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| Tour da Parish - waiting to start |
We have now entered that time of the year where the relative stability of summer weather, and life in general, begins its annual downward spiral, "turning and turning in the widening gyre," as Yeats would say it, as things fall apart and we plunge ever forward toward the winter holidays. OK, maybe a little overly dramatic, but suffice it to say that the weather, among other things, has been lobbing a few curve balls in our general direction lately.
Most of last week's mornings, thankfully the last of the really dark ones before the clocks get turned back, were less than ideal. Tuesday morning I stepped out into a cold mist and turned on the headlight only to see it flash it's "My battery is about to die" warning. I switched it to the lowest power mode and rode slowly out to the levee that I knew good and well would be deserted on such an inhospitable morning. I'd dressed warmly enough to survive the cold and wet for a while, so I put in an easy, yet slightly miserable, 26 mile "character building" ride since the forecast for the following day was looking no better. Tuesday was also Halloween, and although the temperature was supposed to drop pretty low, there was a big turnout in the neighborhood. It wasn't quite enough to dispose of the, literally, fifty pounds of candy The Wife had bought, but at least we put a good dent in it.
It wasn't. Wednesday morning the wind was howling out of the north and the temperature was in the upper 40s, and I knew the WeMoRi was not going to happen. However, just like that girl in the movies who just has to open the lid of the vampire's coffin to see what's inside, I went out and rode anyway. Another "character building" ride I guess. I first turned off of Wisner onto the street once called Robert E. Lee, holding some faint hope that there might be one or two hardy souls who were doing the WeMoRi, but of course saw nobody. I turned down Marconi went down to the end, turned around again, and rode out to Lakeshore Drive to have a look. With a 20 mph north wind spray over the seawall, I rode down to Canal and back, and tossed any ideas of riding farther on Lakeshore Drive right into the dumpster. At least I had a tailwind all the way home. Turned out one person had actually ridden the entire Giro route and somehow I'd missed him. Lucky for me. Somewhere along the way this week the car got hit, again, while Candy was going through a 4-way stop intersection. The offending driver took off without giving any information, of course, which implies that he didn't have insurance. I just got a repair estimate of around $2k on that one.
On Thursday I learned that Rich Raspet, a friend and competitor, had died unexpectedly after finishing a ride. Rich was just a few years older than I, and was a lifelong athlete, lately mixing a good amount of running into his exercise routine. It's always a bit of a reality check when someone like that dies without warning. Then yesterday I learned of the passing of one of my cousins. Sunday evening we were over at my sister's place for a family Zoom meeting with her daughter, currently stationed in Okinawa (she and her husband are MDs in the Navy), who just had a baby. Sort of a virtual baby shower or something like that. Amazingly everyone's internet and Zoom handled it smoothly despite the fact that one connection was on the other side of the planet where it was already tomorrow morning. Circle of life.....
Things were starting to warm up a tiny bit by Thursday, but the levee ride still felt cold and windy and tedious. Friendly Friday was ridden with knee-warmers, but could easily have been done without them. Fortunately the weather for Saturday's "Tour da Parish" not-a-race race was looking to be much better.
Saturday morning I drove out to da parish, arriving much earlier than I'd expected. That got me a nice parking spot and time to indulge in one of the hot donuts and a cup of hot coffee that this ride provided.
As usual, the front part of this ride was basically the entire Giro crowd, along with one rider from Washington DC who had contacted me earlier because he was in town, and Patrick Hennessey who was in town from Atlanta visiting his mother. Before the ride started I rode down to the place where you have to go around a barricade and through some gravel (actually crushed rock) to see how it looked. It looked like I could go around the barricade on the right and skip the rocks, so I planned on that. Sometimes things get backed up there and you end up chasing just to get back into the front group. This year the ride started out at a pretty easy pace, which was a little surprising because there was a lot of horsepower in attendance. I went around the barricade on the right as planned, but then had to put a foot down and lift the bike back up onto the road, so I didn't really save any time. As usual for this ride I was happily stationed near the back of the slowly dwindling front group for about the first half of the ride, having little difficulty sitting in despite the 26-30 mph speed. Then we made a right turn into a bit of a headwind. The whole group started to get strung out along the right edge of the road. It wasn't a problem, but then someone ahead let a gap open and someone else didn't go around, and next thing I knew there was this huge gap. I eventually went around with Charles and we made a feeble attempt to close it, but the front of the group was in full flight and we weren't making any headway. As we approached the next U-turn we decided to try and turn around a little early so we could rejoin the group, but we waited a bit too long had had to wait for them to go by before we could turn. By then they were going 30 mph with a tailwind and there was no way we were going to catch. We made a bit of an effort, though, picking up and then dropping a few riders who had come out of the lead group, and finally picking up one rider who stayed with us for a while. We were going mostly around 24 mph on average I guess, but the front group was doing more like 29, so by the time we go to the finish we were over six minutes down on them. Actually, it was probably a better workout for me the way it turned out, because even at that speed I'd have been doing less work overall just sitting in the paceline. Afterward there was fried catfish, oysters, and lots of beer.
Sunday's Giro was even warmer, thanks in no small part to the time change, and was relatively tame, other than a surge toward the end that was nullified when the Seabrook drawbridge opened for a sailboat. That afternoon we finished taking down all of the Halloween decorations. Mellow Monday got a little fast here and there but it was a nice morning and I was happy to be riding in mostly daylight again. Likewise, this morning's levee ride required a headlight for just fifteen minutes or so, and since we are in the middle of a big high-pressure area at the moment, there was hardly any wind, which made for a smooth and steady ride at a pretty mellow pace.
So I got this new Dell XPS laptop with a 1 TB SSD, lots of RAM, etc. But of course no CD drive or USB-A ports, or Ethernet port. Just USB-C and Bluetooth. I had picked up a teeny tiny thumbdrive that is literally smaller than the end of my actual thumb, but has 265 gigabytes of capacity and a USB-A connector on one end and a USB-C connector on the other. Since my first computer had exactly 1 k of RAM on a chip the size of a New Orleans cockroach, the very idea of having 256 gigs on something the size of an Excedrin tablet is pretty mind-blowing. Anway, that all led to buying a new expensive mouse that can connect to the laptop's Bluetooth, and then a bluetooth numeric keyboard that really should have been included in the 17-inch laptop's main keyboard anyway. Then the next challenge was to see if I could install some really old software on this Windows-11 machine. Thanks to Belarc Advisor I had the install codes for Photoimpact and Dreamweaver. Photoimpact came as a free application with a computer I had about fifteen years ago. There are other things I could use, of course, but for simple things it's easier and faster to use this antique bit of software. Fortunately I had the installation files for both on my old computer, so it was just a matter of moving them over to the new computer and installing them, using the original license codes. The thing that took the longest, though, was copying twenty years worth of documents and photos from one computer to the other. At first I tried to do that with Microsoft Onedrive, but moving all of that to and then from the "cloud" (aka some collection of mysterious servers in some mysterious location(s)) was going to take forever. Using the new thumbdrive, however, made it all relatively painless and fast even though it was a few gigs of data. So I think the new computer is more or less fully functional for my purposes. I bought the Office 365 subscription, so at the moment I don't need to install any of the software I can get from Tulane that isn't supposed to be installed on a non-Tulane computer.
Saturday morning I drove out to da parish, arriving much earlier than I'd expected. That got me a nice parking spot and time to indulge in one of the hot donuts and a cup of hot coffee that this ride provided.
As usual, the front part of this ride was basically the entire Giro crowd, along with one rider from Washington DC who had contacted me earlier because he was in town, and Patrick Hennessey who was in town from Atlanta visiting his mother. Before the ride started I rode down to the place where you have to go around a barricade and through some gravel (actually crushed rock) to see how it looked. It looked like I could go around the barricade on the right and skip the rocks, so I planned on that. Sometimes things get backed up there and you end up chasing just to get back into the front group. This year the ride started out at a pretty easy pace, which was a little surprising because there was a lot of horsepower in attendance. I went around the barricade on the right as planned, but then had to put a foot down and lift the bike back up onto the road, so I didn't really save any time. As usual for this ride I was happily stationed near the back of the slowly dwindling front group for about the first half of the ride, having little difficulty sitting in despite the 26-30 mph speed. Then we made a right turn into a bit of a headwind. The whole group started to get strung out along the right edge of the road. It wasn't a problem, but then someone ahead let a gap open and someone else didn't go around, and next thing I knew there was this huge gap. I eventually went around with Charles and we made a feeble attempt to close it, but the front of the group was in full flight and we weren't making any headway. As we approached the next U-turn we decided to try and turn around a little early so we could rejoin the group, but we waited a bit too long had had to wait for them to go by before we could turn. By then they were going 30 mph with a tailwind and there was no way we were going to catch. We made a bit of an effort, though, picking up and then dropping a few riders who had come out of the lead group, and finally picking up one rider who stayed with us for a while. We were going mostly around 24 mph on average I guess, but the front group was doing more like 29, so by the time we go to the finish we were over six minutes down on them. Actually, it was probably a better workout for me the way it turned out, because even at that speed I'd have been doing less work overall just sitting in the paceline. Afterward there was fried catfish, oysters, and lots of beer.
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| Groundfog |
Sunday's Giro was even warmer, thanks in no small part to the time change, and was relatively tame, other than a surge toward the end that was nullified when the Seabrook drawbridge opened for a sailboat. That afternoon we finished taking down all of the Halloween decorations. Mellow Monday got a little fast here and there but it was a nice morning and I was happy to be riding in mostly daylight again. Likewise, this morning's levee ride required a headlight for just fifteen minutes or so, and since we are in the middle of a big high-pressure area at the moment, there was hardly any wind, which made for a smooth and steady ride at a pretty mellow pace.
Meanwhile, on the new computer front...
So I got this new Dell XPS laptop with a 1 TB SSD, lots of RAM, etc. But of course no CD drive or USB-A ports, or Ethernet port. Just USB-C and Bluetooth. I had picked up a teeny tiny thumbdrive that is literally smaller than the end of my actual thumb, but has 265 gigabytes of capacity and a USB-A connector on one end and a USB-C connector on the other. Since my first computer had exactly 1 k of RAM on a chip the size of a New Orleans cockroach, the very idea of having 256 gigs on something the size of an Excedrin tablet is pretty mind-blowing. Anway, that all led to buying a new expensive mouse that can connect to the laptop's Bluetooth, and then a bluetooth numeric keyboard that really should have been included in the 17-inch laptop's main keyboard anyway. Then the next challenge was to see if I could install some really old software on this Windows-11 machine. Thanks to Belarc Advisor I had the install codes for Photoimpact and Dreamweaver. Photoimpact came as a free application with a computer I had about fifteen years ago. There are other things I could use, of course, but for simple things it's easier and faster to use this antique bit of software. Fortunately I had the installation files for both on my old computer, so it was just a matter of moving them over to the new computer and installing them, using the original license codes. The thing that took the longest, though, was copying twenty years worth of documents and photos from one computer to the other. At first I tried to do that with Microsoft Onedrive, but moving all of that to and then from the "cloud" (aka some collection of mysterious servers in some mysterious location(s)) was going to take forever. Using the new thumbdrive, however, made it all relatively painless and fast even though it was a few gigs of data. So I think the new computer is more or less fully functional for my purposes. I bought the Office 365 subscription, so at the moment I don't need to install any of the software I can get from Tulane that isn't supposed to be installed on a non-Tulane computer.
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