Long Time - No Type

Wow... Time flies when you're having fun. It's hard to believe that it's been a month since I last posted. Lots of things have been going on. In no particular order...

• The Flood is back and is it pissed... Lots and lots of rain up north have driven the Mississippi River levels up to near historic levels at Lock & Dam 15. They started talking about a crest at 17' and kept bumping up the forecasts. It peaked last Monday at 21.4'. Lots of local flooding by the river. The flood walls are now starting to come down again and I'm hoping that my commute route gets back to normal in a week or so. That is a trivial concern when compared to the absolute suffering that the folks in Cedar Rapids, the second largest city in Iowa, have going on. I have friends that live there and while they were spared the rest of their town was not. It's basically a mini Katrina.


• The weather here has been seriously odd. A week a ago Thursday, we had 3" of rain in a bit under 6 hours. That caused a huge amount of local flash flooding. There were roads washed out, some bike path ripped out, lots of flooded basements (not here), etc. My ride into and out of work on the next day was very interesting. The parking lot in Lindsey Park was completely under and I had to ride back off of the bike path and into the East Village. There was about a foot of water geysering out of a blown off manhole and making a nice little stream to ride through to get to dry ground. The high point of the ride was when I rode past a TV Talking Head doing a remote shot in parking lot across the street from there. I'm sure it was an "OMG... This is really bad here" piece. Nothing like a guy riding a bike through the background of the shot to make it seem not so bad.
  
  Then on Sunday morning, while I was waiting for my ride to The Ride (see below), we had an inch of hail between pea and dime sized. Eek!

• The 2008 edition of GITAP. I'll post more about the ride with a few images later.

Now... It's time to clean up the camping stuff, clean the espresso machine, and hope I survive this afternoon's Ashtanga yoga class.