The Next Front

Wednesday morning seemed noticeably darker than Monday had.  Perhaps it was just that I'd been awakened around 5 am by the garbage truck outside my window trying unsuccessfully to negotiate the turn onto Neron Place after entering Pine St., as always, from the wrong direction.  They eventually gave up and headed back onto S. Claiborne, but not without ten minutes of back-up beeping and yelling back and forth.  On the plus side, no side-view mirrors were damaged in the process.  So I go down to the basement and put the bike on the ground only to find the rear tire flat as a pancake.  I quickly swapped it out for my race wheel and headed out to the levee.  It was still a bit cool but definitely more humid than it had been the last few days.  The wind had shifted around to the southeast, I guess.  There was a pretty good group this morning and thanks to the slight tailwind and moderate pace, the ride out to the turnaround was pretty smooth.  With a clear sky I was able to turn off the headlight by the time we were halfway out.  Today there were enough people in the paceline, and they were taking long enough pulls, that my turn never actually came up all the way out to the parish line.

We had a bit of a headwind on the way back, but the pace was fairly slow so it didn't really matter much.  It's late afternoon now and the clouds have started to move in ahead of a very slow-moving cool front that I think will drift through tomorrow. That should bring a shift of wind direction to the north and probably a bit of rain. The Friday forecast seems to be fine, but for Saturday they're presently predicting a 60% chance of rain.  The cool front won't be particularly cold, so by mid-morning on Saturday I guess it will be in the low 70s, which will be great unless, of course, it's also raining.  The cyclocross races in City Park start around 10 am, which means I'll be out there by 8:30 or so, and although it might be fun to do the course in the rain and mud, standing there wet all day officiating is not something I'm looking forward to. Fortunately, there's still plenty of time for the forecast to change.  The plan is to officiate the first race at 10:00, race the second one at 11:00, and the officiate the ones at 12:15 and 1:45 with Bob M. standing in as the official for the 11:00 one.  Luckily, if the weather is really lousy I can always claim I'm needed as an official and save myself from falling into puddles of mud. Actually, it should be fun as long as the weather doesn't get too miserable, and really, this is New Orleans where miserable October weather conditions would resemble a nice summer day in Belgium.  There was a nice article about the race in Cyclocross Magazine (which I didn't actually know existed until this morning).