Summer Again

Riding back home from the Giro alongside the posts protecting the gutter/bike lane on Marconi.
No, we don't ride in the debris-strewn gutter unless absolutely necessary.

Last weekend it felt like we'd stepped out of Spring and plunged head-first into the deep end of Summer. I did the Giro Rides on Saturday and Sunday, and although they were mostly fast, by the time the group was coming back down Bullard you could tell people were feeling kind of wilted. After a nice enough solo recovery ride on Monday I arrived at the levee for the 6 am ride to find nobody there. Rich is out of town and Charles is still a little bit on the bench following his Tour de La crash, and I guess having those two out provided adequate cover for a skipped morning ride. As it turned out, once I got going I started picking up riders. At one point I think there were about six of us, but that didn't last very long as some turned back at Williams Blvd. and others at St. Rose, so I found myself alone again until Steve showed up. He rode with me back out to the Ormond turnaround and then all the way back to the country club, so that was good because by then the temperature was rising significantly. I've been doing fine with just two small water bottles so far this year, usually getting back home with one of them still full, but I can see those days rapidly fading away. Even on shorter rides I'm easily going through a full bottle or more, so I guess it's time to break out the big bottles.  Well, maybe just one of them since getting to big water bottles on my bike is a challenge. In fact, I backordered a side-entry Tacx bottle cage about a month ago that I probably won't see again for another month. I had to really search for that bottle cage, but in my experience the Tacx cages are some of the most reliable and secure ones out there. I gave up on "carbon" bottle cages years ago. They were expensive, turned my bottles black after a couple of months, and regularly ejected bottles. I'll admit, though, they look cool. I was talking with Billy of GNO Cyclery last weekend and he was telling me that getting road bikes and even components and tires is still a huge problem for the shops. He was saying that he couldn't get any good 11-speed chains. I didn't tell him I have two of those on my workbench. My current chain is a KMC because at the time I couldn't find the Campi Record ones. It's about to hit 2,500 miles so I'd already ordered a second one to have on hand. Then I found the Record one in stock over across the pond at Probikekit, so I got one of those too. You never want to be putting off changing your chain because you don't have one handy. By now I think the cassette on my training wheel has close to 10,000 miles on it, so we'll just have to see if we have much skipping when I put a new chain on. I'd just assumed that the supply chain issues had eased up by now, but apparently they haven't. 

So I started going in to the office again on Monday. Tulane is expecting everyone to be back no later than July 6 but I thought it best to go ahead and pull the plug on the working from home thing a little early. I can certainly work in either location, but what I especially want to avoid is working from both. I really prefer to segregate most of my work stuff on my office computer. Keeping files on Box is fine when necessary but it gets more and more complicated every year. We are starting to use Microsoft Teams now, so for me files could be on Box or Dropbox or Teams, or any combination, possibly in different versions. Anyway, I like being back at the office even through I will surely miss the frequent trips to the refrigerator, and the commute to work can be a bit on the hot and sweaty side even at the super-slow speed at which I commute in the summer. To celebrate returning to the office, I took a little time this morning to get an actual haircut at Supercuts where, somewhat surprisingly, they still want everyone to wear a mask. I had not had a real haircut since probably December of 2019. As usual, it feels a little too short, but I'm sure I'll appreciate the improved airflow through my helmet.

Welcome to hurricane season!

With the arrival of the hot temperatures came some early activity in the Gulf, namely "Invest 92" that probably won't be a huge problem except that it will likely mean a very rainy weekend. Speaking of rain, The Daughter sent me an Assos Equipe rain jacket for Father's Day. My old Adidas one is pretty worn out so the tops of the shoulders aren't as waterproof as they used to be. The Assos jacket is very much race-fit, so it might be a little bit of a stretch, literally, to wear over my regular clothes when commuting. We'll just have to see how that goes. In any case, it looks like a really nice jacket with tight-fitting cuffs and collar, and will be great to bring along on longer rides when the temperatures are cooler and there's a chance of rain.