18 Days

Dwight's photo of the WeMoRi going around the traffic circle on Lakeshore Drive.

I will be glad put 2020 in the rear-view mirror 18 days from now, although with things as they are, and will be, there won't be much of a celebration. What a bizarre year it's been.  A serious crash, a pandemic, stay-at-home, cancelled races, cancelled events, postponed races, working from home, a hurricane, another hurricane, a tropical storm, Candy's retirement, road construction, etc., etc.  I only wish I could say that things will be better soon, but actually I think they won't be significantly better until maybe late June. I hope my pessimistic outlook is unwarranted, of course.

An early model once the vaccines were approved

At least there has been one thing that has more or less persisted without major interruption. I've never looked forward to the group rides as much as I have this year, at least once my bones mended and I could sit on the bike again. I've missed, or intentionally skipped, a lot of the pre- and post-ride socializing, and reluctantly decided to skip the annual WeMoRi Christmas party and Mike's party at Gray Cat Cycleworx, but I've been consistently riding with the small 6 am levee ride group on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the WeMoRi group on Wednesdays, and the Giro Rides or Northshore rides on the weekends. I don't know of more than a few cyclists in my extended circle who have tested positive for COVID-19, so I have to think that riding a bike outside in a group isn't a great way to get it. I've avoided restaurants and skipped my usual post-ride coffee stops at Zotz, and generally tried to limit my exposures to other people as much as feasible. So far, so good, I guess. Back in March when I crashed I had $100 in cash in my wallet. I still have $20 of that.

Heading into the rising sun after the turnaround at Ormond.

So it was a pretty decent week of riding. The 6 am rides are getting darker and darker, and we had a few pretty chilly mornings, but otherwise things have been pretty routine. Yesterday, Saturday, it was raining in the morning so I decided to wait until after lunch when the streets would be more dry. It turned out to have been a good call. I left home around 1:00 and rode out to the Spillway, mostly solo. 

The river is running low.

On the way out I stopped to help a rider with a flat. I saw him sitting on the side of the bike path with his bike upside-down, the rear wheel off, and his phone a this ear. He was calling his wife to come pick him up because he couldn't get the flat tire off of the rim. So I stopped and got the tire off pretty easily, put his spare tube in, re-mounted the tire, and discovered that his spare tube had a short stem that didn't make it through the Zipp 404s he was riding. Luckily, I had a long-stem tube with me. He gave me the short-stem tube, which I ended up using later in the ride when I flatted. I was trying out the new Campagnolo Scirocco wheelset I'd just gotten on sale. My regular training wheels barely qualify as round any more, and I'm getting afraid I'm about to wear through the braking surfaces, and the bearings are pretty worn, so I got these fairly aero but fairly heavy wheels. I really only notice the extra weight when I pick up the bike, and it's nice to be able to put on the brakes without the bike lurching from one rim dent to the other.

Where we are now

Today started out at 60 degrees with a bit of wind, so we had a pretty nice Giro Ride. I'm pretty sure my solo levee ride was more of a workout for me, although of course that's because I spent most of the Giro Ride in the draft. It's looking like I'll end the year with somewhere around 11,000 miles, so considering the little six-week lull I had last March and April, that's good. 

So the new AT&T fiber has been working out pretty well. My laptop's ethernet adaptor can handle only 100 Mpbs, so I got an H/P USB gigabit ethernet adapter that works surprisingly well. I'm getting 8-900 Mbps when wired, so basically more than an order of magnitude faster than I had originally. The AT&T TV has been working fine as well. Danielle just sent us an ARLO video doorbell, so I re-configured my old range extender so it could handle the new dual-band signals, and that should be able to reach the front screen door easily despite all of the plaster & lath covered with sheetrock walls. I'm going to need to do some re-wiring in order to put it where it needs to be, so I got a roll of bell wire this afternoon and some white wood filler to plug up the hole from the old doorbell. It will be interesting to see if it all works with the ancient doorbell buzzer in the kitchen that has to be at least 60 years old. The transformer is down in the basement connected rather haphazardly (emphasis on "hazard") to some old knob-and-tube wiring, but at least it's easily accessible.

Wired ethernet at my laptop
via HP USB Gigabit adapter.

Looks like another cold front coming through tonight, but nothing colder than the upper 40s in the forecast through Christmas, which I guess will be kind of a non-event this year despite Candy's having bought presents for every kid in the neighborhood. She's been playing old christmas music non-stop for a couple of weeks already, and evenings are mostly Hallmark movies until she goes to bed and I can watch a couple of episodes of Star Trek or something on Netflix..