A few years back, when I heard Santa Fe was banning non-handsfree cell phone usage, I thought it was a dumb idea. I mean, it takes some concentration, but you can drive sanely while talking on the cell phone, right? Why do we need the government step in and regulate the usage of such a thing?
It wasn’t too long after that that I started riding a motorcycle. I still thought the cell phone ban was a bad idea, but, I already had a Bluetooth handsfree in the truck, so it didn’t bother me much.
Fast forward to living in Utah. There are far more people out here, and since I pretty much commute on the bike, I get to deal with them all the time. As a result, I have noted that 99% of the time, when I get cut off or otherwise have some kind of altercation with a driver… there’s a cell phone glued to an ear. I mean, it’s not even funny how often it happens.
For example, a couple of weeks back, driving downtown Salt Lake looking for an electronic parts store, this car just pulled right out in front of me from a side street. He noticed me at the last minute, and instead pulled out to the center turn lane, but I was already stopped, and damned if I was going to let him drive behind me. Cell phone on the right hand side.
Yesterday, and truly the last straw, I was riding home on the interstate. They had the interstate down to a single lane from 3, so traffic was congested with everyone merging. I was riding the left lane, as on the bike I can ride pretty up to the last possible moment and safely merge over. I merged the first time no problem, and the second time I started moving over to merge. I was halfway into place when this lifted, black Chevy truck just went ahead and merged over from the right. I mean, just came over. I was just in front of the driver as he came over, and I looked at him. I was greeted by a Motorola Razr cell phone glued to an ear. The guy looks over at me at the last second. I pulled up my left hand, looked him in the eye, and waved to him. Waved like he was an old friend. If I wasn’t wearing a helmet, he would have seen a stupid smile on my face too. The look on his face was priceless. He looked as though he was debating whether he had just really screwed up, or if he should know me from somewhere. He slowed back, I got in front of him, and I shook my head exaggeratedly for his benefit.
So there it is. My last straw, folks. If you are talking on the cell phone and driving, non-handsfree, I have no respect for you. Please quit endangering my life and hang up and drive. I’ll be the first person to support any new laws banning cell phones from henceforth.
Drive responsibly for a change, you jerks.
Forward: It has come to my attention that it might be felt that because I force comments to be made on my site instead of on livejournal that I am somehow trying to force you to visit my site. I assure you, this is not the case. I prefer to host my blog on my own terms, and I only cross-post it on livejournal because Danny whined and whined about having to visit some other site to get updates. Thus, I am trying to limit the avenues of different discussion on each missive issued to one site. Sorry for the convenience of being able to read all comments in one place 
I’ll quit using the ‘more’ link so you don’t have to pop over to my site to read the entire story.
Now on to the content…
My poor pickup. It has been through a lot lately. I’ve strived to keep it looking and running great, and so far it has worked out for me. I only use full synthetic oil, and I stay on top of service. 85,000 miles later it runs like it did when it was new.
However, in the last few months, it has had a hard life. Amanda was driving it as her daily vehicle for a while, until we found a Subaru for her, and she managed to tag a pole with the front bumper and smear paint on it. I think that will buff out if I work on it. Then, she decided to be ‘clever’ like me and back it into the space every night, but got nervous one night because of traffic and managed to back into the same pole and put a good dent into the back bumper that will not buff out. She’s probably going to have a cow that I am posting all this, haha. The radio has a motorized front face that pops open when you put in a CD or when you turn off the truck (so you can remove it for theft deterrent). That has started to not work properly for the last month or so. At least everything else is ok, or so I thought…
Friday I went out to the truck around 11pm with Amanda to go over to Wendy’s for a late night meal. Walking up to the truck, I found a mostly empty Natural Ice beer can laying on the ground next to the drivers door, and it appeared to have exploded. My door was covered in a film of presumably dry beer, but nothing seemed amiss. I sat down in the truck and shut the door and found the problem. My mirror was busted. It would seem someone threw a full beer at my mirror while driving past and shattered it. The dried beer on my door contains bits of glittery glass. Mind you, the truck had been parked on the street with about 15-20 other vehicles near my apartment, so I had not thought much of leaving it there (in fact, I figured I could keep a better eye on it…). I took a picture the next day after a motorcycle ride:
I moved the pickup to the parking area behind the apartment, next to where I park the bike. These are unassigned, covered parking spaces. There are many spaces open in the covered area, and many more in the uncovered area. I have been keeping a close eye on the truck every day since when I leave and come home from work (on the bike). After having been parked there for going on 4 full days, I discovered this taped to the drivers window of my truck last night:
I… I am at a loss here. What does it even mean? It looked like there was two different strokes on the H looking character, so I can only assume that the word written is, ‘troke’. I assume they feel this is their parking space? But it is unassigned parking and there is literally 10 open spaces 4 spaces down.
I removed the sign and threw it on the ground nearby. I figure it will at least be plausible that it fell off, so as to give this genius pause before escalating. I look forward to what might appear tonight.
In a related note, I bought a car alarm off eBay last night. One of the kind that has a ‘pager’ key fob that alerts you if the alarm went off, so at least I will get notification. We’ll see what happens. But, seriously, poor truck. Everyone is picking on it, it seems.
I missed the sign signifying the speed up to 50mph, but it didn’t take me long to correct the mistake with a gentle roll on of throttle. The wind rushed past my helmet, and I was still somewhat lost in thought. The excitement of the road ahead pounded softly in the back of my head, but it was too soon to shut off the music, flip up my visor, and give into the pure physics.
… If you always get up late.. You’ll never be on time…
Broken Social Scene crooned softly into my ear, adding more emotion to my thoughts than was really needed. I had just left Albuquerque behind, and for the last 30 miles I had been pondering the things I had seen and said. I woke up this morning on Frank’s couch, in my sleeping bag. His new cat, Zack, finds mostly anything a toy. I understand the mentality; I have a cat too. Of course, it did not help that Frank was cranked up, trying to stir the cat into a frenzy so it would land on my chest. I packed up my things and left as soon as possible. I called Danny, left a voicemail, called Josephine, another voicemail. So, I headed out to Rio Rancho to see Scott. I hadn’t talked to him in a while, not out of malice, just… lack of something useful to say, really.
Today was also his daughter’s birthday party. She is a toddler, and as I walked into his house, I discovered a fleet of toddlers. Scott and Ansley both wore matching Elmo t-shirts. Parents were everywhere, smiling, snapping photos, encouraging and discouraging the kids. I stood by the door, took off my courier bag and leather jacket, and found myself in the sudden possession of a piece of birthday cake. Kids? I don’t want kids. I’m worried if I had kids that I would mess them up somehow, or fail to be able to provide for them. My sister has kids, and she is doing well with them, so at least my folks are not pressuring me to pop out offspring. Scott is full on into the dad thing. Everyone tells me that having kids is the greatest thing, but Danny says they are just trying to make me unhappy like them, haha.
I found a quiet corner of the couch and waited for the excitement to die down. Scott’s folks popped in a DVD of photos from their recent trip to Antarctica. Yeah, that place. Part of me wonders why you would spend the money to just set foot on the continent and leave 30 minutes later, another part of me thinks it would be very awesome. Danny finally came to my deliverance, thankfully, and I ducked out to meet him at Flying Star on Menaul.
Happy Zombie Jesus day! Hopefully he won’t see his shadow and winter will be over soon.
OK, I just bought my ticket to hell there, but what the hey?
Regardless, here I am, 5:30 in the morning, sorting out my favorite pounding tracks for inclusion on my beat up iPod shuffle. I’m planning on going on a motorcycle ride tomorrow up in the hills, roads willing, and I wanted something thumping. I’ve been running Debian on my laptop here and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the iPod was reconized when I plugged it in. I rather expected an hour or two of futzing with it before anything worthwhile happened.
I hope to be down in NM soonish to wrap up some house stuff. Email if you are interested in stopping in and I’ll let you know when.
I know there have been no updates in a while, but I just have not felt inspired. I still don’t know the area up here all that well, except for my commute and the few tangents here and there, and it has been driving me nutty. Just the same interstate commute every day. The bike seems to love the 85+mph rides into work most days, though, and my fuel mileage stays firmly above 40MPG for the most part regardless.
Brian sent me this link the other day, and it just made me giggle, repeatedly. Brian also firmly believes that audiophiles are to music what pedophiles are to children, but hey…
Seriously, do any of these items listed make anyone go, “Hey, there is a nugget of truth there, I bet it would work!”?
Just nuts.
So, things seem to be warming up out here, maybe a little. With luck I’ll be on the bike more soon, hopefully with a drastic decrease in my gas bills. The difference between 20MPG and 50MPG is boggling when you drive almost 500 miles a week. I have been riding a bit, and even doing about 80-85 on the interstate, the bike has been clicking off 46-48 MPG. I’ve been debating putting this to work for me once it warms up a bit, maybe delivering pizzas via the bike evenings and weekends, but I worry showing up to a door clad in black with a helmet on might not get me many tips, haha.