Officiousness

I had my first "Ex-Com" meeting yesterday, a five-plus hour marathon session that I'm told will be the only long meeting of the year. Most of the rest of the meetings are likely to be ten to twenty minutes in duration. Half will be after club general meetings.

On the agenda were things like the club budget for the coming year, what external events the club will support and how, what shape my education program will take, budgets and policies for various efforts within the club and what other agencies and groups are doing to promote cycling in the area.

As a result, I didn't get to ride any yesterday, although I know of a few folks who did.

I had to haul 250# of ice-removal salt from the main warehouse this morning, so I drove. Since I was less distant than usual from the appliance parts supplier, I picked up a couple orders that were waiting for us there as well. The forecast lows are such that I doubt I'll want to ride again until at least Wednesday, but it looks like Thursday and Friday show some promise. Hopefully some of the snowmelt will have a place to go rather than remain on the driving surfaces.

Forecast for today is cloudy weather, but I see sunshine at the moment. Hopefully it will last a while. This is much more conducive to getting rid of the ice than the forecast we were given late last week, which predicted four to five inches of snow on top of the mess we have.

The current number of folks without electricity has dropped to 56,000, from over 600,000 at some point last week. The problems remaining still involve a lot of downed trees, to say nothing of the tree limbs that fell on private property, where landowners will have to arrange for removal. Lots of folks cannot afford having such work done, so dangers will persist for months in some places. Yikes.