The Dog Days of Summer

I've been under the radar for a while now mainly as a consequence of being completely knocked off routine. Typically I proceed any commuting with a training ride the day before or if it happens to be a Monday that I would be commuting, a good 25 mile ride on the road bike the Sunday before. Unfortunately, this summer has turned out to be the wettest on record for Houston so most of August I was waiting out thunderstorms. The second half of August I was contending with an artificial emergency at work. Although it was not necessary, my employer insisted that all hands stay late for the last two weeks of August to assist with registration ( as I probably mentioned I work at a university); however, the truth of the matter was it was more about breaking my personal routine rather than registration. The only real emergencies for registration occurred the first day and although it was technically true that registration went on till September, computer support was only needed for the first day for set up and nothing more than that. What other "work" that was worked on during that time period was more a product of people returning than from registration itself. The whole rationale for staying late was a crock. It really had more to do with a particular supervisor knowing that I typically lit out 15 minutes early to go ride. By forcing the whole staff and myself to stay to 6 p.m. it meant that by leaving at six o'clock I had no time to go ride my nightly training ride in Memorial Park.
No training ride equals no commute . The latter is something that was a sore point with this particular supervisor as the permission had not come through him but through his superior and he would be hopping madbecause he couldn't do anything about it when I would leave early after being there for eight hours from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. to beat the traffic through Memorial Park.

I'm hoping that with cooler weather I'll be able to return to commuting.