An East Wind.....

"There's an east wind coming all the same..... It will be cold and bitter....., and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared."

This morning I finally resorted to arm-warmers. The most recent cool front has thus far brought two days of strong east-northeast wind; so strong in fact that yesterday's WeMoRi was barely recognizable.  There were probably only ten riders out there when I arrived, latching onto a little break of three.  Looking back, I couldn't even make out the rest of the group, and it was only when it briefly came back together on Marconi that I realized how few there actually were. It fractured once again on the half-lap of Lakeshore Drive and I spent the rest of the lap glued to the wheel of the big guy ahead of me as the tailwind blew us toward West End at 30-34 mph. It was fun, but I was nursing my once-again re-injured left wrist and didn't enjoy it as much as I might have.

I'd been walking the dog the prior evening and as we went past the neighbor's house I noticed him up on a ladder working on his porch light.  The front door was partially open, and all of a sudden his two dogs came blasting out of the house in full stride toward Renzo who doesn't respond well to such things. I had to swing him around by the collar to keep him from attacking the two smaller dogs and in the process really wrenched my left wrist.....again. It was bad enough that I was feeling it all night, and after the WeMoRi I noticed it was swollen a bit.  Damn.  This is getting really old, but then again reading Steve Tilford's blog chronicling his TBI recovery does kind of put into perspective.

Anyway, this morning the temperature was a little cooler, I think around 59 or so, and the wind a little stronger, I guess around 15 mph. Out at the Lakefront we had a pretty decent sized group, though, for the lap of Lakeshore Drive, but a lot of them turned back for home at the end rather than heading over to the bike path for the stretch out to the casino boat at Williams Blvd.  Of course, there was still that strong tailwind, so we averaged something over 28 mph all the way out there. Knowing it would be a very long ride back, I took myself out of the rotation pretty early.  As expected, the ride back was kind of hard.  We were down to like four riders by then, and 18-19 mph was a struggle even with a smooth paceline in place.  Seemed like it took forever, but at least I hadn't killed myself on the way out and was pretty comfortable taking my pulls.  The wrist was feeling better after spending the night with a wrist brace on it, so hopefully the dog-walking incident won't turn out to have been much of a setback.  I've got an Ace bandage thing on it at work, which is interfering a bit with typing but manageable.

Speaking of setbacks, the recent presidential election was a surprise. Living in New Orleans and working at a university you kind of start to think that the majority of people are, at least, reasonable. While I didn't like either candidate much at all, I really thought that when push came to shove more people would have been reluctant to vote for someone with such a volatile temperament for president, especially when the alternative's policies and efforts would have clearly been somewhat balanced by a congress in control of the purse strings.  I just wish there had been better options, which is all I will say about that. I'm a white person, one who didn't leave what is probably one of the more ethnically diverse cities in the country in order to move out to the suburbs or elsewhere where I could complain about the city without actually living in it and where we've had lots of experience with both good and bad leadership from numerous flavors of people. Yeah, I'm offended by this stuff, but at least I know enough not to sort all the people into convenient little buckets based on skin color, which incidentally, is represented by a pretty extremely broad gradient around here. Get it together, people.