Good morning, sunshine

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - So why the hell am I blogging and having a second cup of coffee in my motel room instead of riding?
I am on the west side of Albuquerque, which means I have to ride through an unfamiliar city during morning rush hour with the blinding light of the rising sun in my eyes. I can only control one of those variables, so I’m waiting for the sun to get a little higher in the sky.
I have about 550 miles to ride today – from here to the home of lifelong friend Sue Crumbo in Edmond, Okla. It involves about 9 hours of riding time, plus maybe two hours off the bike for gas and food, plus an hour lost to a time change, so I expect to get there around sundown. This could be completely off, of course, in the event of rain, construction, or any number of other unknowns. The bottom line is that it’s gonna be another long-ass day on the superslab.
Which brings me to another point. You can’t pour a cup of coffee out of those goddamned cheap in-room coffee carafes without spilling. It’s a design defect that fails to take into account the Coandă effect – the tendency of a fluid to be attracted to a nearby surface. (The principle was named after Romanian aerodynamics pioneer Henri Coandă, who was the first to recognize the practical application of the phenomenon in aircraft development.) It’s the hallmark of poorly designed pouring containers and it’s particularly annoying in a coffee carafe.