Holidays Coming

     Long morning shadows on the levee.    

After skipping my Monday ride (the damp streets from an early rain provided a more than adequate excuse) I figured these old legs would be nice and fresh for Tuesday's ride.  I figured wrong.  My quads complained with every effort right from the start and I quickly resigned myself to short pulls and lots of wheelsucking. Sometimes that happens after a good weekend of riding, although to be honest I don't remember it happening much back when I was in my 20s.  For that matter, though, I don't remember a whole heck of a lot of what happened back when I was in my 20s anyway.

I was up late last night to pick The Daughter up from the airport, which was extremely busy even at midnight, so it was something of a struggle to get out of bed this morning to ride.  The floor guy was scheduled to arrive at the house at 8 am, though, and now that we have four people in the house and are down to only one functional bathroom, I figured I'd better get moving.  There were just three of us, Mark, Richard and myself, this morning.  Scott's apparently out of town, probably on a little ski vacation if I had to guess.  The weather was really nice with a temperature in the mid-50s and clear skies and a light southeast wind.  Tomorrow it will probably rain when the next cold front drags through. My legs were still not back to normal, although they did feel a little better than yesterday.  We were taking long pulls at 20-22 mph this morning, and by the time we got to the turnaround my legs were starting to loosen up a bit. Shortly after we turned around, Donald, Kenneth and that triathlete woman whose name I can  never remember came past so we tagged along for the ride.  Donald pulled for a few miles before Kenneth finally went around him and got a little bit of a rotation started.  With the light headwind, that allowed for everyone to at least get out of the infamous Zone 2 for a little bit.  Anyway, it was a nice ride and I arrived back home just as the floor guy, who is sanding away as I type, arrived.  I expect it will be a quiet couple of days at the office between now and Friday unless some kind of unexpected fire erupts.  This is the time when a lot of staff and faculty take some extra time off to extend the long holiday vacation that we enjoy at the university.  After Friday, the next work day for us will be in January, unless, of course, there is one of those aforementioned fires.  I am hoping against hope that my long-awaited parts from Great Britain arrive before Friday since I had them shipped to the office.  If not, the new bike won't be seeing the light of day until the first week of January at best. The last, and first, time I ordered some parts from probikekit.com they arrived in about five days.  This time it's been three weeks already, and I can only assume they're stick in Customs somewhere or otherwise have been relegated to the low-priority bag at the U.S. Postal Service. The prices were great, and although I knew there was a chance that shipping would take longer than usual, I really wasn't figuring on a whole month.  I'm still hoping to make it to the local bike shop for some other stuff I need, but I had been holding off until I could start building the new bike since I know there will be a few items that I discover I need during the process.