Not Quite Summer Yet

Friday

It's been so nice to get up in the morning with the temperature hovering around 72° lately. No tenuous wardrobe decisions, no freezing north wind, summer kit, warm toes. Granted, at some point next week it'll briefly drop back down to the mid-50s, but I'm probably the only person who thinks that's cold. Last Wednesday's WeMoRi was good, even if it didn't quite go as planned for me. I got to Lakeshore Drive at my usual time, but apparently the group had gotten up to speed unusually early that morning. As I was heading east, I saw them coming my way, and could have made the u-turn and gotten into the group if there hadn't been a car coming at the same time, but my instinct for self-preservation along with a quick risk-benefit calculation screamed "Nope," so I continued to Beauregard and onto Wisner where I went in circles for a couple of minutes until they showed up. On the way home, just before we got to the Wisner overpass, my rear tire blew out. I must have rolled over something big and sharp because we all heard it as it made a couple of revolutions of the wheel before being ejected along with all of the air. I put a new tube and booted the slash for the easy ride back home where, fortunately, I happened to have a new tire just waiting for such an event.

On Thursday, after the usual out and back on Lakeshore Drive, those of us left for the ride out to Williams Blvd. met up with the Metairie morning group with Glenn and Russell and a number of others. We had a little tailwind on the way out, so with a group of maybe eight or so it was nice.

Friday 

This morning's Friendly Friday ride had a big turnout. Our meeting spot is essentially where the Crescent City Classic finishes in City Park. The finish line was already set up and some things were already barricaded off in preparation for tomorrow morning's event, but it wasn't an issue for us at 6 am. The ride turned out to be a pretty fast one by Friendly Friday standards, so that was fun. Somebody must have pinch-flatted on the big bump that we are forced to ride over just past the Elysian Fields traffic circle now that they have blocked off the right lane to make it a bike lane that we can't safely use. I was hanging onto Lisa's wheel as she pulled the whole group most of the way out to Franklin Avenue, so I didn't even know we'd lost anyone until we were on the way back. It looked like four or five people had stopped between the levee and Franklin for that flat. I don't know if any of them got back with us. 

Afterward, I rode down to the river with Charles to meet up with the Tulane coffee ride group that had a very healthy turnout now that the weather is so much better. Coffee at Tartine and then it was back to the house. I need to bite the bullet and register for Sunny King and the road race, even though it feels a bit like paying an entry fee to my own execution. Should be a fun trip anyway, though.

Meanwhile, Shannon finished the Arizona Monster 300 endurance run in the wee hours of the morning with a time of 6d13h45m. As usual they had live tracking via Spot and trackleaders.com, so I'd been following everything since last Friday. At one point a day or so ago her Spot tracker apparently died, so she was MIA, at least for me, for half of a day until the organizers got that fixed. I can't even imagine walking or running that far with much of it being on remote trails in the middle of nowhere, in the dark. 

Yesterday I was also following the Artemis II moon mission that seems to be going quite well so far. It seems like most of the flight is essentially automated and the astronauts are there for testing and backup purposes. Hopefully everything will go smoothly. I remember watching the TV coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing and recording the audio from the TV onto my little reel-to-reel tape recorder. At some point I re-recorded that onto a cassette tape that is still around here somewhere. The coverage of that was quite different from what we have now, of course, and the audio was pretty rough by comparison.