An Early Start

Here we go again.....

It looks like the hurricane season is off to an early start around here. The threat of a tropical storm -- wait, I mean tropical "cyclone" as they are now calling them -- kept me off the bike this morning. That turned out to have been way overly cautious, though. Although the streets were wet at 5:30 am, there was never much rain. I could have easily gotten in a couple of hours on the levee without getting all that wet, especially if I'd taken the rain bike. I ended up driving the car to work almost two hours earlier than usual, still without hitting any significant rain. Even now, the radar isn't looking all that bad and is showing mostly just a huge area of light rain. Oh well. We'll see how it all works out later today, but I'm thinking that most of the dire weather predictions of last night will turn out to have been a little exaggerated.

Mid-week on the river levee

So anyway, last week was actually a pretty decent week, riding-wise, even though there weren't any races nearby. I did both the Saturday and Sunday Giro Rides, mainly because Sunday was father's day and I had to visit my father at noon, so a northshore ride was definitely not a possibility. Saturday's Giro was fairly fast and I made a point of making a few good efforts, especially for some of the sprint points. Those felt pretty good, actually.

Sunday's Giro was definitely slower and easier, and it included a couple of stops for flat tires, all of which were Scott's. The legs were feeling a little tired on Monday when I rolled out for a solo recovery ride on the river levee. I didn't feel like I needed a super-easy ride, just something smooth and steady. That turned out to be 22 miles at 17-20 mph in easy gears. At the moment I have no idea what the rest of the week is going to look like. The chance of rain doesn't drop below 75% until Wednesday night and they're still showing a 95% probability for the WeMoRi, but given the crazy weather right now you can't really trust any of that. I'd really hate to miss two days of riding right now, so I'll just have to play it by ear for a couple of days I guess.

Bob Perrin goes down in the Bastille Day race
back in 1976 - riding his Pennine, I think.

I rode with David Hughes for a while on Friday and he sent me a couple of scans of photos from the newspaper of the Bastille Day race back from July 11, 1976. The scans are pretty bad, but they always are when they come from an old newspaper.

Meanwhile, at the office I'm looking out the window at the low, ragged black clouds streaming in from the south and not feeling very optimistic. We're not expecting our actual furniture to arrive until the end of the month, so it will likely be June 29th or 30th before I have a real desk and file cabinet and can unpack the boxes that are currently lined up against the wall.

I took the car in for "scheduled maintenance" on Friday, which means they did an expensive oil change and ordered a new tail light assembly. The service rep is supposed to call me today about it, but I doubt I'll be able to get the car back there until tomorrow at best anyway. The windshield leak thing is basically my problem unless the extended warranty will cover it, which I haven't checked on yet. I'm pretty sure a tube of black silicone seal will solve the problem anyway, but we'll see.