Winter

So I guess it's finally winter here, at least for a couple of days.  By "winter," of course, I mean nighttime temperatures of 40F and below.  Long tights, shoe-covers, helmet liner and jacket were all deployed when I left home this morning.  It was a little darker than I'd expected and I was glad I had the front blinky light for the ride over to the levee where I found, well, nobody.  I stopped for just a couple of minutes, hiding from the wind behind the big pumps, hoping someone would show, but nobody did, so I rolled out alone.  A mile later Big Richard came up from behind, and a few minutes after that Howard joined in around the playground where we then picked up Donald.  As we plodded along at about 20 mph, taking long pulls as the wind kept switching from one side to the other.  I was already contemplating an early turn-around.  It was just one of those mornings when I just wasn't having any fun at all.  Besides the cold and wind, I had a number of distractions bouncing around in my head and was rather unsure about  how I was going to get everything done that needed to be done this week.  There is something about this time of year that I always find particularly stressful.  It always seems like there are just too many things that start piling atop each other, all competing for limited time and even more limited energy.  This week The Daughter is in Hawaii, we're taking care of The Sister's dog, I'm meeting a roofer about a chimney leak, there's a cyclocross race and the LAMBRA business meeting over the weekend in Jackson, and of course there are the usual things to do at work.  My feet are cold, and I'm on my second, and inadvisable, cup of coffee in hopes that it will help clear the stuffiness I'm feeling in my head. We're about to buy a car for The Daughter, which will likely entail a cross-country expedition from New Orleans to Olympia and back - basically a week's worth of non-stop driving.

Interestingly, it's the LAMBRA meeting that seems to be weighing most heavily on my mind today.  The preliminary race calendar needs to be assembled, I want to draft a proposal for some fairly significant organizational changes to address changes in the way USAC is moving, there are a bunch of recommendations to consider for the 2012 LCCS points series that I need to really think through, and a host of "deferred maintenance" administrative issues to deal with related to tax-exempt status, bank accounts, uncollected surcharges, etc., etc.  It was all so simple back in the (very) old days when we'd gather around the dining room table at Greg Gulotta's house with a calendar and put together a year's worth of races that, collectively, probably cost half as much to produce than any little local race does now.  There were no police, usually no follow cars, homemade race numbers, no cash prizes, insurance, or video cameras, and $2 entry fees.  Oh well.  It's about time for a webinar entitled, "President Obama's Initiative on University Research Commercialization: How Universities Plan To Respond."  I know, I know.  You wish you were here, don't you?