promptly at the levee, blending into the cluster of blinking lights a few minutes before we rolled down the "hill" for the Thursday long ride.

I chatted for a couple of minutes with Mignon about the NOBC group that she is registering for the upcoming Tour de Jefferson ride, but after a couple of miles the pace started to rise as we accumulated more riders and settled into a long paceline.  I guess two-thirds of the group wasn't interested in being on the front today, which is kind of typical this time of year, so the speed remained relatively steady, which is more than I can say about a few of the riders who seemed to be having balance issues.  People really need to put more emphasis on riding a straight line.  While I'm on my soapbox, let me also remind everyone that the red blinky light flashing in my eyes while we're in the paceline isn't really serving any purpose other than to make it hard to see where we're going, so please reach back and turn the thing off.  Nobody's going to be coming up on us from behind.  Anyway, things seemed shaky enough this morning that I spent a lot of time riding an extra bike length behind the wheel in front of me until the sun started to rise.

On the ride back today, somewhere around River Ridge, which seems to be the home of some sort of underground anti-bike, take-back-the-levee activist cell, we were rolling along at a nice steady pace of 22-23 mph as we approached a woman walking her dog.  Coming the other way on his bike was Bob Perrin, so we at first eased up, and then braked since everything was coming together at the same place.  The woman wasn't budging from the middle of the bike path, nor was she keeping her dog close to her, so by the time we all converged, Bob had come to a stop and the paceline was down to walking speed as we threaded our way past.  I didn't see it as a much of a problem, thinking that the woman was either clueless or stupid (or perhaps both).  As we went past, I saw Donald turn around and tell the woman, "That's why we yielded to you!"  It turned out that the woman, possible stupidity notwithstanding, was just being passive-aggressive and must have said something about pedestrians having right of way, not that any of us were arguing the point.  (Passive–aggressive behavior, a personality trait, is passive, sometimes obstructionist resistance to following through with expectations in interpersonal or occupational situations.)   So that slowed things down for a little while as we collectively scratched our heads and wondered why someone would think such behavior was necessary, or helpful.  Eventually, of course, things got going again and I found myself spending a whole lot of time sitting in VJ's draft.

Last weekend Bob Perrin stopped by and gave me a few really old local racing photos from the early 70s.  This one shows me in one of the La Boucherie Gran Prix races that the club promoted down in the French Quarter around '72 or '73.  Eventually I'll get them all scanned and up on the NOBC archive website.  I still remember that old helmet and even those socks.