April returns

The cloud banks rolled back in and 60 today doesn't feel a bit like 60 yesterday. Today was once again too cold.

I have been thinking though, and I can remember several Memorial Day weekends when it was too cold. It has happened before. Of course, I can also remember quite a few Memorial Day weekends when the sun came out, the temperatures rose and it was suddenly and completely summer. Summer would be good, although I would have preferred that we have a little spring first.

But Memorial Day weekend is upon us and with it comes the greatest spectacle in racing. And, no, I do not mean the end of the Giro. In line with family tradition I get first pick and I am taking the guy in the middle of the first row. I am not even positive who that is right off hand, but I think it is Dixon.

I HAVE noticed that the Giro is going on but I have also noted that the extremely unlikable Alberto Contador is making a mockery of the competition, leading the last time I checked a couple of days ago by nearly five minutes. What this shows me is that Alberto's "drug team" is clearly far superior to the "drug detecting team" being employed by the woeful World Anti-Doping Agency. That WADA continues to fail to detect the performance enhancing drug masking agent being provided to Alberto by his team indicates that bicycle racing is not "clean". Actually in the modern world of sport with the financial rewards available it seems unlikely that ANY sport is anywhere close to clean.

As long as I am on the subject, earlier this year Barry Bonds' personal trainer for the second time went to jail for refusing to provide testimony against Bonds at Barry's criminal trial. It gets harder and harder to find that kind of loyalty in employees. Unfortunately for Lance Armstrong it appears that his long time chief domestique George Hincapie has declined a similar opportunity and has instead testified to the federal grand jury about drug use on the US Postal bicycle racing team.

Lance's defense remains as he apparently recently posted on Twitter: “20+ year career. 500 drug controls worldwide, in and out of competition. Never a failed test. I rest my case.” It almost seems like that defense ought to be good enough and that he SHOULD be able to rest his case. Unfortunately for Lance that defense is getting less and less credible. As admissions from various others in the sport gradually make it abundantly clear that bicycle racing during the time that Armstrong competed was saturated with performance enhancing drugs, that many of Armstrong's chief competitors and many of his teammates were using those drugs, it gradually becomes too much for Armstrong to ask us to believe that he was clean and that his ability was so much superior to the others that he was able to dominate the sport without using the aids that all of the others were using.

Which does nothing to diminish the fact that it all made for great theater.

We recently had delivered to the house a freebie from a local real estate company. Produced in conjunction with the Roseville Historical Society, it is entitled "Historical Atlas of Early Rose Township". I like this sort of thing so I have been looking it over. It has a couple of early plat maps of the township and a bunch of historical notes. For example, I note that an 1867 plat shows that the place where I now live was at that time part of a 40 acre parcel owned, well, insider information here, what it actually means is that the taxes were being paid by "H & F" an abbreviation quite likely related to the 80 to the north for which taxes were being paid by "Hardy & Hough". By 1886 the 40 had been joined to the immediately adjacent to the west 40 and both were having taxes paid by Nicholas Pothen.

The first settlement made in the town of Rose was by Stephen Desnoyer in 1843 on the bank of the Mississippi River in section 32 of the surveyed township (29N, 23W for those who care) which was eventually incorporated as the Town of Rose.In the fall of 1843, Isaac Rose, for whom the town was named, settled just a little to the west of Desnoyer's riverbank location. The atlas states that he "had built a log house . . . near present day Shadow Falls" and that Isaac "ran a ferry for the convenience of the soldiers coming to sample Mrs. Desnoyer's cooking."

This got me thinking about the Mississippi River. It is not currently really much in the way of a river, it is more in the nature of a series of dams built and maintained by the US Army Corps of Engineers with resulting pools behind the dams.

I know where Shadow Falls is so I went over to take a look at the area of the pool above Lock and Dam Number 1. Here is the river photographed from the east side of the river and the south side of the gorge which conceals Shadow Falls.Even allowing for the fact that the river is running high right now, this area doesn't look to me to be very prospective for a ferry business. The reduction of the Father of Waters to a concrete channel is going to have to be a rant engaged upon at some other time but suffice to say, this photo probably resembles the river as seen by Stephen Desnoyer and Isaac Rose not at all.

So I ended up repairing both tubes. Partly I did this because it is the right thing to do. On the one hand, tubes only cost six or eight dollars or so but patching a tube isn't rocket science and I have ridden thousands of miles on patched tubes. Partly I did the repair because I suspected that the repaired tubes would provide just exactly THIS photo opportunity.Everyone all together now:

"He was right, there is something suspicious about the way those flat tires keep occurring at the same spot on the rim".

And finally, even though it may appear to be so, TOPWLH and I are pleased to report that there is NOT some sort of domestic dispute going on over here. I said to her, "I didn't think you would be so sensitive." She said to me, "I didn't think YOU would be so sensitive". Neither of us was ever actually upset with the other.

We now resume regular programming.