Yikes! It's Ike!

When we Northerners talk about "the big one" we mean 20 inches of snowfall and white-out blizzard conditions. My brother in Houston called me just now, and he's staring down Hurricane Ike, a 250 mile diameter category 2/3 behemoth with 110mph winds, an eye with a 60 mile diameter (the eye alone is 10 times bigger than our biggest thunderstorms), and a 30 foot high wall of water in the storm surge.

He called to assure me that he picked Mom up from the nursing home and took her to his house, where they've bought out Lowe's or Home Depot to be ready for the fury. He bought a Honda generator that would easily power a modest rambler indefinitely, and they've charged up their cell phones (pray that Ike doesn't knock over all the cell towers), and they've headed for the basement...oh that's right, that's what WE do in a storm. In Houston, first of all the basement is the first thing to be flooded since they're about 10 feet above sea level, and second, nobody there has a basement (see #1).

Anyway, they are battened down for the big one.

Katie, on the other hand, is getting ready for a different kind of big event: our church is hosting a baby shower for Katie and Soulmate tomorrow morning. I've been invited too, and I can tell you, I can hardly wait. (Anybody out there who desperately needs to go for a training ride at exactly 11am tomorrow? Call me ASAP!) Seriously, I am one who believes it is possible to tap into the feminine side and actually enjoy 3 hours playing games and opening presents. Possible--unexpected, but possible.

I go on record, however, to reserve the right to decline to participate in any and all diaper games, especially the one where the hostess melts various chocolate candy bars into disposable diapers, and participants try to guess which warm brown pile belongs with which candy wrapper. This is an almost sacrilege to a lover of sweets. What a waste of a perfectly good candy bar.

Katie is trying to figure out what in the world to wear to the shower, a problem she shares almost daily with Soulmate. Here's one possibility:

For a while there, Soulmate let me pick Katie's outfits because I usually get her up when she wakes up in the morning (Katie I mean; I stopped trying to get Soulmate up many years ago after she bought a nightgown that had a picture of a sleeping bear and said "Caution: may bite if awakened early" or something like that). More recently, for reasons undisclosed to me, she has started laying out clothes for Katie the night before. Is it me?

If you've made it this far looking for something bike related, congratulations! I cleaned up my TT bike and road bike and hung them up on the top racks, and installed Maxxis MiMos on my Ksyriums and put them on my Scott Team CX in advance of CX season. Big Jim invited me to plan for an MEA weekend excursion to Maah Daah Hey (Medora) in October, so I am grudgingly starting to pry the mud off of my Giant Anthem Advanced (it's still in the doghouse for bucking me off and precipitating my rotator cuff surgery in February). The trail looks pretty benign, and Big Jim assures me that there's nothing technical about it, just lots of fun MTB riding. Soulmate has given me the tentative thumbs up, but we'll see how I feel on the CX bike first, then decide if I'm going to push my luck on the MTB.

BTW, good luck to all the Fat Tire Racers tomorrow at Shwammy, especially Big Jim, Jeffro, Matt, Ray, and Doug and Ian. Don't let that kid with one gear beat you this time...