Like this:

It’s harvest time here! I rode to work Monday and by the time I rode back home many of the soybean fields had been cleared and harvested. A few of the corn fields have been cut, too. It was a perfect fall day on Monday — really nice ride, but with a KILLER headwind. I’m still on the Ross because I have had NO time to complete the RWB 5900 overhaul. Basically it’s together, but I want to test ride it to check the BB adjustment and I should probably pull the headset out and overhaul the bottom HS bearing, which after these rain rides tends to seize up and get rough. Think this was my slowest commute yet of about 50 minutes, but I don’t have stats since there’s no computer on the Ross. Thought about turning around before I got to the first crossroad — but I was all dressed and packed and moving down the road, so I kept riding.

The wind flattened a lot of the cornstalks in front of my house. It was really strong overnight, tossing and blowing everything around. Fortunately this house seems a lot better in windy conditions than my previous apartment, although only real winter winds will truly show the difference.

Tuesday morning was another beautiful day, but rain was called for in the afternoon. I deliberated over the Weather Channel’s forecast before deciding to ride in (still on the Ross, fortunately.) The afternoon commute was another good one, although there was a decent SSE 8 mph headwind. The moon was full and beautiful last night so I thought a night ride home might be pretty… alas, the rain did fall during the afternoon and during my Novel class in the evening. I had a lot packed into the class, including showing the last half of the Dangerous Liaisons movie (Glenn Close and John Malkovich) and a quiz, which I did at the end, so some students finished up around 9:30 PM. By the time I got my stuff packed it was 9:45. Realized that my clothing choice was really stupid — black pants and a navy-blue jacket… I’ll have to remember that in the future! At least I have lots of reflective stuff and lights (front & rear on the bike plus a red LED flasher on my backpack). And once I leave town there isn’t a lot of traffic to worry about.

I scudded home ahead of the strong SSE tailwind, watching the moon go in and out of the thickening grey clouds. Although the roads were damp, I was dry and comfortable (fenders!) Approximately fifteen minutes after I got home I suddenly realized that rain was POUNDING the house! Total cloudburst. Weird. But I missed it, luckily.

Wednesday morning I went for a walk up to the Wolf Creek bridge (3/4 mile up my road):

Had to go in on Wednesday for an A&S faculty meeting. I brought up the wording of the TU student-athlete missed class policy. I don’t think the director of athletics is too happy with me. I want to propose a wording change that actually allows faculty to impose some sort of attendance policy on student athletes; my suggested change is that if a student misses more than 20% or 25% of a class that they’ll be penalized or will fail the course. Amazingly, BonnieT (who is our faculty athletics liaison) presented this idea in the Business school meeting and the faculty didn’t jump on board! As it is currently written, faculty cannot penalize athletes for missing class for sports competition during the season that their sport is in competition. The way the policy is worded means that they could miss any number of class sessions and faculty cannot penalize them. The Dir of Athletics wants this to be “handled on an individual basis,” but I think it needs to be stated clearly in the policy. I have one student in the Novel class who’s borderline for this already, another who dropped 141 because he was going to miss too many class sessions, and another instructor has a student who has missed 7 classes in the first 4 weeks of the semester (not all were his fault, but still…) I think TU has grown enough and has enough athletes that we need to formalize the policy and make academic integrity a goal. So now I have to attend the October Athletics-Academics Committee meeting and present my case. Hmmm. Making lots of friends here, indeed

Since I have orchestra on Wednesday nights I just drove in with the bass in the car and stayed in Tiffin until rehearsal. We still have a month to go before our concert — I think I’d be ready in a week, but the group is still really struggling with Beethoven and Brahms. The violins have a lot of notes in the Academic Festival Overture! We need more violas. Another bass might be coming, which would be nice. I certainly hope that percussion and brass might soon be rehearsing. I am enjoying rehearsing and practicing Brahms and Beethoven (always fun and challenging music); the actual performance will be decent. I keep imagining Geoffrey Simon or Larry Rachleff livening up the group and making some pithy comment that just gets the *music* out of everyone. We’re a little pedestrian at the moment.

Thursday morning was another day of deliberation, but I decided to ride. These days I have as much interest in the weather and wind direction as any sailor. It remained clear all day until my afternoon class, when it began to drizzle. Vince offered a ride, but it wasn’t raining much and I managed to scoot pretty quickly after class was over and was on the road by 4 PM. Although it was damp and drizzling a little, it wasn’t a bad ride (after the CFC 113-mile-rainfest, my standards of wet riding have been greatly altered!) The raincover on the Trek backpack works really well and I have everything in a plastic bag inside, too.

Friday and Saturday I worked at the Elmore bike shop to cover for the owner, who’s on a cruise out of Barcelona. I was by myself and kept busy building bikes. It rained ALL DAY on Friday; Saturday was really nice out, but I was too tired to get up early to ride to Elmore! Morgan woke me up 20 mins. early* (by early, I mean before I planned to get up, which has little relevance compared to Morgan’s programmed breakfast time) on Saturday to play the food game. She was quite insistent. There was a claw to the face involved — a delicate, yet quite sharp, invitation to get out of bed! I was very grouchy but dutifully threw food bits around the house for ten minutes.

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