The lesson of this week

There is a reason why it is so darn hard to accumulate a lot of miles in October. Most of the season when the weather turns unsatisfactory it is only a setback of a day or two. This time of year when the weather turns unsatisfactory it can be a quite a bit longer spell before it again feels rideable. In fact, as we all know, the weather is due very shortly to turn unsatisfactory and not turn back to satisfactory for oh, say, four and a half months.

This week was not a good bicycling week. We had a couple of days of rain including a day which featured two separate episodes of flurries. Yesterday was finally dry but a dreary overcast kept the temperature below 40 with 20-30 mph winds.

Too cold.

Today was balmy, the mercury passed 40 and the clouds and the wind went away. 40 and calm? I can do that, I have the gear. But no more kidding around, I added on pretty much the whole kit.

So I had a nice ride, down into the big city with a detour through the farm campus.

I rode past a couple of the colleges to see what sort of activities they had going on on a late fall day.

TommieNation had football, just riding past I wasn't able to gather enough information to discover who the opponent might have been. I am able to say that the shortage of cars parked in the nearby neighborhood eliminates any possibility that it might have been JohnnieNation.

I got up to where the PumpkinHeads hold their football and I was a little surprised to see a pretty nice crowd in the stadium. But it wasn't football, it was soccer. Which set me to thinking, can you be the PumpkinHeads if you are a sport which does not feature the wearing of a large orange helmet?

Apropos of not much of anything I got this photo. That's the Union Pacific crossing over from just above the Q Yard heading into the Transfer.

It really isn't a main line crossing anymore but that track on the far right is the remnant of what was the main line. At the time I worked there there was a track dedicated to each direction. One of the tracks has been taken out. The reason for that is that is related to railroad mergers. The railroad there now is the BNSF and they use the old Northern Pacific freight main line which is located a block or so farther north as the main line. The old Great Northern main line is now an interyard line only.

I know most of this just from riding by.

Today ends traditional DST, revised DST gives me hope for a couple more weeks.

Football update: On Monday night FC Nantes rode an early goal by Ligue 2 leading scorer Filip Djordjevic (10 goals in 11 games) and an end of game stoppage time goal to a 2-0 victory over fellow contender Dijon FCO to rise to second in the general classification, three points behind league leading AS Monaco. Today FC Nantes played the biggest game they have played in at least three seasons as they traveled to the principality to take on the league leaders. And Djordjevic has done it again, scoring two first half goals (now 12 in 12 games) to lead Nantes to a 2-0 victory and a tie for first in both points and goal differential with Monaco.