No Plans

Tomorrow is the 4th of July, which means I'll be off from work. At the moment, I have no plans to do anything in particular, and don't really know exactly when I'll be riding. Do I get up early and see if anybody shows up at the usual Thursday morning 6 am time? Do I sleep late and go out whenever I want, which will undoubtedly be even hotter than 6 am? Is there some local quasi-organized ride that will materialize between now and then?  Who knows?

Why did the turtle cross the bike path?

I'm thinking maybe I'll ride the levee up to the spillway, which is STILL open. They're supposed to start closing it soon, but I swear this has to be the longest time I've ever seen the river remain at such a high level around here. My Garmin has been showing me a flood warning alert every time I've turned it on since around February, I think. The river has been very slowly going down and some sections of batture are exposed again. Last Saturday, after coming up short mileage-wise when I stopped to help with an early flat on the Giro Ride, I put in a few extra miles on the levee to make up the difference. They were pretty easy miles, so I got to look at the scenery a bit more than usual. In addition to the usual assortment of Herons and ducks and things, I spotted one big alligator and watched a snapping turtle climb up the levee and across the bike path toward the river. The nice thing about a high river is that you get to see a lot more wildlife along the batture.

Our little post-Tour get-together at Wrong Iron was pretty nice. A number of people actually showed up and we went through more than a few pitchers of beer. We has a surprise appearance of Stan Truxillo who was in town from Texas for some sort of family thing. Chip Eyman, Adam Watts, Stan and I spent way too long talking about old-people stuff like which medications work best, reading glasses, hearing aids and other timely issues of the day. Stan was club president for a while, as I recall, back in the 80s. Adam owns Bicycle World and promoted the last Race Across Louisiana. Chip is a long-time member who broke a hip in that race and helps out with the Tour road race. Anyway, it was a fun evening despite the occasional cigar smoke and afternoon heat, and I think maybe we'll have to do it again.

Sunday Giro Ride heading out on Lakeshore Drive. It was damned hot by the time we got back.

The Wednesday evening 4-race lakefront series is halfway through right now, taking a week off for the holiday. It's been a bit of a rush to get out there to officiate them, but fortunately the weather has been OK for the last two and I don't think we've screwed up the results too badly. I have been experimenting with a couple of LED work lights that I bought to help with the finish camera since it's pretty dark by the time the last of the three races ends. Although the images are still pretty dark, the numbers were all readable, so that's definitely an improvement. Other than that, I've just been doing the routine rides during the week and the Giro Rides on the weekends. There isn't a road race on the schedule until August, which makes it hard for me to stay motivated. I always did best in the years when I was racing three or four weekends every month. Here we are in July already and I think I've only really raced four or five times all year, and some of those were pretty low key.

When a hot wire hits the ground.

So the other day I was coming home from work on the bike, crossing South Claiborne Avenue, when I saw something odd. There had been a big thunderstorm with lots of lightning earlier in the day, and I'd gotten a notification from Entergy that the power at my house had been out. A while later I got another notice that it was back on. Anyway, I'm crossing S. Claiborne where there's this little house that's kind of behind my back yard and has been abandoned since Katrina in 2005, and I see this huge section of high voltage cable hanging from the tree. I rode up to it to have a closer look and I could see that it had dug a hole in the ground when it was still live, and also had set the fence alongside the house on fire, burning up a ten-foot section entirely. Down the street I could see Entergy trucks working way up on the poles. People have stolen sections of the copper ground wires from almost every pole along S. Claiborne, which I suspect is not a good thing in the event of a lightning strike, which is what had clearly happened. Later that evening I discovered that one of the two little TV cable boxes wasn't working. The cable line comes from the same pole, so I guess that's what blew it out. Luckily the TVs and internet and everything else seemed to be working fine. I ended up having to drive out to Metairie to get a replacement box from Cox, a process that went surprisingly smoothly.

No helmet, no jersey, on the old Pennine

Last week someone mentioned the Heart o' Dixie triathlon and it reminded me of when I did it way back around 1980 or 81. I think it's the oldest triathlon in the country now. Anyway, when I went looking for the website I stumbled upon a photo I'd never seen before showing me on the bike there. I had been convinced to go do the race the day before and hadn't been swimming in a couple of years, but I'd been doing a little bit of running in the off-seasons. I finished 10th that year because triathlons were so new back then that there weren't really any dedicated triathletes. Also, the ride was fairly long and it was point-to-point. I finished the ride I guess five to ten minutes ahead of the next person, but my shoes hadn't arrived yet at the gas station that served as the transition area, so by the time I started the run six or seven people were already up the road, and a few more passed me as I shuffled through the run and onto the horse racing track at the fairgrounds.

Meanwhile, Facebook and Instagram seem to be having major problems today. I wonder if we'll ever find out what the real problem was, or is.