December Sunrise

In the early morning darkness the only light in the room came from the clock-radio and the flashing VCR that hasn't been reset since Katrina. I stumbled down to the basement and clipped the headlight onto the handlebars for a ride in the dark. With a meeting scheduled for 8 a.m., it was going to have to be an early ride for me, and I'd have to be back home well before the usual Tuesday levee ride group even made it to the turnaround. Riding up the bike path from Oak Street, I spotted a flashing headlight up above me, and by the time I got onto the levee he already had about twenty seconds on me. It was still pitch black, but the reflective strips on his jersey reflected the flashing of my headlight. I wasn't gaining on him. Suddenly, somewhere before the playground, he stopped to text-message someone else who was supposed to be riding early and I caught up. It was Justin, and I was glad to have the company. Despite the darkness, we held a good pace all the way out to the parish line. The western sky ahead of us still pretty dark, but when we turned around we were greeted by a beautiful orange dawn reflecting off of a calm Mississippi River. I thought "red sky at morning, sailors take warning." We returned a little bit more slowly, finally crossing paths with the 6:15 Tuesday group a mile or two from the playground. I was glad I had ridden. It would have been easy to have blown off the ride, considering.

After dropping The Wife off downtown and then sitting through a long meeting of minimal consequence, I finally got back to the office around 11:00. There was a lot going on, none of it good. The medical school faculty were in a bit of an uproar following the layoffs and then the sudden resignation over the weekend of the Dean of the Medical School. Meanwhile, on the legislative front, Congress has been content to sit back and fiddle while the city's economy struggles. The universities are getting the cold shoulder, as is the city. I guess it's more important to rebuild Bagdad than New Orleans. Various groups are trying to formulate a thoughtful recovery plan, but there is still not a unified voice, and as we know, they are easily confused.

So in a weak moment while trying to distract myself from the problems I think I volunteered to redesign the office of research's website. There is a story on it on the WWL website, though. There are probably a lot of somewhat disappointed lawyers.

The Corps extracted some of the sheet piling from the 17th street canal floodwall near the point where it failed because some researchers from LSU used some sort of ground-penetrating sonar system earlier and claimed that the sheet piles that were used were about ten feet shorter than the specification. As it turned out, the researchers were wrong and the sheet piles measured out to the correct lengths. Oops. I'll bet that story doesn't make it onto the front page of CNN.

Looks like warmer weather tomorrow ahead of the next cold front and its associated rain.

Got an email from Gina V yesterday. Her new Diet Cheerwine team had an announcement in CyclingNews. It should be a fun season for them.

Weak Link

It was a marvelous winter riding day today over on the Northshore. We started out with 13 riders under a clear blue sky with the temperature just under 40F but rising quickly. There was only a hint of wind, and that made the cool temperature feel a whole lot warmer, especially considering that the first few miles of our winter rides always seem to head straight North.

Although I had more than a couple glasses of wine at the party the evening before, I was in fairly good shape when the alarm went off at 5:45 a.m. this morning. Noel had called earlier to say that he could give me a ride across the lake, so The Wife dropped me off at the Morning Call so I could switch over to Noel's fancy truck. She was planning on driving across the lake herself to do some christmas shopping, since a lot of the stores over here are still closed. We had a good group for the ride, starting some time after 8:00 ,and ended up doing about 60 miles, arriving back at the cars around 11:30. We weren't too far along when Noel dropped his chain climbing a little hill. He stopped for just a second to put the chain back on, and we all continued on, but a bit later I noticed something odd. Noel's chain was now acting like it had a stiff link, so we finally stopped again five or six miles later. It turned out that one or maybe two of the links were bent, twisting the chain and causing it to jump off of the jockey wheel every time that spot came around. Luckily, Jorge was there with his handy multi-tool (gotta get one of those) which includes a chain tool, so I removed the offending links and we were good to go.

Although much of the ride today was at a nice steady pace in the low to mid-20s, things did get a bit out of hand a couple of times. When we were coming back down Lee Road toward Enon Jay took off, perhaps anticipating the Enon town sign sprint. A number of us responded and pretty soon most of us were in full-out race mode. It was fun! For once, we didn't stop at the store in Enon and just continued on up the Watchtower hill. Jay and Rick took off near the middle of the climb, but I waited a little bit before going after them. For a little time it was Race #2 and there were only six or seven of us still together by the time we go to the Tung road turn.

Now if there's one thing I hate, it's having to rush off from a training ride, salty and unwashed, without a chance to go home first and shower and eat. The other thing I hate is shopping. Especially when the traffic is all backed up with christmas shoppers. So by the end of the afternoon, we had checked a bunch of items off of the christmas shopping list (especially The Daughter's list), and I was a tired, cranky and rather fragrant mess with a significantly lighter wallet.

A Quick Giro

A somewhat complicated day today. I took the car out to the lakefront for the Giro ride this morning. I normally ride the seven or eight miles from home, but this morning I was supposed to be back at the office around 10 a.m., which is about the time I usually get home from the ride. Anyway, it was going to be tight.

The morning weather was cool, and although I knew it would warm up by the time the ride was over, I dressed for the start rather than the finish. The ride today was mostly civilized, with only a few brief fast sections. The changes along the Giro route through New Orleans East are coming painfully slowly. This week two of the seven or eight stoplights along the ride are flashing. The rest are still out, replaced by folding stop signs placed on the corners. The old lighthouse at the West end of Lakeshore Drive has fallen farther over into the scoured-out hole left by the storm, and it's just about to collapse altogether. I wasn't feeling too sharp todayand was sort of avoiding doing much hard work, concentrating instead on spinning a slightly lower gear than usual. Since today's ride wasn't particularly fast, by the time we got back to the parking lot it was around 9:30 already. I make a quick exit and rushed around when I got back to the house, still arriving at the office about twenty minutes late. The five of us got to work on the report and finally got it finished and sent out around 2 p.m. Then it was off for the Intercontinental hotel downtown for the Psychiatry christmas party. There were lots of shrimp and raw oysters and wine, and the turnout was quite good. I guess that the christmas party competition is weak around here this year, so if you have a party you can be sure of a good turnout.

It's looking like it will be a chilly winter northshore training ride tomorrow.

Long Day Off

It was cold and windy this morning and it didn't take me long to choose to drop The Wife off at work and take the car to work, which meant skipping my morning ride. The Wife is working a meeting downtown tonight through Sunday morning, and she'll be staying at a hotel for the duration. There will be a party Saturday night, and I'll be there for that, but I guess I'll have to skip out early Sunday in order to make the Northshore training ride.

I knew it would be a long day at work trying to help get a report finished for a meeting on Monday. This is a committee report (well actually a workgroup of a subcommittee of a committee of a commission), and that kind of complicates the writing process. By 10 a.m. our small group of people from the bioscience workgroup were in our "office" for another group writing marathon. We had all been there until around 7 p.m. the night before, and it was looking like it might be a repeat performance today. In fact, we finally gave up around 7:30, having agreed to meet again Saturday morning at 10:00 to try and finish up. A few of us headed over to Cooter Brown's for a beer before heading home, and I readily chose a bottle of Rogue Hazelnut Brown Nectar Ale. By the time I got home it was already after 9 p.m. I'm pretty tired and could really use a break.

Well, not to worry. I'll be out there for the Giro ride Saturday morning, though I'll really have to rush to get to the office for 10:00.

Cuts and Bleeding

It was darker than usual this morning as I headed out to the levee, thanks to overcast skies and a rainy forecast ahead of another approaching cold front. Appropriate weather for today as you'll see later. Even so, I was surprised to find the bike path deserted when I arrived a couple of minutes after 6:15. I found Donald alone at the playground and we continued on, eventually picking up a couple more riders along the way, and once again we cut the long ride to a medium-length one. We had a pretty good ride, though, and the added effort of the smaller paceline and moderate wind made up for the shorter distance.

Today a press release by Tulane was scheduled for noon. Tulane announced its cuts. Some of the details are on the "Survival to Recovery" website. Numerous degree programs have been eliminated. The Medical School's clinical enterprise is being slashed. A number of athletics programs are being eliminated. As I sit here there is a group downstairs in the President's office stuffing FedEx envelopes with letters to the 230 faculty and staff who are being terminated. It is both sad and scary. The university is bleeding, the city is bleeding, the state is bleeding, and the Federal government is responding with about the same level of urgency we saw when the levees failed. I guess they don't call us "the city that care forgot" for nothing.

I look outside the window of Gibson Hall and there is a handful of workers working on the landscaping and putting christmas lights on the Azaleas that line the semicircular drive across from Audubon Park. It seem odd under the circumstances.

Easy ride tomorrow for sure.

Southern Winter

Tuesday morning was cold and windy, and indeed it was hard to get myself out the door and to the levee by 6:15. The 39 degree air felt a lot colder thanks to the strong winds and I wasn't too surprised to find the bike path virtually deserted. There were only four of us and when Donald, who recently started a new job working for FEMA, said he would have to turn around early, we all decided that would be a fine idea for the rest of us too. We still got in around 35 miles. Later in the day, I had a nice ride from the uptown campus to the health sciences center (and back) downtown for a meeting. Ended up at work till around 7:00 working on a report and returned home to find that the neighbor and The Wife had strung up lights on a couple of the oak trees. Man, this next electric bill is gonna be interesting. Anyway, the street looks quite festive, except for the ever-present contractor trucks and the FEMA trailer parked in the neighbor's driveway.

Wedesday the weather was still pretty cold, by "southern winter" standards, but a bit warmer, although The Daughter called to say it was ten degrees below zero up in Iowa City where they spell winter with a capital "W." We had a nice group of eight or so for the usual Wednesday ride and things were going along smoothly until Donald inexplicably decided to attack about half-way back. The rest of the paceline sped up just a bit, and I'm sure everyone was thinking that he would ease up and come back to the group quickly. Eventually big Richard pulled the line back up to a pace that was starting to close the gap, and then I cam around and finished the job. Along the way we dropped a few of the guys, though.

So Tulane bought an apartment building just off of St. Charles near Jackson Ave., and has lined up a cruise ship also. The cruise ship will be moored at the "Riversphere" location, which is really an old riverboat casino building that Tulane was given downtown. Luckily, it happens to have a beautiful concrete dock. As I rode the commuter bike through campus this morning it seemed that the level of activity had moved up another notch. There's just about a month left before classes resume. Compared to much of the city, Tulane's campus will look like a real jewel.

Seasons

Who says we don't have seasons down here in New Orleans? Damn, we practically had all four of 'em just this week. When we went to bed last night we had the air conditioner running. By morning it was in the 50s outside and tonight it will around be down to the upper 30s with a much lower wind chill. Yeah, I know that's not considered cold in Minnesota, but it's pretty cold by New Orleans standards. I'm thinking it won't get below 40F here, but I'm sure it will feel a lot colder. It's all relative, you know.

Today was another day off the bike, thanks to the rain we had all morning ahead of the cold front. On Sunday I skipped the Sunday Giro ride, and instead did a long solo ride up on the levee. Somewhere way out there around Destrehan, my computer hit 49,000 miles. It's going to be tough to get out the door tomorrow morning in the dark with that cold wind blowing. Tonight The Wife decorated the artificial christmas tree, and the house is full of the usual holiday decorations. Hey, anything to get your mind off of reality, right?

It was a long day at work today, and I had to skip one meeting downtown that I had wanted to make in order to put together a last-minute photo presentation for Sharon to take with her up to D.C. around mid-afternoon. Somehow I managed to get good photos from four of the local universities, put them all into a nice little package with four photos per page, find someone in the building with a color laser printer, etc., etc. Under the circumstances, I think it came out pretty nicely. Thinks are not looking too good for the university, financially speaking, and the uncertainty is starting to get to everybody. We've already lost a few key administrative/academic people, and I suspect more will follow. I think things will get worse before they get better.

Summer Weekend in December

It is late Sunday night and a cool front is slowly approaching. Behind it comes cooler weather that I'm not really sure I want. It felt like summer this weekend in New Orleans, and between the warm weather and my rest day on Friday, my legs felt pretty good for Saturday's Giro ride. The temperature had warmed up so quickly that the overpasses were all damp with condensation, and most of the group stopped to walk across the slippery steel grating on the top of the Seabrook bridge near the start of the Giro ride. There was a little group that split off the front at that point, and they didn't wait for the ride to regroup. Eventually, though, someone had a flat and things were able to come back together. It was a fairly fast Giro ride for this time of year. I felt good during the ride, but then had to battle a headwind all the way home.

The annual LAMBRA meeting was on Sunday in Baton Rouge, and since I was the one who would be representing the NOBC I had to skip the Northshore ride and instead went out for a long solo ride on the levee. The meeting went fairly well and we at least got a start on the 2006 race calendar. We also decided to add a Cat.3 division to the LCCS points series, even when the 3s are combined with the 1s and 2s. Should be interesting. By the time the meeting was over I was not feeling too good. I'm really hoping I'm not coming down with a cold or something. The Wife came up to B.R. with me and spent about three hours at the local shopping mall, so we ended up taking home an artificial christmas tree to replace the one that was ruined in the flood. The Daughter and I always have allergy-like problems when there's a real tree in the house for very long. Tomorrow will be a long day at work and I'm already pretty tired, so I'm off to bed now . . .

Listening

Since my body's obviously been trying to tell me something the last few days, I decided it was time to do a little listening today, so I skipped my usual morning ride. Of course I woke up at 5:45 a.m. anyway. I've done my weekday riding in the morning for so long now that I'm decidedly uncomfortable when I don't.

Yesterday it was raining when I was ready to head home from work, so I got a ride with The Wife and left the commuting bike at Tulane. As a result, I had to walk the mile or two to work this morning, which would have been quite nice except for the 40 pound messenger bag I was shouldering the whole way. In addition to the laptop and all the other usual stuff, I had a few 2006 calendars in there too. As it turns out, we have maybe forty cases of these rather nice calendars that are put out by the anxiety disorders association down in our basement right now. They were apparently printed with the wrong color ink and the whole job had to be re-done, so they gave them to the Psych department and they ended up in our basement.

So our final staff person started work again today and I decided that since we'll probably be stuck working out of this classroom through December, I'd see about getting some printer-sharing going. Ordinarily, that would be pretty simple, but since we're using the university's network, I knew it wouldn't be. I've been down this road before. Luckily, the TIS support folks are also shacked up in Gibson Hall, so I walked downstairs (yep, all they've got them and their computers down in the basement - slow learners, aren't we?) and one of the guys came back upstairs to set something up. Theoretically it should be a simple matter to share a printer that's connected to a computer with other computers on the same network, right? Well, naturally it wouldn't work and we'll be trying again on Monday.

Slow Day

I almost didn't go. I mean, is was kind of chilly and damp this morning and I musn't have slept well because I woke up feeling tired. But of course I went out anyway, and as usual it was fine once I got out on the road. I arrived at the usual meeting spot on the levee right on time, but it was just me and Richard. Eventually we ended up with eight or nine riders, and although Todd raised the pace from a comfortable 23 mph to an uncomfortable 27 mph, it didn't last too long. He took off again with BJ on the way back, but the rest of us weren't interested and just watched them ride off into the distance. My legs were feeling like lead again today, making 23-24 mph feel like a real challenge, so I wasn't taking very long pulls.

At work, things were pretty quiet, at least for me, so I ended up making some updates to our office website's contact information pages. I had a heck of a time dealing with the odd way that Dreamweaver handles shtml files that contain server-side includes.

It's only 8:30 p.m. right now, but after just one glass of wine (well, maybe it was more like three) I'm already sleepy.

Musical Mail

The legs were better today, if only due to the easier pace of the Wednesday ride. It was fairly cool, at least my my standards, but certainly not what you'd mistake for COLD. That will come later, I'm sure. I was comfortable with the long-sleeved Pearlizumi Kodiak jersey over a summer jersey, and although the cotton DeFeet shoe covers weren't essential, I was glad that I wore them. Otherwise, it was just another nice moderate-paced weekday training ride on a day of marvelous weather with clear blue skies, a light breeze and mild temperatures. Sadly, I spent pretty much the whole of the day inside at work.

Around midday I decided to take another shot at tracking my missing bike stuff order from Excel Sports. This time it showed an actual delivery date and location. Here's what it said:

Summary: Your item arrived at the JACKSON, LA 70748 processing center at 8:02 am on November 28, 2005 and is ready for pickup. Information, if available, is updated every evening. Please check again later.
Detail: Acceptance, November 07, 2005, 5:25 pm, BOULDER, CO 80301
Detail: Electronic Shipping Info Received, November 07, 2005

So even though I had sent in an online change of address to the U.S. Postal Service, this package still got forwarded to Jackson, LA, taking 21days to arrive. Twenty-one days! Any guesses on how long it will take to get re-forwarded back from Jackson to New Orleans? I think it's cute that they refer to the "Jackson processing center." I suppose they mean the two people who work at the post office there. On the plus side, I'm sure that the folks at the post office in Jackson will remember me and my forwarding order.

It'll be chilly again tomorrow morning. I hope the long ride isn't too brutal.

A Very Looooong Ride

The regular Tuesday long ride seemed a long longer than usual today, at least to me. It was much cooler than it's been lately, but I still ended up a bit over-dressed. To make matters worse, there were certain individuals on this morning's ride who wanted to make it both long AND hard. Todd and VJ spent most of the ride about 20 seconds off the front despite persistent head and crosswinds. A few of us were none too interested in making a race of it, but on the other hand we weren't willing to drop off the back either. Although I was careful to maintain the pace when I came to the front, I was staying out there for only 30 or 40 pedal strokes before pulling off. On the way out there were a few surges that took us up to 27 or 28 and started to close the gap to the duo off the front, but there wasn't really enough horsepower, or perhaps just motivation, to bring it back together again. Surprisingly, the return trip turned out to be quite fast too, with long stretches up around 26 mph. Since my legs had felt achy from the start, this all made for a very long ride. I can't really explain why my legs were hurting like that today. Perhaps I rode a bit harder than usual yesterday, or maybe the cooler weather had something to do with it.

So the City of New Orleans has set up FREE high-speed wireless internet throughout the CBD and French Quarter. Once the area loses its "disaster area" designation, they'll have to drop the speed down a notch so as to not compete unduly with the regular service providers (mostly COX and BellSouth around here), but still, it makes us the only actual City that has gotten away with a city-operated free internet service. Amazingly, I had heard nothing about all of this until I read about it this morning. Not that I did not have a clue, however. Yesterday, while sitting in the Bioscience workgroup meeting I had fired up my laptop to see if there was a good signal and found five or six low-level wireless networks within range, all with the "city of new orleans" ID. I wondered if perhaps some of the city's administration was operating out of the hotel temporarily, but of course now I know better. Tulane Hospital today opened a small primary care facility on LaSalle St. on the ground floor of the parking garage across from the (currently closed) emergency room. That's another bit of good news!

I had to run home around noon today to meet The Cable Guy (who I thought was supposed to come on Wednesday rather than today). I had to give him directions to the house, as he was clearly unfamiliar with the area, but once he found the place he got everything fixed up quite neatly. I could hear the Latin music blaring from his open truck door the whole time. Beats the hell our of Rap, IMHO. One more Katrina item to check off the "to-do" list.

So the insurance company called to say they had increased my roofing settlement amount up to the estimate I had gotten, adding about $10k to the total, so it'll now cover the whole roof (barring any nasty surprises). I think I can probably live with that, although The Wife is afraid it won't be enough to fix everything.

I think I'll go have a glass of wine now . . .

Quick Ride, Long Day, and MAIL!!!

Since I had two back-to-back meetings downtown today, I left for my Monday morning ride early. It was, and still is, quite warm for this time of year, even here in New Orleans. I suppose it was nearly 70 F when I headed for the levee this morning, taking my usual route down Neron, Short, and Willow streets. After three group rides in a row, I was rather looking forward to a quiet solo ride. As often happens when I ride alone, my pace would creep upward gradually until I would finally have to consciously ease up for a while. Next thing I'd know, I would find myself again pushing up against my self-imposed "base training" limit. Of course, around here it's hard, and not much fun, to do a real base training phase, since there the combination of the relatively mild weather and the frequent group rides tends to guarantee some significant hard efforts practically year-round. You could do it, of course, but what fun would that be? So anyway, I got in an easy 22 miles or so and headed home to iron a shirt.

The Psychiatry department staff arrived at 8 a.m. to move their stuff out of our house and drive it all downtown where they are finally able to reoccupy their offices on the 10th floor of the Tidewater Building on Canal Street. Since I needed a ride downtown for my two meetings with subcommittees of the Mayor's "Bring New Orleans Back Commission," I helped them load and unload boxes and computers, and then got The Wife to drop me off down at One Canal Place for my 10 a.m. meeting. The rest of the day was spent in meetings, writing up notes and reports, etc. I also set up a Tulane listserv for one of the workgroups and made a few minor changes to the website.

This evening the insurance adjuster called. They want to pay to replace one half of the roof and to patch the other half, so are offering about half of the lowest estimate I got from my roofer. I'm faxing them my estimates in the morning, assuming I can get to a functional fax machine. They're also saying that you can still get asbestos shingle roofing. Hmmm.

On the plus side, when we got home today we discovered that mail had been delivered. The actual U.S. Postal Service had actually delivered actual mail right to our actual house! Whoohooo! Now that's exciting. Never mind that one piece was a flyer for a bike race in SC that happened in mid-October and another was a cable bill dated Nov. 3.

One little problem at home, though. It seems that while we had a fax machine connected to our home telephone line, one of the faculty members gave his answering service the number. Their automated messaging system keeps calling our house now trying to fax us copies of his messages, and it is very persistent! I've turned the ringer off on the phones for now. Hopefully we can get it fixed tomorrow.

Complications

The streets were still wet from last night's rainstorms when I headed out in the car this morning, and so I wasn't too surprised when I arrived at the meeting spot on the Southshore and found nobody there. So, clutching my $1.90 small coffee from Puccino's I set the cruise control for the 24 mile drive across Lake Pontchartrain. The only radio station that wasn't doing lame PSAs or playing classical music at 7 a.m. on a Sunday was already in Christmas music mode, but at least it was mostly rock n' roll Christmas music, so I went hoppin' and boppin' over to the Northshore where we ended up with a group of eight for the team training ride. The weather was unseasonably warm, and although I started out with arm-warmers, they were in my pocket within ten miles. Our group's pace was a bit faster than last week, but as it turned out it would take us over half an hour longer to do the same ride. The first flat came on the way out, on Tung road, and was quickly fixed, so we continued North through Enon, sprinting for the "town pole." The "Enon" sign that belongs on that pole has been missing for about a year now, but we know a town limit pole when we see one. Way out around the mid-point of the ride we cut across from one highway to the other on a little road called Sie Jenkins Road. It's a couple of miles of steep hills and rough pavement, so of course it's always a race. When the lead group got to the end of the road, we made the turn and continued slowly, waiting for the rest of the guys to catch up. One rider was missing. We waited a little longer. Still, he wasn't in sight. So Keith and I rode back to find him, figuring that he'd either flatted on Sie Jenkins or taken a left at the intersection instead of a right. Keith went backwards on the course, while I headed North in the wrong direction in case he had gone that way. After riding for a mile or so with no sign of him, I turned around and met Keith who told me that Dennis had broken his chain.

Now of all the mechanical incidents that can spoil your ride, a broken chain 30 miles from home has to be right up there. The rest of the group was a good five miles down the road by now, but finally Keith got a cell phone call through to one of them and they send Jorge back in our direction since he happened to have a multi-tool in his bag. Meanwhile, I pushed Dennis along for a couple of miles, struggling up the hills in my 21, until we all met up again and could repair the chain.

Before we got back to Enon, we had another flat, and then we stopped at Enon so John could put some more air in his tire. While we were there, we discovered that we'd routed Dennis' chain over one of the aluminum tabs on his jockey wheels, instead of under it, and had to pull out the multi-tool again to fix that. About that time, we noticed Dennis' rear wheel was going soft, but by now we were about fed up with bike mechanic school and decided to pump in some more air and hope we would make it the last 15 miles back to the cars. Along the way John came off the back. As it turned out, Dennis made it OK, but John finished the ride with about 10 psi in his front wheel.

It was a very complicated ride!

What it's Like on Saturday

So first, check out Tulane's "welcome back" video.

It was around 65F this morning when I finally woke up, rather later than usual, with intentions of riding the Saturday Giro ride out at the lakefront. I pulled on a jersey, shorts and arm-warmers, not necessarily in that order, and rushed down the stairs to the basement. Shoes, helmet, glasses, gloves. I was out the door a couple of minutes later, with not quite enough time to make it to Lakeshore Drive without having a Time Trial for breakfast. Thanks the absence of stoplights (there are only temporary 4-way stop signs at the intersections) along Carrollton Ave., and my willingness to blow through numerous 4-way stop signs on the quiet early-morning roads, I made it to Lakeshore Drive just in time to catch the Giro ride a few minutes after it had started.

We had a pretty large group this morning, and things stayed civilized until someone, I suspect Todd, went to the front and ramped it up to about 30 mph, taking a handful of riders with him. The pack, or at least a few members thereof, mounted a reluctant chase, but the horsepower was lacking and we didn't really catch until they eased up around Chef Highway. It wasn't long, though, before the pace heated up again. I kept reminding myself that it is November as I spun the lowest gear I could handle near the back of the 40-rider pack. There were a few riders off the front again, and the pace was up around 27 or so, and soon Realdo drifted back alongside me and commented that even though you don't really care about the group off the front, you still hope they get caught before the turnaround. Indeed. I suppose that's one way to tell the bike racers from the bike riders. If there's one thing that all bike racers learn to hate, it's the feeling that they're getting dropped!

So I ended up riding a bit harder than I had planned, but I was able to keep things under control enough to avoid doing much damage and so I'm sure my legs will be fine for tomorrow's ride, assuming that the rainstorms that started rolling through here half an hour ago clear out before morning. Reo and I rode back down Canal Blvd. together. The prediction is for strong storms all night, finally easing up around 7 a.m., so it may be a tough call tomorrow.

The area around my home continues to move more and more toward recovery, but there are clearly some things that are going to take a while to get worked out. I still have yet to have any mail delivered to my house, and the stuff I ordered over two weeks ago, and was shipped via U.S. Postal Service, has yet to surface. There are new stoplights at most of the major intersections nearby, but a mile or two in any direction except toward the river things deteriorate pretty quickly. Riding through Lakeview on the way home today, The watermarks are still clearly visible on the houses along Canal Blvd. The worst are about even with the tops of the doorframes, though most seem to be at around the five foot level. Many, perhaps most, of the houses I could see have been gutted, and sit sadly awaiting their fate. Apartments are in high demand near the University, and the owner of the three-unit house across Pine St. from me told me today that she had just rented it to a student sight-unseen, and has already received the deposit and first month's rent via FedEx. I didn't dare ask how much. There is still a large pile of branches and tree trimmings, to which I added today, on the neutral ground near the house, and another pile of construction debris a few houses down where they recently ripped out a whole gound-level basement. They've been there a couple of weeks now and grow higher each weekend. Garbage pickup seems to be happening about once a week, apparently on Wednesday.

The Wife and I spent much of the day outside cleaning up. While I trimmed dead and broken branches from the Oak tree, balanced on top of a ladder with a long pole-saw and sawdust falling into my eyes, The Wife bagged up leaves and debris from around our house, from around the next-door neighbor's house, and from around the unoccupied 4-plex across the street. The next-door neighbor is supposed to be moving into his FEMA trailer in the driveway some time after Thanksgiving, but hasn't yet shown up, and the apartments across the street are normally rented to students, so I don't expect we'll see any action there until January. On the plus side, the SUV that's been parked in front of those apartments since the hurricane disappeared a few days ago. I don't think it was badly flooded, so hopefully the owner finally retrieved it and it didn't get towed away to the flooded-car graveyard. BTW, the admissions department at Tulane reports that over 90% of last semester's freshmen have already registered for their Spring semester classes. That's a good sign, I think.

While we were outside today the roofing company's guy showed up!!! Now that was truly exciting, since we've been waiting for about a month. This guy was brought in by Orleans Sheet Metal and Roofing from Montana to help them catch up on their estimating. He gave us two estimates. One for a true "equivalent" roof made of some sort of composite plastic type of material that looks like slate, and the other for some good-quality dimensional asphalt shingle roofing. In both cases, it's necessary to overlay the entire roof with plywood first. The first estimate was around $26k, and the second was around $19k. We still haven't heard from our insurance company, but I'm guessing they aren't going to spring for the $26k job, and will probably try to tell me that all I need is $9k to fix things up. Should be interesting, eh?

It's raining cats and dogs outside right now!

A Nice Muff

As is typical for a Friday, there were only a few of us up on the levee this morning, but along the course of our 26 miles we picked up a few others, including Mark and Reo. I took the long way home, riding all the way down the bike path to Audubon Park where the Zoo was preparing for it's official re-opening today. They won't be back to their regular schedule yet, and will only be open on weekends. It's hard to believe that it has been nearly three months since Mother Nature squashed my city.

Later in the day we drove downtown because The Wife wanted to check out the recently re-opened Riverwalk shopping center. Unable to think of an excuse quickly enough, I reluctantly went along. It was rather a disappointment, however, as most of the shops, and indeed all of the larger ones, have still not re-opened. So we ended up walking down to the French Quarter where Cafe du Monde was doing a brisk business today. The Quarter was fairly busy and after checking out the flea market down by the French Market, I started getting hungry. I had noticed that Central Grocery was closed, so we went down to Napoleon House and split a half-muffuletta. Nothing like biting into a nice warm muff, eh? They are offering only a limited menu, but of course it includes muffelettas, gumbo, red beans and rice, etc. The temporary menu has "MRE" in big letters at the top. Below, it says "Muffelettas Ready to Eat." The table next to us was occupied by Corps of Engineers Red-Shirters.

Late in the day we decided to play postman and hand-deliver some Psychiatry party invitations to folks with addresses in the neighborhood. The post office is still not delivering mail around here very regularly (we have yet to receive anything), although I was able to pick up a few items of mail at the post office myself this morning.

So it sounds like the Psychiatry department will be moving out of my house and back into the Tidewater Building on Canal Street on Monday. I won't be able to help, though, because I have two back-to-back meetings, coincidentally also on Canal St.

I'm a year older today. Feels more like two!

Holiday Levee Ride

There were 20 or do riders up on the levee this morning for the 7:30 a.m. Thanksgiving Day levee ride, and there would have been a few more were it not for the popular Turkey Day Race. This run is now in its 98th year, but it's not the longest-running race in the City. The New Orleans Track Club's Jackson Day race is actually older. It is something of a tradition to have a special training ride on holidays. I can remember back when we used to try to ride the same number of miles as the year on New Year's Day back in the 70s and 80s. Needless to say, that little tradition was doomed to fizzle out pretty quickly. Maybe we should start it up again now that we'd only have to ride 6 miles!

The weather has been warmer around here lately, and although I started off in arm-warmers and two jerseys, by the time I got home from this easy 44 mile ride everything that could be unzipped was unzipped. It was a really nice day in the City that Care Forgot, and the streets were unusually quiet, even for a post-Katrina day. I think that most of the contractors took the day off, leaving the city to the relatively small number of actual residents.

It was good to see some of the local riders who have been rather scarce since the hurricane because of work or displacement or whatever, and the group rolled along in mostly a double paceline at a moderate 20-23 mph the whole way. I'm thinking I'll do the Giro on Saturday and then the Northshore ride on Sunday like last week. It's looking like the temperatures will stay quite warm until early next week. The high temps Sunday and Monday will be around 80F. However there's a significant chance of rain Saturday, so we'll have to see how that works out.

We ended up going over to my mother's place in the early afternoon for an early Thanksgiving dinner. Although there were just the three of us, The Wife brought a pumpkin pie, a pecan pie, and a lemon merangue pie, along with potato salad. Go figure.

Guess what I'm having for breakfast tomorrow.

Oops! Missed the Train

Inexplicably tired last night, I had a glass of wine after dinner and by 9 p.m. was already half asleep. Not being one to argue with my own biorhythm, I went with it, unfortunately forgetting to set the alarm clock on the way. The next things I saw were the bright red numbers 6:15 on my bedside clock. Oops. The levee ride train had already left the station for the Tuesday long ride, so I took my time and headed out for an hour's ride and got back before the long ride returned. I saw a few people heading the other way as I was heading out, so I guess that either the pace was fast enough to drop people, or the group was really small (or both). Oh well.

At any rate, the weather here today is marvelous as I sit here looking out from the third floor of Gibson Hall though an open window at the entrance to Audubon Park. There's a light wind blowing through the sycamore tree outside the window and I can see the sunlight sparkling off the ripples in the lagoon. The only thing missing is the sound of the streetcars rumbling down St. Charles Avenue. Could be worse.

If you happened to see the incredibly, and intentionally, one-sided 60-minutes report on TV entitled "New Orleans is Sinking," then in the interest of the responsible journalism so sadly lacking at CBS, you need to read the article from the front page of the Times-Picayune this morning entitled "Not so Fast, 60 Minutes." So CBS does an article, intended to be controversial, implying that New Orleans is doomed and that there is not point in putting any more money into it, and they somehow couldn't seem to find anyone in the whole country better qualified that this plate tectonics geologist with absolutely no qualifications even remotely applicable to coastal erosion. There are, of course, lots of qualified scientists in Louisiana who are readily available and who, in fact, let CBS know in no uncertain terms prior to the report being aired. Go figure.

Predatory journalism at its best.

So I sat in on a meeting between Tulane and FEMA representatives today that was interesting. One thing I was happy to hear was one of the FEMA people complimenting Tulane on the way it is handling the whole situation and how much better it is than the way the state (i.e. LSU) is handling it.

Base Training on the N-Shore

Sunday morning was looking good and it was nice to be heading across the causeway again, looking forward to a great Fall day. We had a group of eight or nine at the start of our 58-mile Base Training ride, and it was just warm enough to dispense with the long tights. To give you an idea of the conditions, I'll say that I headed out wearing two summer jerseys, lycra arm-warmers, DeFeet shoe covers, and my trusty DeFeet Un-D-Shirt. Twenty miles later, most of that was in my pockets. So we head out to the North and right away some kid zooms past our double paceline at around 70 mph. A few moments later we hear a siren behind us and a police car goes flying by at more like 90 mph. A mile or so later we come across the two of them pulled off on the shoulder. The kid is sitting in his car with his head in his hands and the policeman is writing up a ticket on the trunk. As we went by I told the officer "thanks," and he replied "no problem." We saw two other police cars heading to the scene moments later.

So anyway, the weather was nearly perfect all morning and we had a really nice Base Training type of ride with long stretches of smooth paceline in the low 20s. Of course, there were a few sign sprints and some hard efforts on some of the bigger hills because, being bike racers, some of us couldn't resist the urge to attack.

I got home to find the refrigerator in the kitchen, but then spent a couple of hours hooking up the icemaker and inserting the box into the narrow space where it lives. It was a bit wider and taller than the old refrigerator, and I guess I had maybe an inch and a half of clearance to work with. Anyway, I can now check the refrigerator and dryer off from my Katrina "to-do" list.

Monday morning was cooler than I expected and because it had rained a bit overnight, the streets were still damp. I briefly considered sleeping in, but my legs felt fine and the weather looked good so I went out to the levee for an easy ride. I met Mark D. up there and we cruised out to Williams Blvd. and back at an easy pace. Although it's been ten weeks since the hurricane, practically all conversation still centers around it, one way or the other, and I suppose that will continue for months.

At work I'll be assisting with the Technology subcommittee of the Economic Development committee of the Mayor's "Bring New Orleans Back Commission." Should be interesting. I've set up a little website for it already, but since this particular committee is just getting started, I don't have any good content for it yet.

Oh yeah, I almost to thank "60 Minutes" for their usual one-sided documentary last night that made it look like the entire city was destroyed, covered with mud, and sinking into the muck like a brick in quicksand. Thanks a lot, guys.

Bad Legs

As soon as I got on the bike today I knew something wasn't right. For some reason my legs felt achy all day. To use the technical term, I had a case of the dreaded "bad legs." Why? No idea. So on my way out to the lakefront when I spotted Rob turning onto Wisner Blvd. ahead of me, it was hard to pick up my pace and catch him, even though he saw me and eased up to wait. Anyway, as the group was about to start, Howard L., who lost his house in Katrina, looked over and commented about his gloves. He was wearing these black gloves with faux fur around the wrists. Apparently the only gloves he could find were his wife's!

I was glad that the pace stayed pretty tame all the way out to Venetian Isles today, but on the way back things started getting out of hand. There I was, sitting in near the back going 30 mph and the gap in front of me is opening up! I had to make a few hard efforts just to stay in the paceline, which at one point got up to 35 mph. I can't say I felt terrible. Just flat. Really flat. I rode home down Canal Blvd. and looked at the watermarks on the houses up around the tops of the doorframes and thought about how long is was going to take to put everything back together. Depressing. Finally, I got back to my own "happy place" on uptown island and again thought how lucky I was and how much of a difference for or five feet of elevation made. I mean, in many parts of the country there's more elevation change than that between the sidewalk and the front door.

Got a call from GiVo yesterday evening as she was driving back from CA to AZ, having finished up her rotation in Sacremento (at least I think that's where it was). She will be riding for the Diet Cheerwine team next season, making most of the big races around the country. New bike, new kit, etc. Sweet.

Tomorrow I'm headed out for another Sunday Northshore training ride. It should be nice. The only bad part is that the new refrigerator is being delivered in the morning, according to Sears, so I will have to miss the big event.

Acclimatization??

5 a.m. and I'm lying in bed thinking that it should be warmer. I check the indoor-outdoor thermometer next to the bed and my suspicions are confirmed. So I ended up down in the basement re-lighting the pilot light on the furnace. It was too late to go back to sleep, so I basically shuffled around the house until it was light enough to go out.

It was fairly cold this morning, and still rather windy, and it was clear that I have not quite acclimatized to the cold weather. My fingers were frozen by the time I hit the levee, and since I was a few minutes early and it was too cold to stop and wait, I rolled down the levee slowly wondering if anyone would turn up. After a while Joe F. showed up. He had never been able to find his long tights yet this winter, and so was riding in shorts. He was looking pretty cold, and I think he would have been happy to turn around at the playground, but I convinced him to ride on. Even so, we were going pretty slowly and turned around at the pumping station, a couple of miles before the usual turn-around. Another rider joined us on the way back, and by then the sun was coming up and it was a little warmer. Anyway, it was kind of a typical easy Friday ride, just a bit colder. It always seems to take me a couple of weeks to acclimatize to the cold weather, so I figure it's worth it to force myself out the door right now because in a few weeks this weather will feel relatively comfy.

The house looks more and more like an office every day now, and I guess there were five or six staff there all day today. I had to run back from Tulane to the house around lunchtime to get a few files off of my desktop which currently resides in my study along with a few visiting Psychiatry computers, printers, routers, etc. When I got home, there was some good news, however. The word from the VP at the Health Sciences Center was that the power was back on in the Tidewater Building and that he was probably going to move back into his office on Monday and then begin to coordinate the re-entry of other departments, one of which would be The Wife's and another of which would be mine. I have a feeling, however, that we will hang out on the uptown campus for a while longer, though.

Should be interesting.

Tomorrow, the Giro; Sunday, the Northshore training ride. Also Sunday, the refrigerator and dryer get delivered!! Whoooohooooo!

Out the Door

I was out the door at 6:05 this morning, comfortably over-dressed and intent on getting in a few miles. The winds were gusting out of the North and as I made my way to the levee I wondered if I would end up being the only one crazy enough to show up on a day like this. I had intentionally over-dressed a bit in order to prevent a repeat of yesterday's retreat, but my thin Defeet gloves weren't quite cutting it and my fingers were already pretty cold by the time we started. We ended up with about ten riders, which I thought was quite good under the circumstances. The circumstances today included a gusty cold crosswind that made it very difficult to hold a straight line and essentially impossible to get any draft beyond the fifth rider. Which explains why the group split on the way out and I ended up in a group of . . . five. I don't think anybody was even pretending to want to do the usual long Thursday ride today. Before the pace picked up I ran into Leslie, an old friend who does masters swimming, and a fair amount of running too. She was riding to work at Ochsner with a huge bag slung dangerously over her shoulder. She sounded glad to be employed again after having been out of work (she's a nurse) because of the hurricane, and as she turned off to ride back down the levee I warned her to be careful with that bag. I would have liked to have had more time to talk with her.

The ride today seemed rather hard even though I was trying to limit my exposure at the front. Donald was taking some l0ng pulls into the wind, and for a while I ended up stuck at the back negotiating with the edge of the road for the last sliver of draft. It took a lot of concentration just to stay on the asphalt most of the time, and every time you'd come to the front it was like getting hit in the chest with a sack of cement. Once the sun came up over the trees, however, it did warm up a few degrees and I was able to strip off the vest. Hopefully the wind will finally ease up tomorrow.

By the time I got showered and ready for work, there were already five people in the house, and as I rode off to Gibson Hall I saw the department chair walking up the steps. Can't wait to get my next electricity bill! With all the lights on and a whole slew of computers, printers, routers, etc. going all day, it should be interesting.

Around the Block

The cold front came through overnight and I awoke to gusty winds, damp streets and much cooler temperatures. The thermometer seemed warmer than it looked, but I trusted it anyway, dressing for weather in the mid 50s. I headed out the door and the cold North wind sliced right through my double layer of summer-weight lycra like a hot knife through butter. When I got to the first intersection, the bike turned and headed back around the block and back to the house. Some mornings it's just not meant to be. I decided instead to use the time to scrape out the remnants of the fiberglass insulation I had pulled out of the flooded part of the a/c blower ductwork. For an hour or so I crawled around literally inside the ductwork, scraping and vacuuming, finally emerging to re-install the blower and blower motor. So at least we'll have some heat if we need it. Around when I finished, the sister-in-law called. She was on her way over to take a shower because the power had gone off at the place where she's staying in Bywater. There were already a few of the Psych staff at the house by the time I showered and headed out to the empty classroom and folding table that I call an office nowadays. It bothered me all day that I hadn't ridden this morning. Despite the large mug of coffee I brought with me, my feet were cold all day today, but I'm determined to get in a training ride tomorrow morning.

So the USCF sent out a little summary of rule changes for next year. I see that they have again backtracked on the Cat. 5s, prohibiting the awarding of prizes in Cat. 5 races and at the same time increasing the field limit to 75 riders. 75 Cat. 5s in a road race. Yikes! They also re-defined the term "Stage Race" to include what are really omniums (i.e. multiple stage races based on points rather than time).

Tuesday on the Levee

Monday evening we headed over to my father's place in River Ridge where we promptly disposed of a bottle or two of wine before dinner. Then we decided it was a good time to go over to his apartment building and pick up the small refrigerator he said we could use. Well, this wasn't quite the "small" I had been thinking of. It was a typical apartment-sized refrigerator, and it was a good thing it was dark because I wouldn't have wanted too many people to have seen two somewhat inebriated guys trying to stuff a refrigerator into a Volvo. We did get the monster in there, but it was a little too long for the hatch to close, so I hooked a bungie cord to the latch mechanism of the hatch and secured the other end to the underside of the car. Then, the refrigerator slid just a tad farther forward and .... click! Great. Now the hatch was closed with the bungie cord hook stuck in the mechanism. I could neither open or fully close the latch, and it wasn't until this morning that I crawled into the car alongside the refrigerator and hack-sawed through the bungie cord hook in order to get the hatch open again. Just for the record, it's not a very good idea to load refrigerators into automobiles while drunk.

This morning's long levee ride was good. It was surprisingly warm when I headed out there - I guess around 70F. There were maybe 15 guys initially and the pace was mostly moderate until Todd (or at least I think it was Todd) ramped the pace up near 30 mph and the front part of the paceline started shedding riders. We ended up with maybe eight who did the whole ride and I got back a bit later than usual because we had to stop for one flat tire and then again to tighten a loose pedal back onto a bike. It looks like a cool front will push through here over the next day and by Thursday we'll have lows in the 40s for quite a while. I guess I should get busy and install that blower motor in case we decide we need to fire up the central heating unit.

Things in my immediate neighborhood are really starting to look better, but five or six blocks away there's still a lot of work to do. It's so strange riding to work because although both Gibson Hall and my house are on relatively high ground, the area between the two got some pretty significant flooding. The nicest thing, though, is being able to look out the windows of Gibson Hall toward the entrance of Audubon Park where everything looks just completely normal.

I'm back at our temporary office in Gibson Hall today where I'm hoping to get a couple of telephones installed soon. They tech guys were just up here looking at the phone lines and said that the most they could put in here were two phones and maybe one or two ethernet lines. I guess that will have to do for now. It is looking like we will probably stay camped out here through December, even if our office in the Tidewater Building becomes available, because most of the other people we need to work with are here as well. We'll see.

Back at Gibson Hall

Yesterday there was a little rain shower in the early afternoon. Then there was a loud "boom" somewhere down the block and the lights went out. We were then without power (and of course high-speed internet) all night and most of this morning. I slept badly and was in no mood to go out for a ride when the sun started to come out, and when the wife asked me to go out and get some coffee and brioche for breakfast, I grudgingly agreed. Since I had no cash in my wallet, I figured I'd hit the ATM down on Carrollton and then backtrack to Rud de la Course. The ATM had an "out of order" sign on it, so I went on down to Magazine street. My bank didn't have an ATM there, so I ended up getting held up for $2.25 for the privilege of getting money out of my own friggin' bank account. Then I went down to the Laurel St. Bakery for brioche, only to find that it is closed on Sunday, so it was back to Magazine St. where I found that the line at CC's coffee was out the door, so I went down to block to PJ's where the coffee is better and the line is shorter. They had nothing good to eat, so I ended up back at CC's, waiting in line for a couple of $2 muffins. Let me be perfectly clear about this. I would never have done this for myself.

So anyway, the Psych folks started showing up at the house promptly at 8:30 despite the lack of electricity, and soon enough I headed off for Gibson Hall at Tulane where we have secured the use of a classroom as a temporary office. No phones, no ethernet connection, no nothing. It took all morning for me to get my MAC address registered so that I could get a wireless internet connection. My dad called to say he had a small refrigerator we could use, so we headed over there for large quantities of wine and a little food after work. Around 9:30 p.m., my dad and I drove over to his apartment building and liberated an old refrigerator, stuffing it into the Volvo and screwing up the latch so that I don't know if I will ever be able to get the thing out! Hopefully it will look easier in the light of day, but for now, the "fridge will spend the night in the car!

Finalement Arrivé

It took two trips, but we have finally arrived back home - lock, stock, and barrel. I went out a bit early this morning for a quick 20 miles or so on the levee. By the time I was back and showered, there were four of the Psych office staff ready to get to work. We had two working on the dining room table, one in the study, and another kind of floating around thanks to the wireless network. There's a fax machine on my end table, two computers on the dining room table, a desktop and printer in my study, file boxes on the window seat, a couple more printers here and there, and a wireless telephone. I made a big pot of Starbucks coffee to get things started, but even with the extra caffeine, it wasn't until after noon that The Wife had things under control that we could head back to Jackson for the final time to retrieve the cat and a full car load of "stuff."

Over the past two months, it seems we have duplicated a lot of things, most of which I personally consider to be entirely unnecessary anyway. We clearly have at least twice as much laundry detergent, cleaning supplies, paper plates, etc. as ever. We even ended up with two hair dryers, two vacuum cleaners, two shower heads, and innumerable varieties of bath gel, bug repellent, etc. The house, which a couple of weeks felt remarkably clean, neat and uncluttered, is again a bit of a mess. Regardless, it's good to be home, even if I do have to trip over a few file boxes for a while.

On the way to Jackson this afternoon, The Daughter called to say that her laptop was having serious trouble. Sounds like it can't find the hard drive. Not good. She was going to let some guy she knows take a look at it, and we also had our tech guy give her a call, but AFAIK, no dice. The last resort is to bring it to tech support on campus and see what they say. Could be that the hard drive has gone south, but that seems to be such a rare thing nowadays, that I wonder if it could be something else. We shall see, I guess.

The Baton Rouge Fall Century is this weekend. Now, doesn't it just figure that I'd leave Jackson the Friday before the Fall Century, which starts just a few miles down the road and goes right past the house? As it turns out, I'll be "leading" the winter training ride this Sunday on the Northshore. We had a great ride last Sunday. This weekend it looks like the warm weather will continue, and there will even be a reasonable chance of rain. I'll be doing the Giro Ride tomorrow anyway. After the last ten weeks, the security and predictability of routine will be welcome.

On the Move - One More Time

Anticipating an early start, I skipped riding this morning. As it turned out, I may as well have ridden because we didn't finally get on the road back to New Orleans until around noon. Around 10 a.m., we shut down the computers and stuffed about six computers, numerous file boxes, and miscellaneous other office stuff into the Volvo, stopped by the house and crammed in some luggage, and clamped the bikes to the roof rack. Of course, it wouldn't all fit. Not nearly. The cat will be spending the night in Jackson tonight, and tomorrow morning after we get a couple of staff members started off at the new home office, we'll drive back to Jackson one more time to pick up the rest of our stuff and say goodbye to Tywana before returning to work.

On the way back to N.O., we stopped at CompUSA to pick up a little Linksys wireless router, about $150 worth of ink cartridges for various printers, and a fax machine. Traffic in Baton Rouge, as usual, was barely moving for the five or six miles after the I-12 / I-10 split, but it finally got going again and we arrived at home around 3:30. Candy headed off to survey some space in the 1555 Poydras building that they had been allocated for temporary office space, and I got to work setting up the DSL modem and wireless router.

The modem installation was a no-brainer, but as I expected, the router installation was a bit more challenging. As it turned out, BellSouth's DSL service wants to use an IP number that conflicts with the default IP number that the Linksys router wants to use. There is no clue that this is the case, of course. Luckily I had immediate access to the Psych/Neuro tech support person who had been down this road before, and with his help we changed the router IP number, set up security, and finally got the thing working. The first time I went to send an e-mail via Eudora and my Tulane account, the BellSouth server wouldn't allow it, even with authentication "on," so I had to change my outgoing SMTP server to BellSouth's. "Just goes to show you, if it ain't one thing, it's something else." Anyway, everything seems to be working now, so the place is more or less ready to go to work tomorrow.

We had been thinking of making the final trip to Jackson and back tonight, but The Wife really wanted to wait until tomorrow, so tomorrow it will be. Instead, we headed down to Magazine and State for a Calzones and Pizza at Reginelli's where I was happy to see a couple of old friends, Lesley Goodell and Lee Egan. Lesley I knew from high school and since she's an avid swimmer and runner and lives in the area, I often run into her. Lee I knew from early grammar school, and saw him once in a while, especially while his daughter and mine were both attending high school at l'académie du sacré coeur, aka Sacred Heart Academy.

Tomorrow I will slip out early for a much-needed ride on the levee before we have to drive back up to Jackson and then back down to New Orleans.

Back ... and Forth

The alarm went off at 6:00 Tuesday morning, but somehow I made it out to the levee before the 6:15 group left (luckily, they were running a little late too). I think this was the first post-K long weekday morning levee ride I've done. The legs felt fine and we had a good sized group that did the whole ride. Afterward I once again loaded up the car for the trip back to Jackson and by noon we were in our little basement office again. The move of the Psych/Neuro office to our house is definite now, but there wasn't much time on Monday to think about it. We did go over to the hospital and get the annual flu shots for free, and then had a nice dinner at the house. After more than one glass of wine, I hit the sack pretty early, but was soon awakened by the ring of my cellphone. It was the sister-in-law who was, then wasn't, going to be staying at our house. As it turned out, the place where she had ended up staying, which was an apartment in a building that a friend of hers had recently bought down near the French Quarter, didn't have any electricity when she arrived, so she bailed and was calling to let us know she'd be staying at our place that night. I have no idea if she's just going to stay with us or try the apartment again.

When I went to sleep Tuesday night I had already decided to take Wednesday off the bike. I was dead tired for one thing, and I knew it would be foggy for the other, so it was an easy decision, especially since I had gotten in four days of good rides while in New Orleans. So Wednesday morning I went over to the Jackson Post Office and filled out a "change of forwarding" form to cancel out the temporary change of address form I had submitted when I arrived in Jackson. Then I did another change of address form so that mail that did get addressed to the Jackson location in the interim would be forwarded back to my home address. I guess it will be February before my mail gets finally straightened out, if I'm lucky.

So today we realized that the hospital will be closed on Friday for Veterans Day, so we will have to move our stuff out of the office tomorrow. I looked around at all of the computers that we had there, and then looked around at the house and the amount of stuff we had accumulated during our two-month "displacement." Then I looked at the car which suddenly looked quite tiny. Hmmmm. It looks like we'll be making two trips back and forth to Jackson in order to get all of this stuff moved. I guess we'll make one trip Thursday, and then another on Friday or Saturday. Then over the weekend I'll hopefully get the DSL connection set up and we can rearrange things to create two or three offices. At any rate, I expect I will at least be able to make the Sunday Northshore training ride again, and I should be able to get out tomorrow morning for a short ride if it's not too foggy. I am not at all sure where my lights are right now. Hell, I'm not at all sure where anything is right now!

Homecoming Coming, Blower Blowing

Listening to: Mennonite Blues- James Super Chikan Johnson
Drinking: Coke, no ice

The Monday morning levee ride garnered all of four people this morning, which is about normal, and we did a nice steady 24 miles on this unseasonably warm morning. It looks like the temperatures will remain fairly warm for the next week or so, and that's just fine with me since I usually ride in the early morning and "unseasonably warm" right now means 65-70F. At any rate, I was glad to find my legs not particularly sore from Sunday's ride and I'm already hoping to be able to make next Sunday's northshore training ride.

It seemed that this weekend was kind of a homecoming for a lot of folks in the area. I think that the first week of November must have been a good target date for many folks, and I noticed lots of people apparently back home for good in the less damaged areas. In my own block, I think everyone is back except for my immediate neighbor who had a lot of roof and rain damage (although there's a new trailer in the driveway now), and a couple of the rental units in the 4-plex across the street. The story wasn't the same at my mom's rental house where I met the contractor around lunchtime. All of the houses there were flooded and most are now empty and gutted, waiting for the sheetrockers. The contractor and the brother-in-law went through the place room by room, working out what type of sheetrock, where appliances should go, what flooring to use, where the big problems were, etc., which took about two or three hours, so the stage is set for construction to start, perhaps as early as next weekend. It will be interesting to see how much they can get accomplished in a week.

So after I figured out that Mike's old blower fan unit wasn't going to fit into my system, and then learning that our house would soon become the temporary office of Tulane's Psychiatry & Neurology Department, I did two things. First, I called BellSouth and arranged for DSL (hoping to have everything by next Friday), then I resigned myself to having to buy a replacement blower motor for the heater. First, though, I had to remove the pulley from the motor shaft so I could bring the motor in and get a similar replacement. I had not been able to turn the motor by hand since I removed it, so I figured it was all rusted. The pulley was stubborn, though, so I gave it a few taps with the hammer. Voila! I was shocked to find that the motor then started to turn freely! I couldn't believe it. I checked the capacitor and it looked fine - the rust I had seen was from the inside of the housing that the capacitor sits in, and I think that was about as high as the water got. So I put the motor on the floor, connected up the 220 line, and voila! The thing ran like new. Go figure. That absolutely made my day. So let's see:

• Roof patched: Check
• Basement cleaned out: Check
• Electricity: Check
• Water: Check
• Gas: Check
• Telephone: Check
• Heat: Check
• Internet: Coming Soon

Later in the evening, the sister-in-law who was going to move in but didn't because she decided to stay with a friend in Faubourg Marigny stopped by while we were eating dinner at GB's Grill and gave us a brand new Ionic Breeze air cleaner! One of the other sisters-in-law had sent her four of them when she was living in B.R. in a house that had been closed up for over a year.

Talked to Gina V, currently doctoring in Sacremento, who said she'll be riding for the Diet Cheerwine team next year. She was on her way back from her first cyclocross race, which, predictibly, she won.

So I may be able to sneak out tomorrow morning for a ride before we have to leave for Jackson, but it is looking like our next trip to N.O. will probably be for keeps! Whoohooo! We are SO ready to be back home. My Government Affairs office has secured the use of a room in Gibson Hall on Tulane's uptown campus, so things are really starting to come back together.

Northshore Ride

I met Charlie and Kevin early today at The Morning Call, and we headed across the lake to meet the Northshore winter training ride group. It didn't feel much like winter. I had packed arm-warmers and gloves, but I knew I wouldn't be wearing them today. The cruise across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway at this time of year always reminds me of long training rides. My first one was during the summer of 1971. It was hot and sunny and I had brought exactly one water bottle and no food. We rode 80 miles, from the Priory up to Bogalusa and back, and at around 60 or 70 miles I finally bonked. Someone else came off the back too, and he stayed with me until we turned onto Stafford Road. Then he reached into his jersey pocket, handed me a little box of raisins, and said "see you at the car." Those last few miles were very long, but that' was just part of the learning process for cyclists.

Anyway, this morning we had 10 guys and were planning on a 50 mile ride that turned out to be more like 55 I guess. Along the way, my trusty Campagnolo computer hit 48,000 miles. It felt great to be out on a real club training ride again, and although I knew I wasn't in very good shape, it was hard to resist staying at the front longer than I should have. Every now and then I would remind myself to get some rest back in the draft. We rode from Barker's Corner up through Enon and then over to Plainview, looking forward to the smooth and fast road from Plainview back down to Enon. Man, were we surprised. The road had just gotten the first layer of the dreaded chip-seal, so we spent about five miles riding over the slightly loose crushed rocks, getting pelted with them every time a car would go by. Finally, we emerged back onto the asphalt, which IMHO was in absolutely no need of repair in the first place. I guess we'll have to take that road off the itinerary for a while. Toward the end of the ride I actually started feeling better, and pushed the pace a bit here and there. Most of the rest of the group joined in easily, so we got a good workout all-around. On the way home I stopped over at Mike L's house to pick up a used blower motor he had to see if I could use it to get my house heater going again. It turned out to be smaller than the original blower and motor assembly, so I may have to do some street-level engineering to get it to work in there. As I was staring out the back window thinking about it, I looked at my downed TV cable and suddenly realized that I could reconnect it if I lowered the attachment point on the house a lot and used the connectors that had been installed earlier this year when it had broken during a tropical storm. Half an hour later, I had cable again. I'm not altogether sure that's such a good thing.

In the afternoon I got an email from Sharon, the Assoc. VP who runs our office, saying that she thinks we will have some temporary space in Gibson Hall on St. Charles Ave. to set up a temporary office. In a remarkable coincidence, just as I was reading that and thinking that I would need to be staying in N.O. if that happened, I got a call from The Wife who said that they were considering trying to move the Psych/Neuro office back to a temporary place in N.O., and that she had volunteered our house. So OK, here's the situation. The wife's sister is supposed to be moving in (she was supposed to arrive Friday, now it's looking like Monday), we may be trying to set up an office for five or six people in our living room, it's November, and our entire heating system consists of an unvented gas space heater in the living room fireplace. This is, unless I can rig up the blower motor or get a replacement one. Do you see how all of this is coming together? The only way we could get the office going here would be to somehow get high-speed internet installed practically immediately. Hmmm. This is starting to get interesting, eh? Of course, I expected that we would eventually be providing housing for somebody, which is why I was in a hurry to patch up the roof and get the place more or less in order.

Tomorrow I'll meet the contractor who will be fixing up The Mom's rental house, then I'll have to pick up The Wife from the airport, probably dropping off the contractor about the same time. I will of course need to be working tomorrow too since we have a number of extremely time-sensitive pots on the fire right now.

Life. Gotta love it.

A Giro and a Haircut

It's been warm around here lately! This morning I headed out to the Lakefront to catch the 7 a.m. Giro Ride. Riding down Carrollton Avenue from Uptown Island to the Lake, about 8 miles, felt kind of strange. Most of the major intersections are still without functioning traffic lights, and as I rode through the Mid-City area I got a close look at all of the flooded houses and businesses. Many were being repaired and the streets in some areas are coated with the white powder from all of the sheetrock that has been torn out and hauled away. I had to ride a bit faster than I would have liked, though, because I had forgotten that my spare wheel didn't have a magnet on it and it took me a while to find one.

The actual spot in the parking lot on the lakefront where we usually meet for the Giro ride is currently occupied by a bunch of trailer homes, presumably housing construction workers, so the group is meeting a bit farther down in the same parking lot. We ended up with a respectible group of almost 30 riders, and the pace was fairly civilized most of the time. As we started, a Levee Board police car rolled up and the officer said that Lakeshore Drive was closed to bicycles because of the construction. Bullshit. There is essentially no construction, or traffic for that matter, on Lakeshore Drive right now. So we smiled nicely, waited for him to leave, and rode the five miles along Lakeshore Drive without further harassment. Even though the pace wasn't particularly fast, my legs were definitely feeling it. When the paceline got up to about 26 mph, I decided it was time to get my sorry butt out of the rotation and seek shelter at the back if I was expecting to do a long ride in the hills tomorrow. Reo and Tim showed up somewhere on Hayne Blvd. as we were heading back, and I noticed that Realdo is on a new carbon Fuji. I rode home along Canal Blvd. through Lakeview where there was much flooding. Lots of the houses have already been gutted and stand there empty awaiting rebuilding. This wasn't a low-income area. In fact, real estate prices were very high, despite the fact that most of the homes are typical 1060s ranch-style brick-veneer types. With around 60 miles by the time I got home, this was probably my longest ride in a month. Anyway, it was nice to be in the Giro again, and I found out that a few other guys are planning on doing the Northshore training ride tomorrow, so we're meeting at the Morning Call around 6:30-6:45 tomorrow morning.

After the Sister-in-Law called to say she wouldn't be coming over until tomorrow, I did some work around the house, climbing up on the roof and slathering some more roofing cement where I think the leak may be coming from. I also went over to the local Supercuts, which has just re-opened, for a haircut. I hate getting haircuts, and this was my first post-Katrina trim. After cleaning up outside around the house, trimming hedges, etc., I decided after dark to take a little ride around the neighborhood, so I broke out the old commuter, pumped up the tires, clipped on the lights and headed down toward Tulane and St. Charles Ave. First, I rode down Maple St. to see if perhaps PJ's or Starbucks was open yet, but they weren't so I then headed over to Magazine St. It was quite lively there. Although CC's was closed, there was some sort of art showing going on and lots of people out on the sidewalks drinking wine and talking. Across the street, the Magazine St. PJ's was just closing for the evening. They must have just opened this week.

Gina called from Sacremento where she's doing a rotation. She had done a nice ride to Napa and said it was really great, but that it's starting to get pretty chilly over there at night.

Morning on the Levee

I met Mark D. and Joe F. out on the Levee bike path this morning, and as always talk centered around the recovery, who was moving where, what was open and what was not. Mark was on his TT bike, since his regular road bike is a temporary resident of Houston until his company moves everything back to N.O. We rode about 30 miles and somewhere along the way I guess I decided to go ahead and plan on making the Saturday Giro ride out on the lakefront. On the way back my front tire sounded like it exploded. There was a loud hiss - hiss - hiss, and I stopped expecting the tire to be flat within the minute. Very strangely, however, it kind of sealed itself with maybe 50 psi left and I was able to ride the last 5 or 6 miles without a problem. Definitely wierd. When I got home and took the tire off, I noticed that the rim was cracking at the seam, so I hung it up for now and swapped in another old wheel off of the Pennine. Guess I'll have to do some wheelbuilding this winter.

The Wife headed off to the airport before noon after telling me that her sister would be staying at our house starting tomorrow. Her house was badly flooded and it will be quite a while before it is habitable again.

I stopped in at Adam's Bicycle World, currently located in part of Chad's Oasis Horticultural building, to say hello to Adam and Mark. Adam showed me a stack of flooded bikes, most still in the boxes. It was sad. I was rather shocked to see how much damage the immersion had done to some of the bikes. The aluminum in particular seemed to be in bad shape. He said that in some cases you could snap off the frame braze-ons with your fingers. This was apparently not nice, clean water. It was the somewhat brackish water from the lake and the salts played havoc with the aluminum and steel. To make matters worse, after being under water for days, it was a long time before anything could be done, so there was a lot of time for the corrosion to really take hold. Anyway, they were quite busy cleaning up costomers' bikes that had been flooded and working on remodeling the space to make a nice bike shop out of it.

So tomorrow I'll do the Giro ride, and then I guess I'll be moving salvaged stuff from The Wife's sister into the basement for storage.

Morning on the Levee

I met Mark D. and Joe F. out on the Levee bike path this morning, and as always talk centered around the recovery, who was moving where, what was open and what was not. Mark was on his TT bike, since his regular road bike is a temporary resident of Houston until his company moves everything back to N.O. We rode about 30 miles and somewhere along the way I guess I decided to go ahead and plan on making the Saturday Giro ride out on the lakefront. On the way back my front tire sounded like it exploded. There was a loud hiss - hiss - hiss, and I stopped expecting the tire to be flat within the minute. Very strangely, however, it kind of sealed itself with maybe 50 psi left and I was able to ride the last 5 or 6 miles without a problem. Definitely wierd.

The Wife headed off to the airport before noon after telling me that her sister would be staying at our house starting tomorrow. Her house was badly flooded and it will be quite a while before it is habitable again.

I stopped in at Adam's Bicycle World, currently located in part of Chad's Oasis Horticultural building, to say hello to Adam and Mark. Adam showed me a stack of flooded bikes, most still in the boxes. It was sad. I was rather shocked to see how much damage the immersion had done to some of the bikes. The aluminum in particular seemed to be in bad shape. He said that in some cases you could snap off the frame braze-ons with your fingers. This was apparently not nice, clean water. It was the somewhat brackish water from the lake and the salts played havoc with the aluminum and steel. To make matters worse, after being under water for days, it was a long time before anything could be done, so there was a lot of time for the corrosion to really take hold. Anyway, they were quite busy cleaning up costomers' bikes that had been flooded and working on remodeling the space to make a nice bike shop out of it.

So tomorrow I'll do the Giro ride, and then I guess I'll be moving salvaged stuff from The Wife's sister into the basement for storage.

"Make Levees, Not War!"

It was another chilly morning in the quiet town of Jackson, but I dressed a bit more lightly than yesterday because I was planning on more of a workout. Although I've certainly lost a lot of fitness over the past month, it felt good to be pushing on the pedals again, even if it was for only 22 miles. On the way back I stopped by the Post Office, encouraged by yesterday's mail stash. It seems that they've finally started to forward some of my mail, and yesterday I had two months worth of a couple of bills (but not others??). Go figure. It's a good thing I've been paying the bills online.

It was a very busy day at work for me, which was great. It's really frustrating, though, trying to use the incredibly slow ethernet at the hospital and trying to make phone calls on a cellphone that is doing its best to pull in one bar's worth of analog signal. I did commandeer the one land line we all share for my 1-hour conference call, though. After working frenetically most of the day pulling together an impossible report with inadequate data, we skipped out around 4 p.m. to head back to New Orleans. Traffic through Baton Rouge was stop-and-go, and once we got out of the city it was still very crowded on I-10 all the way to New Orleans. I was glad that we didn't have any more trouble with the flaky temperature sender, so I guess my wiring repair did the trick. I have to admit that I'm pretty surprised that something as simple as a loose connection to a temperature sending unit could mess up the engine management system and make the car run so badly.

The Wife has a flight out to D.C. tomorrow afternoon, and had an informal dinner meeting scheduled with one of the folks in her office. We ended up at Louisiana Pizza Kitchen on Carrollton Avenue and had a nice little dinner, although we practically closed the place down around 9:00. Most of the area restaurants are running shortened hours, and this one closed at 8. The person we were with had attended the local Voodoo Festival, held this year on the "fly" which is the riverfront batture area of Audubon Park. She said it was great, and added that she has been seeing a lot of interesting Katrina-related T-Shirts. One that I liked said "Make Levees, Not War!" She also said that many of the jazz places down in the Quarter, like Snug Harbor, are not charging for the jazz shows!

So I think I'll probably hit the levee tomorrow morning rather than trying to make the Giro ride, since I'm planning on doing the Northshore training ride on Sunday and I have a lot of work I need to get done tomorrow. Hope there's somebody out on the levee I can ride with. I really need to learn to plan ahead for these sorts of things. Living in two different places is making it really hard to keep track of my stuff. I can no longer remember what stuff I have where, so I've been basically packing everything every time I move. It's getting really heavy.

A Long One, Still Unfinished

Finally I got back on the bike this morning, rolling out into the cold air around 6:45, and thankful for the extra morning sunlight since the time change. It was somewhere in the upper 30s F, but I have finally accumulated about enough of my winter wardrobe to accomodate those kinds of temperatyures. Still, I felt pretty out of shape, as I undoubtedly am, and wasn't really pushing myself very much. Such is winter training. The whole time, my mind was on other things. For one, I needed to deal with the car. I was lucky to make it back to Jackson on Tuesday. The last 25 miles from Baton Rouge were pretty sketchy. The temperature gauge would make wild fluctuations and the car's engine management system, trying to accomodate the bogus data, was doing some strange stuff that caused the car to misfire sometimes. Right after we arrived yesterday, I popped the hood and jiggled the temperature sender connection. Sure enough, the cooling fan kicked on immediately. I jiggled it again and the fan stopped. So this morning, after my ride, I checked it out and found that the connector had pretty much disintegrated. I think the sending unit was getting only intermittent contact. I got that fixed to my satisfaction, using large amounts of electrical tape, and moved on to other things. There was a 10 a.m. conference call about the state's upcoming special session where they will have to make a lot of cuts. I ended up with a rather impossible task after that one. Then, at 2 p.m. was the weekly research conference call. What a disaster. We kept getting one side of someone else's private phone conversations and it was hard to talk over them. After only half an hour, we abandoned it altogether.

Anyway, I have a lot left to do tonight and I'm very sleepy after having a couple of glasses of wine with dinner.