Rainy Weekend - Thanks to Hanna

Heading back in Thursday morning. Almost made it home dry, but didn't. Finally remembered
to drill a hole in the soles of my Bont shoes after having to pour water out of them at home.

I knew it was going to be a wet weekend. There was a tropical storm/hurricane named Hanna way down in the Gulf heading for the southern tip of Texas that would be spinning off a ton of rain in our direction. When I went to sleep Friday night I was already making contingency plans because the Giro Ride was clearly in serious jeopardy.

Sunday morning

So when the alarm went off early Saturday morning, the first thing I did was feel around the nightstand for my phone to check the weather. I stared at the radar for a long time. As expected, there was a lot of rain heading our way from the south, due to arrive around 8 am or so, but outside the street was dry and my still-groggy brain calculated that I might get in thirty miles on the levee before most of it arrived. I'd already written off the Giro as a viable option. I knew that most of the Giro riders would, like me, opt for Plan B. For many of them that would be Zwift, for others it would be an early ride like mine. The ride itself went fine, although as usually happens when I ride alone, it was at best Zone 2 rather than Zone 100 like the Giro is. As I approached my turnaround at the "little dip" I saw Dave Simon heading the other way, so at least I had a little motivation closing the one-minute gap after I made my U-turn. We rode together until he turned back around the green pipes in Jefferson. By that point I had been fully expecting I'd be riding in a light rain, but as it turned out the sky looked fine and as I later discovered, the forecast had pushed back the arrival of the rain by another couple of hours. The Giro could have happened, but as far as I could tell from Strava, it didn't. So at least I salvaged 33 miles, however easy, for the weekend, which was a far cry from the usual 120 or so.

This morning it was worse. The streets were wet and it was raining, and neither the forecast nor the radar was offering much hope for most of the day. Then again, this kind of weather can be pretty unpredictable, so I'll hang onto a thread of hope that there could be a little window of opportunity at some point this afternoon. We'll see.

Meanwhile, out in the Atlantic, there's another one coming, currently designated Invest 92L, heading in our general direction. Current long-range models have it making a turn toward the north and skirting the east coast of Florida, but that's along way off and everything could change by then. Welcome to hurricane season.

So Garmin.

A few days ago the Garmin website was hit with a big ransomware attack and everything went down. The first clue that most of us got was when our ride didn't upload to Garmin Connect and from there to Strava. There have been occasional times in the past when, for one reason or another, my ride didn't upload via the bluetooth connection to my phone, so I didn't think much of it when I noticed it wasn't on Strava. I simply went and took the head unit off the bike and plugged it into the laptop and manually uploaded the .fit file to Strava, but by then I had seen the "down for maintenance" notice on the Garmin Connect website. A quick google search for "garmin down" soon pulled up the real reason for the outage, and also dashed any hopes that the site might be back up and running any time soon, and by "soon" I mean within a week. Unless, that is, they negotiate the reportedly $10 million ransom demand and pay off the site kidnappers, which I hope they don't do. I can deal with manually uploading my rides for a while, although if I used Garmin rather than Strava as my main ride log I guess it would be different.

As of last Friday (LDH doesn't report on Saturdays
any more.)

So locally we are seeing some signs that the COVID-19 surge may be leveling off a bit around here. The Mayor shut down the bars, even for take-out service, which, sadly, seems it was necessary. Some videos that I saw of Bourbon Street prior to that were pretty shocking in terms of complete disregard for any sort of social distancing. I also expect that over the past couple of weeks the contact-tracing efforts had revealed that the bar patrons were driving much of the recent increases locally. At any rate, with Tulane getting ready to bring about ten thousand students in from all over the country, we certainly don't want to be in the middle of a surge at that point. The university has some pretty extensive and costly plans for the whole "Return to Campus" process. Of course, the biggest variable there will not be what happens on-campus, but what happens off-campus. I don't know what will happen with the fraternity and sorority houses, which are basically petri dishes as far as infectious diseases are concerned. It will be interesting, in any case.

Unless I manage to squeeze in a ride later today, and for that matter even if I do, this may turn out to be my lowest-mileage week in over two months. I could pretend that I needed the break, but really, I don't. It's not like I've been going out there killing it five days a week.