More Rain

Friday afternoon in New Orleans - view from the westbank looking toward downtown

Fall weather can be irritatingly inconsistent around here, especially now that we are starting to see the cold fronts making it all the way to New Orleans, one after the other. With the Gulf of Mexico still relatively warm, the city seems to be nicely positioned where the cold fronts run smack into the warm Gulf air. The predictably  unpredictable result, of course, is rain and more rain, until there's no more rain and the winds turn to the north and the sky turns blue and the temperature plummets, which in New Orleans means it drops into the 50s, accompanied by a day or two of 15 mph winds. At the moment we have a Tropical Depression named TD #17 (they apparently don't merit more colorful names if they don't spin up to the correct wind speeds) drifting toward us from the southeast, while at the same time a cold front is inching its way down from the northwest. It's been raining since about 2 am this morning, and probably won't stop raining until some time on Saturday when the northwest winds start to overwhelm the southwest winds. This would all be well and good if I'd been training and racing hard for a couple of weeks and could benefit from a day or two off the bike. This morning I turned off the alarm at 5:25 am and didn't even get out of bed until almost 7:00. The wife has some kind of stomach thing hanging on from yesterday so she wasn't going to go to work. On the plus side, that meant I could take the car, even though parking at the Tidewater garage meant I'd still have a four block walk in the rain to my building on Poydras. As luck would have it, however, when I tried to turn off of Canal Street onto LaSalle, where the entrance to the garage is, I found the street completely flooded, which seems to happen with alarming regularity lately. I decided to park in the garage at my office, which will cost something like $10, and then turned on the wrong block and ended up parking in the garage across the street from my building. Oh well. Closer than four blocks anyway. So I'm pretty sure I won't be riding tomorrow morning and somewhat doubtful I'll be riding tomorrow afternoon. Sunday should be nice if you don't mind the mid-50s temperature. Remarkably, the wind is supposed to be only 3 mph by then.

Nashville to New Orleans

Yesterday on the levee ride it was dark all the way out to Ormond. We still have another week or so until the time change, and I'm not all that comfortable on the bike path in the dark where we often run up on un-reflectorized pedestrians quite suddenly. Yesterday, on the way back, we came up on a couple of cyclo-tourists from Nashville TN who were on the last leg of their trip to New Orleans. Lucky for them that today wasn't their last day, because it would have been miserable!

This weekend there are cyclocross races up in Jackson/Ridgeland. I'm quite grateful that I'm not scheduled to officiate those. I suppose that turnout tomorrow will be on the low side despite the 88 entries since I suspect Saturday will be a bit of a sloppy mess that might be fun if you're riding but could be kind of miserable if you're officiating for five hours with eight race groups and twenty-one different age and skill categories. Also, 49 of those entries are Juniors since Rolando runs a popular kids' cyclocross series there.

Right now it's Friday afternoon and I'm waiting on a call from someone in Capital Projects who has been successfully dodging me for over a week despite three emails and a text message, so that I can start work on a $1M state capital outlay request that is due in a week.