Season of Change

The more things change, the more they stay the same. May is always a complicated month.  We sent Danielle back off to Olympia for the summer on Saturday.  As usual, things didn't quite go as planned.  Some bad weather was moving across the south on Friday evening, and some time before midnight she got an alert that her early morning flight had been "delayed" and rescheduled for something like 8:30 am.  That meant she would miss her connecting flight, and no help was forthcoming on what to do about that. Ordinarily a long layover might not be too big of a problem, but in her case she was flying with two small dogs in a bag under the seat and the travel time to bladder size ratio was way too high for comfort.  With no satisfactory resolution coming from the telephone ticket agents, we loaded the car with the bike case, borrowed from Bob and unprofessionally packed by me, a huge overweight bag, the dogs, etc. and went to the airport in time for the 8:30 flight.  Luckily we got a good ticket agent who got her set up on a later flight, so we checked the bags and went to breakfast at Morning Call in City Park. The streets were wet and it had been raining a bit so I wasn't feeling too bad about missing my Saturday training ride.

With exams at Tulane ending, it's furniture season in the neighborhood.  Students departing for good leave their thrift store and Walmart furniture out on the curb all over the place. Some of it I'm sure finds its way into the hands of the next generation of students.  Anyway, the general feel of the neighborhood changes a little bit this time of year, which is good since it substitutes for the change of seasons that we don't really have around here.  I ended up not riding at all on Saturday, so I was glad to see a big group and much improved weather for the Giro Ride on Sunday.  I don't really know what it was, but that Giro seemed particularly hard to me.  Granted there were a few critical sections where I had to dig really deep to close a gap or stay on a wheel at 30+ mph, but overall it didn't seem like it should have felt quite as hard as it did.  Anyway, it was a good ride and I got home with slightly sore quads.  The house was much quieter without the two little dogs! Later in the day I ripped the old 1986 Race Across Louisiana video and got it started uploading to youtube, which at my home wifi upload speed probably took ten hours. It kind of needed to be there for posterity, although I have heard that it was blocked for some people because of the music.  Still seems to work for me, though.  So on Thursday The Wife is having hip replacement surgery.  That will probably keep me pretty busy through the weekend and well into next week, so I'll miss the road race this weekend.  Hopefully things will go smoothly enough that I'll be able to get out for the Giro or part of the Giro or something on the weekend.

Things are getting busy here at work now and after a really slow week I suddenly have a whole list of projects.  Funny how it always seems to work that way.  I'm hoping they will be able to start work on the Tulane Cycling space here at University Square soon.  It's been held up for two weeks by Club Sports for no particular good reason.  Very frustrating.  We have been working on this for over two years now and the pace has been absolutely glacial, even by university standards.