Eagle Season

Morning temperatures have been remarkably consistent this week, hovering around the 40F mark.  This has had a few consequences.  For one, I've been riding with long tights, shoe-covers and jackets.  For another, it's been getting harder and harder to get out of bed in time.  I was so late on Thursday that I didn't even make an attempt to meet the group.  Instead, I resigned myself to a solo ride up the river until I could see the group on its return trip.  Not a bad thing, this time of year, anyway.  As it turned out, the group I saw was small and had turned around early, so I probably rode only twenty miles, maybe less.  This morning it was more of the same.  Beautiful weather, really, just a bit on the chilly side in the morning.  I'd turned on my "early" alarm by mistake the night before, so when it woke me up half an hour before I really needed to get up, I went back to sleep.  Well, of course that meant that I woke up late again.  I rushed out to the levee, arriving a couple of minutes late, to find only Scott, so we headed off for a nice Friday ride, taking long steady pulls at 20-21 mph and enjoying the scenery.  On the way back, just where the bike path loops around the "stacks," something big caught my eye.  A bald eagle had just landed atop the telephone pole.  I had my sunglasses on and had to ask Scott if that was really what I thought it was.  Once I took off the glasses and could see the white head, though, it was obvious.  We stopped for a minute, and when we did a few of the Tulane riders arrived from the other direction, so we all rode back together.  This was the second eagle I'd seen in two weeks, the first having been the one that nests near the I-10/I-310 junction.  I'd seen that one on the way to the cyclocross race in Natchez, and then again last weekend on the way back from Baton Rouge.  It's nice to see those big guys making a comeback.

Tonight is a holiday/business party down at the Westin, and then tomorrow the LAMBRA meeting, followed on Sunday by another cyclocross race just north of Jackson.  I'm glad to see that the weather will be a little warmer for that.  Meanwhile in blogger land, something is broken at blogger.com that is causing some of the links in the "pages" gadget to redirect to my own blogger home page instead of the correct page.  It seems to be affecting only the links that are blogger.com links.  It's been going on for a week or so, and they're "working on it."