Nature

Went out to the spillway again last Sunday. Water's coming down, finally, but the fishing's still good apparently.

I've been riding fairly consistently lately, although by no means pain-free, and if there's one silver lining to this cloud I've been under for nearly seven weeks, it's that it's been easy to take in the scenery along the river. The river level has been dropping noticeably every day lately, but there are still enough wet areas along the batture to attract a lot of wildlife, and since I don't have other riders around me like I normally would, I've been taking pictures of the birds instead. Better than nothing, I guess.

This morning I saw an eagle up on top of one of the huge power poles along the river. Yesterday I stopped to re-direct a turtle that was apparently thinking the water was better on the other side of the levee. There have been all sorts of herons, of course, plus the usual whistling ducks and wood ducks, and geese, along with the occasional raccoon and rabbit. There were even some roseate spoolbills the other day. You see a lot of nature when you're going slow.

Well, that's kind of ugly.

It's been a little difficult to push myself. Always has been when I ride alone. I've been doing short segments at slightly higher intensity, but after a few minutes it gets a little painful and I want to ease the pace and get up off the saddle for a bit. It's all rather frustrating. The current situation is like this: I get up in the morning and can feel a little pain sitting up from the ribs and especially around my sternum where no fractures were ever noted. Standing and walking, there's a mild ache from the pelvic area, but nothing too significant. Riding, I can usually find a fairly comfortable position on the saddle, but pushing hard with my left leg definitely increases the pain level, and just the pressure of sitting on the saddle for more than half an hour or so makes me want to ease up and get up off the saddle periodically. I'm more comfortable pedaling off the saddle than I was a couple of weeks ago, but it's still not quite normal.

Tomorrow I have a telemedicine dermatology check-up. I have no idea how that's going to work, but it should be interesting anyway. The other night I pulled a crown off of one of my teeth while flossing, so now I'm going to have to make a dentist appointment. He'll probably take the opportunity to tell me he wants to extract the tooth and to another implant. The last one cost me close to $4k that I haven't quite paid off yet, and took the better part of a year to complete.

USAC sent out an interesting survey the other day that looked like it was to help event promoters get a better handle on what to expect when and if they start scheduling races again. I guess the real story will be about two weeks from now when we can see what the effect of all of the easing of restrictions is. I mean, despite everyone's best efforts, it's human nature to believe what you want to believe and disregard the rest, right? Louisiana and New Orleans are officially moving to Phase 1 on Friday or Saturday, which means some limited restaurant seating, people going back to work in many cases, etc. Still no groups larger than ten, I think, but you know people are going to push the envelope. In New Orleans we got the R₀ down to some where between 0.8 and 0.9 depending on whose calculations you use, which would indicate that we're just slightly, barely, below "epidemic" status for the moment. It wouldn't take much to push us back up above 1.0, however. My office will continue to work remotely until the end of May, and then re-assess. There's little doubt that transmission and illness will increase as restrictions are lifted, it's just a matter of when and by how much.

One thing that keeps nagging me is the question of risk when riding, especially when riding with a group. I wouldn't be surprised to see a larger Giro Ride group showing up this coming weekend. I'll definitely be waiting a little longer before jumping into that, but mainly because my age puts me in a higher risk category. My thinking is that the risk of group riding is relatively low, assuming there's not somebody there who is actually symptomatic and coughing all over everyone. Of course, "low" isn't the same as "zero," but still the dose level would arguably be pretty low considering the wind and turbulence and distance, and it's unlikely that anyone with even  mild symptoms would be showing up for that particular ride. The concept of asymptomatic people wearing cloth masks made from old T-shirts seems almost pointless to me, but I guess something is better than nothing, and if it catches some percentage of the inevitable sneezes and coughs it couldn't hurt.

I expect we will be seeing a lot more people getting serological/antibody testing in the near future since a could of studies have already been launched. That should provide a little more useful information, I guess. I'd love to find out I already have antibodies. I'd hate to have to get them the hard way, however, while in the ICU.