Hurricane Season - Cristobal

Welcome to hurricane season

Next weekend was supposed to be the Tour de Louisiane weekend. Of course we ended up postponing it until some time later in the year, assuming it's even feasible to do it then. On Monday the newspaper nola.com did a nice article about it. Apparently, however, the weather gods didn't get word of the postponement and had already scheduled some severe weather for the weekend, just to mess with us. Joke's on them, I guess. An early tropical storm, named Cristobal, is supposed to be coming our way around the end of the weekend, but it's already raining here and looks like we'll have wet weather well into next week if things go as expected. If we're lucky we'll be able to slip in some of the regular training rides, I guess. We'll just have to see how it goes.

At this point I'm basically back to my regular training routine, doing the 6 am rides on Tuesday and Thursday, the WeMoRi ride on Wednesday mornings, and the Giro or whatever other longer rides come up on the weekends. For the moment, cases of COVID-19 in New Orleans are holding steady at a pretty low level, at least as far as I can tell from the available data. There are a lot of confounding issues with using the testing data right now, but other than deaths, it's all I have to go on until we see some comprehensive serological test results. Over the last 14 days there have been only 10 COVID-related deaths in the city itself, and the ratio of positive tests to total tests has been in the range of 2.6-2.8%. With the state moving to Phase II at the end of the week, the city is sticking with Phase I until they can tell if Memorial Day caused a significant increase in transmission, so a lot of businesses are still barely limping along hoping for the best.

Could be worse I guess. Still being pretty cautious, though.

My own post-crash progress has been continuing at a slow but perceptible rate. I'm OK with putting some power on the pedals most of the time, and after getting off the bike I don't feel as bad as I had, so I conclude that the level of riding I've been doing isn't doing any significant harm. My weight (I actually bought a bathroom scale a couple of weeks ago) has been running in the 126-129 range, which is OK for now, although I'd prefer to be seeing 124-126. Candy has been going into her office at Tidewater more and more, and will probably move her desktop computer and gigantic printer back there soon. My office is planning to continue working remotely for a while, however. Tulane announced plans to start the (mainly undergrad) academic year on August 19, which is just a week earlier than usual. They'll probably cut out the Fall Break and finish up classes by November 24, with exams to be taken online after that. Locally, there are a lot of rental apartments being cleaned out (big piles of trash out on the curb), and people moving in. I think a lot of the leases start in June, so that's normal. Naturally the neighborhood people are complaining about the trash those Tulane kids are leaving all over the place when they're moving out, and of course blaming it on the university rather than the landlords, slumlords, and tenants themselves. So situation normal.

I made it out to the WeMoRi this morning for the second time since the crash, and although I'm still not up to sprinting out of the saddle, it was otherwise fine. I stopped at Starbucks afterward for an iced coffee - pre-ordered online and picked up at the door. They don't have any of the usual tables and chairs out outside, but the fixed bench is there and the ceiling fans were running, so that was fine.