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.

Home for Halloween

After an early morning lift-off we arrived back in the crescent city around 1 pm, and ignoring for the moment the numerous voicemail messages, we headed down the street for a long walk. There seemed to be even more activity than when we had left, and when we returned The Wife decided to dig out some of the Halloween decorations an drun out to buy some candy. OK, so we were being optimistic. As it turned out, we never had any trick-or-treaters at the house, and soon after dark we went over to the neighbor's house with some cheese, wine and beer, and next thing we knew we had almost the entire block over there. It was really very nice to get together with thge other folks on Neron Place. I drank entirely too much wine and beer, not necessrily in that order, and am still somewhat under the influence. Suffice it to say that a good time was had by all, and that some are still having a good time as I write. Nonetheless, it is time for bed and I am hoping to get in a ride in the morning before we have to return to Jackson. It will be a miracle if I actually make it onto the bike in the morning. We shall see . . .

Kicking Back in IC

With no plans for the day and a drizzly overcast sky, I wasn't quite sure what to do today. The time change granted me an extra hour of sleep that I didn't really need, and so I ended up at Starbucks for breakfast. Luckily, looking out the window of the hotel I could see that a big rowing regatta was underway, which turned out to be the annual Head of the Iowa Regatta . We broke out the umbrellas and took a long walk along the riverside path watching the races. Rowing is pretty much of a cult sport in New Orleans, and I've never seen so many boats. Competitive rowing has always appealed to me, and it's definitely something I'd love to try one day, even if I do end up stuffed into the bow barking out orders! At least the steady light rain kept me from feeling like I should be on the bike too much. Later in the day we went to the big mall with The Daughter, mainly just to kill time, and she bought me a nice pair of arm-warmers at the huge sporting goods store they have there.

This little visit to IC sure did cost us a lot more than I would have liked it to, but it was kind of nice to take a little break, visit with The Daughter, and zoom around town in her nimble Jeep Liberty. We'll be heading back to N.O. very early tomorrow morning, and I think we'll probably spend the night there before returning to our foster home in Jackson early on Monday. Perhaps I'll finally be able to get back on the bike Monday morning before we head out. I think I have now achieved full de-conditioning and am ready to begin winter training from the ground up!

Up North

As usual, our first day up here in Iowa City was busy. Also, as usual, I didn't get any exercise, unless you count getting into and out of automobiles. It was in the 30s when I awoke, and the view from the window at the on-campus hotel, located in the Student Union building, was beautiful. We borrowed The Daughter's car to drive back up to Cedar Rapids to check in at the Red Cross office to see if they were still offering discounted hotels, but no luck. Apparently that function has been shifted to FEMA, which pretty much guarantees it will be inaccessible. On the way back I stopped to get the oil changed in The Daughter's car, and discovered that the battery was in pretty bad shape. No way was it going to make it through an Iowa winter, so I picked up a replacement at the local Wal-Mart, along with a $2 adjustable wrench and a handy-dandy $4 "battery installation kit" since there was a lot of corrosion on the negative terminal. I had to wrestle with it a bit because I didn't really have the socket wrench that I needed to get the hold-down bolt out. Nonetheless, I eventually got it done without any significant blood loss. Around 5 p.m. we went with the team to a local school and helped them get set up for their Halloween Haunted House, constructing a nifty casket from old refrigerator boxes. Then it was off to the "Hall of Fame" for the gymnastics banquet where they gave out various awards from last year's season. Amazingly, the food consisted of fried chicken and cake. OK, they did have a fruit and veggies, but I mean . . . really! The teammate who was in the hospital yesterday is still not well, but the doctors are quite divided as to the problem. Now they are thinking it is a ruptured ovarian cyst, which I guess is a little better news, but the girl is still on some heavy pain meds.

Travel Day

I didn't bring the Cervelo down to N.O. this time, since we were only staying overnight, so this morning I pumped up the tires on the old Pennine. This was my first high-end racing bike, acquired around 1972 and custom built in England. For the then-princely sum of $110, you could specify the type of lugs, dropouts, fork crown, and tubing you wanted, where you wanted the chrome to be, what colors it would be painted, where you wanted braze-ons, etc. I headed out to the levee around 7 a.m., and was a little surprised how few people I ran into. Perhaps they were all doing the long ride today and since I had gone out late I had missed them.

Anyway, we eventually made our way out to the airport for our trip up to Iowa City. We flew Northwest, which means we took the long way. The first leg took us all the way up to Minneapolis. Then, we hopped onto a little turboprop for the second leg to Cedar Rapids where The Daughter met us to make the short drive to Iowa City. Along the way, she mentioned that one of her teammates had been in the ER all day. After we ate dinner, she found out that the girl has a bad case of endometriosis and they want to do surgery tomorrow. Man, this team just can't get a break. I think they are down to maybe 5 or 6 healthy gymnasts out of a team of 13.

So now I'm bikeless in Iowa and wondering what I will do tomorrow. I think I can get a free pass to the health club here on campus, so if get desperate enough, perhaps I will

Touch and Go

It felt really cold this morning - around 38F or so - up in Jackson, but I headed out anyway because I knew I'd be off the bike this weekend when we go to Iowa City to attend the annual awards ceremony. I had pretty much everything I needed to stay comfortable except for my shoe-covers and my helmet cover. I decided to do a little exploring this morning since I had noticed on the map that there was a road that bypassed the torn up bridge and connected back up with the road that makes for a nice 22 mile loop. I had ridden down that road a few weeks ago, but had turned around when the asphalt ended. This time I figured I'd tackle the mile or so of gravel and dirt and ride the loop for a change. It turned out to be really nice. There were a few patches of loose stuff, but it was mostly quite rideable and reminded me a lot of the roads we ride in the Rouge-Roubaix race. It's actually a lot more scary when you're going slow like I was today. When you're racing, you just fly through and don't have time to think much about how loose the gravel is. It's amazing that we actually race on stuff like that without killing ourselves. Anyway, this nice little road eventually crossed a small creek by way of a little low bridge that consisted of little more than a bunch of wood planks. Immediately after that was a long, steep climb before it connected back up with Jones Vaughn Creek road. I suppose that was Jones Vaughn Creek that I crossed. By the time I got back to the house, my toes were so cold they hurt.

It was a busy day at work. A bit depressing too, hearing about the people who were being laid off. We left a little bit early to pack up and head into New Orleans, getting stuck in the Baton Rouge traffic for a while along the way. We'll spend the night at the house tonight so that we can hand-deliver some paperwork to Accounts Payable which is back in some sort of operation uptown. Then it will be off to the airport for the trip to Iowa City. I will probably try and get in an hour of riding on the track bike or the old Pennine road bike in the morning.

Inching Forward

Things continue to inch forward all around. Yesterday morning is was very windy and cool, so I decided to do an easy ride down St. Charles Ave. and Prytania in order to avoid the unbuffered gusts up on the levee. Most of St. Charles Ave., especially around Tulane and Loyola, looks no different than it did B.K. (Before Katrina), and I even spotted a number of uniformed students returning to McGee's high school for their first day of B.K. classes. Back at the house I called Entergy about the leaking gas meter and got to work on the computer and telephone. It was great working out of the house where I had full telephone access, although the dial-up internet connection was a little slower than I'd like. I needed to leave by 2:30 to pick The Wife up at the Baton Rouge airport, so I was hoping that Entergy would show up sooner rather than later. Naturally, after fairly quiet day, everything started happening around 2:00. There was a little bit of a crisis with work involving FEMA, so I was on the phone trying to track a few people down when, of course, the doorbell rang. I pointed the Entergy guy at the gas meter in the basement, and while he worked replacing it, I ran around trying to pack up with my cellphone in my ear. I was about ten minutes from the airport when The Wife called. Her flight had arrived a bit early, but I was close enough and it worked out fine. So progress on getting the house back in shape is inching forward. I should hear something from the insurance company some time this week. The back yard is presentable again, the basement is somewhat reorganized. The gas leak has been stopped so I'll be able to light the pilot lights on the stove and we'll have at least a little heat from the old unvented gas heater in the living room.

This morning up in Jackson, LA., it was somewhere around 39-40F when I got up to ride. Luckily I had thrown a bunch of winter riding stuff into my bag before I left N.O., so other than cold feet I was OK and got in a 22 miles or so before work. I am definitely in winter training mode now, and it's especially difficult to make any hard efforts when riding alone on a quiet road. By the time I got back to the house my forearms and hands were cold enough to make it difficult to turn the key in the lock and my toes didn't warm back up for half an hour.

Beautiful

A cool front came through last night and the weather today was nothing short of beautiful. I left the house around 6:45 in semi-darkness, headed to the levee. It was a bit windy, and I was planning on an easy 30 mile ride. I was surprised how few people I ran into this morning, although I did ride most of the way with other people. I suppose a lot of people did the Giro ride or perhaps the Northshore ride this morning, but I had a long list of things I wanted to get done today and I didn't want to end up wasted until noon after a hard ride. I ended up doing around 35 miles, most of it at quite an easy pace. After riding I hit the back yard, taking down some of the broken tree limbs, cutting the grass, cleaning out the garage, etc.

That gas leak in the basement was really bugging me, so I decided to take another shot at pinpointing its source. I thought about it for a while, and then realized that I probably had the perfect bit of technology right in the house. After searching through the bathroom, I finally found what I was looking for. Bubble Bath!! I mixed it with water in a bucket, grabbed a sponge, turned on the gas, and went to work. It didn't take long. As I suspected, the leak was coming from the gas meter, so it looks like it'll be 1-800-Entergy. They'll probably tell me that I have to pay to relocate the meter to outside the house and it'll be freezing cold and Christmas before I have heat again. Just in case, I checked out the old portable electric heater to make sure it was still functional.

I wandered over to Bob G's house a few blocks down Pine St. to find him installing a new gas water heater in his now-gutted basement. Being a clever Ph.D., he had gotten the same model as he had before to make the installation easy. Nice try, Bob. He discovered that although the model number was the same, all the fittings were in slightly different locations, so he has a bit of plumbing to do.

So with winter fast approaching, I searched all over the place for my arm-warmers but couldn't find them. I think that perhaps I gave them to The Daughter, so I'll have to check out longscycle.com to see if they have something I can get for cheap. It's supposed to be even colder tonight and I'm planning on doing a very early ride before a few hours of work at home and then the trip back to Baton Rouge to pick The Wife up at the airport.

Pack in the Pack

Although I had hoped to ride out to the Giro ride this morning, there just wasn't enough time once the insurance adjuster rescheduled for 11:00 a.m., so I drove the car out to the lakefront instead. It was the first time I had been out that way since the hurricane, and coming over the I-12 overpass onto West End Blvd., I was shocked to see a huge mountain of hurricane debris piled up in the broad neutral ground between Pontchartrain Blvd and West End Blvd. Then, as I rounded the curve onto Lakeshore Drive, I could see the old lighthouse, leaning precariously toward the water. I honestly don't know what was holding it up. Anyway, a cool front came through last night and it was chilly and very windy out at the lakefront as the recently resurrected Giro ride headed out. We had somewhere around 15-20 riders this morning with only a few who wanted to go hard. Other than the wind, the weather was beautiful and things stayed reasonably calm all the way down Hayne Blvd. past rows and rows of flooded houses. When we got to that spot on Paris Rd. where we have to cross over two lanes of interstate highway, the idiots in the lead almost got everyone killed by crossing in front of a truck towing a boat in a curve going 60 mph. There was a lot of impatient traffic making the curve heading into Chalmette and a few of us had to wait quite a while before we could make it over to the right lane safely. Not to worry, though, because I knew that Eddie C. had a slow leak and was going to have to stop sooner or later, which turned out to be arond 6-Flags.

Chef Highway was interesting. Once we got out past Highway 11 where there are a number of ship-related businesses, we could see huge gashes in the asphalt where ships had dragged bottom across the road during the storm surge. There were a few along the edge of the road, and many more way back in the marsh up against a small levee where big cranes were at work trying to retrieve them. Anyway, it was nice to be riding with a group again, and once I got warmed up I felt pretty good. A few of us rode back ahead of the group to get a little more exercise. One thing I saw that really stuck in my mind was a business jet on the front lawn of the old Lakefront Airport. It almost looked like it had been parked there on purpose, except that the main gear looked partially collapsed. It must have gotten washed right out of one of the hangers.

So I get back to the car a bit later than I had expected, and figure I'll rush back to the house so I can take a shower and relax for a minute before the insurance adjuster shows up. I head down Pontchartrain Blvd. and am soon detoured all over the place. You still can't get onto I-10 into the city from Pontchartrain Blvd., so I had to take a circuitous route over to Canal Blvd. and stop at about fifty of the 4-way stop signs that have replaced all of the non-functioning traffic lights around town. The insurance person shows up about half an hour late after calling for directions and to through the house, select which photos she wants me to email to her, and she tells me she'll have a roofer come out next week to have a look at the roof. On the plus side, she said that they will cover the refrigerator. I spent the next couple of hours out in the back yard cutting down the tree that had fallen on the garage, and although there was lots more I could do, by 5:00 I was ready for a glass of Rouge Red Ale, so I swept up the thick dust that had accumulated on the porch and took a long break.

There is a lot of activity in my neighborhood, and the stench of refrigerators has been mostly replaced by clouds of dust that have made the air quality pretty dismal. The cool North wind today certainly helped, but we could really use a little rain around here. The Corps of Engineers folks were on my block today checking our houses that might need "blue roofs," which is their program where they put free blue tarps on damaged roofs. Problem is, they don't do that for older asbestos shingle roofs like mine (and many others in this area), so I got a little paper taped to my window indicating that I don't qualify for a blue roof. I chatted with them for a while and when one of the guys saw the roof rack on the volvo he said he recognized me and that he had done some riding off-and-on.

I'm thinking that tomorrow I'll go ride the levee. I really do need to attend to a bunch of stuff around here and although I'd love to do the Northshore ride, I should probably put those two hours of driving to better use.

Olfactory Overload

Headed out from Jackson LA this morning without time for a ride, dropped The Wife off at the Baton Rouge airport, and headed for New Orleans. It was pretty smooth going until around LaPlace. From there all the way into town it the speeds on the interstate were very erratic. There must have been an accident or something, but I never saw anything but one little fender-bender. So I finally get to the house, park the car and when I open the door it hits me. Oh man, it was bad. They had been picking up refrigerators, and must have basically emptied one of them right next to the house. There was nasty fly-infested refrigerator juice all down the gutter. I pulled the car up the street a bit and spent about an hour with the garden hose washing that rank stuff down to the storm drain. I never did get rid of all of the smell, but at least I got it down to a tolerable level. One of my mother's tenants, a Tulane student, was coming in from Houston to clean out her stuff from one of the flooded apartments and was supposed to be in around 10-11:00, but she got a flat somewhere along the way and was delayed, so I decided to turn on the gas and light the pilot lights on the stove. Well, that went fine, but when I went down to the basement later, I could definitely smell gas. I ended up turning the gas off again, and much later in evening I went around with a spray bottle of Windex, which BTW is great for finding leaks in gas lines, tires, etc. I found a couple of tiny leaks at some of the valves and tightened them up, so I'll seen how it smells in the morning. Next, I discovered that the toilet was running nonstop, which of course meant that crud from the water lines had clogged up the valve, so I shut off the water and disassembled the float valve, cleaned it out, and got it working again. Yeah, it was just handyman heaven around here today!

Anyway, I eventually met the tenant over at the apartment and helped wash down a bunch of her stuff with bleach and water and brought most of the furniture over to my basement for storage until the Spring semester starts. That took most of the afternoon, but when I drove past the neighbor's house (whose roof I had patched up last week) on the second trip to put stuff in the basement, she came over with three bottles of Rogue ale. Better yet, they were cold!! Not having a refrigerator at the house right now, a glass of cold Red Ale really hit the spot!

I'm planning on making the Giro ride tomorrow morning and then meeting the insurance adjuster at 11:00. She called to reschedule this afternoon because there was a death in her family and she needs to drive back up to Alabama tomorrow. Wish me luck!