A State of Detent Has Been Reached At Casa de El Poeta

Mrs. the Poet has been complaining about how I’m “not helping” her throw away my stuff when she does it during the part of the day when I’m still asleep. I don’t understand this. I don’t complain that she’s not helping me write when I start composing stuff at 0300 when the Internet is fastest locally and I can get to reference materials most quickly.

So we reached a compromise, in that Mrs. the Poet will not start throwing my stuff away until I get up, and because we both have things to do over the weekend I will start helping her on Monday afternoon after I have had coffee. There is something in the garage that she calls a “box full of rusty metal stuff” that I’m almost afraid to open. Then we don’t go into the garage again until after I get up Friday.

On other things I’m playing some more Shadowrun tomorrow, and there is a late race on Sunday, the Las Vegas race for the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup. And now that I have a new tube of GOOP™ I can continue to mock up the Mini Sprint-T street version. I haven’t found a model kit that has the Pentastar V6 as an option so kitbashing is right out. But I have that first wheel glued up and ready to test fit to the tire when the glue dries. I’ll probably do that Sunday while I’m watching the race during commercials.

Billed @€0.02 Opus the Unkillable

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$@*& Texas’ weather, and the Feed

OK there is a measurable accumulation of snow on the ground and slush filling the streets that will freeze into an unrideable mess come sundown, possibly an undrivable mess for going to RPG in the morning. You can see from this picture of the place our lunch guest was eating his squirrel yesterday that we do have what Mrs. the Poet refers to as “snew”.

Our guest from yesterday would have a hard time finding where his squirrel went in this mess.

Up first an example of why the Dutch have the best bicycle infrastructure. Dutch provinces to examine ‘rapid’ cycle paths What is being proposed here are real “cycle superhighways” that are grade separated even from other bicycle infrastructure, for riders and pedal-powered vehicles that cruise significantly faster than the 15-20 km/hr that cyclists average around town. This route runs over by David Hembrook but I don’t see anything there about the route…

A little closer to home the widow of a dead FL cyclist is suing over the 3rd nearly identical fatality in 4 years in nearly the same place (and by “nearly” I mean within a few feet). Widow of Key Biscayne cyclist files lawsuit and Wrongful death suit filed by widow of bicyclist killed on Rickenbacker Causeway The only thing that kept this from having 3 hit-and-runs was one of the weapon vehicles being rendered hors du combat by one of the bicycles in the wreck.

Our Daily Ted. Weekend Links: Own your own bicycle coffee café, slower driving works in Scotland, and WeHo candidate surveys

I really need to stop calling these “lifestyle” links, but my broken brain won’t let that word go. So what would be a better word to describe these? Family say cyclist killed in HGV collision was not ‘a risk taker on the roads’ Really, there has to be a better word for it than “lifestyle” because it isn’t lifestyle.

And over on this side of the pond a woman is killed riding home from work, but people remember more about how she lived than what killed her. Bicyclist killed in Plainfield Avenue crash remembered as ‘happy go lucky’

A UK driver facing actual consequences for killing a cyclist? Man to face trial over death of cyclist Terry Brown in Warrington

Update on the consequences of a wreck from years back (that we covered some here) in Oz. Truck driver jailed over cyclist’s Dutton Park railway bridge crushing death I remember this wreck as one of those I assigned to the “unavoidable by human cyclists” category. And the 8 month prison sentence is just beyond words for me. The cyclist involved didn’t even have time for an “Oh, shit!” before he died under a mountain or broken glass bottles.

We may never know what happened to Bono that day… BONO WORKING HARD TO RECOVER FROM BIKE WRECK, PREP FOR U-2 VANCOUVER CONCERT START When someone claims memory loss from a head injury (and Bono without a doubt had a severe head injury) there just is no point in asking what happened. Most of what I “remember” from my wreck is from people who were there telling me afterwards. My personal memory of the wreck ends with being yelled at just before impact.

WA decides to make a federal guideline law. Olympia Update: SSB 5438 – Faulty Traffic Signals Bill – Moves Forward This bill makes law the “Wait 2 minutes or 2 cycles” federal guideline.

IA decides to make sharing a lane with a bicycle illegal unless the bicycle rider chooses to do it. <a href="[Action Alert] Safe Passing Bill in Iowa House That’s right, a “change lanes to pass” bicycle law.

Not to be outdone SD also has a passing law wending its way through the process. Safety zone to pass bicyclists gains tailwind # feet to pass when the speed limit is under 35, 6 feet everywhere else.

More on the proposed CA helmet law. The Best Reasons Not to Support the Helmet Bill #SB192

Also in CA is this little slice of heavenly infrastructure. Why BART Bike Stations Are Actually Very Cool

And in the same city. SFPD Cops Shoot and Kill Suspected Bike Thief and SF OFFICERS SHOOT ARMED SUSPECT TRYING TO ROB CYCLIST IN MISSION DISTRICT As a victim of bike theft myself I say “If that’s the way he tried to do it, then that’s the way he made it go.”

An indictment of what passes for bicycle “infrastructure” in London UK. More than 20,000 cyclist accidents in London over five years That is 4600 people hit and injured severely enough to require a report to the police a year on average, or more than 12 injured cyclists a day, every day.

And a real lifestyle story, one that means something to the disabled vet writing the blog. Wounded Warriors ride together to heal

And I have run out of links again.

Billed @€0.02, Opus

A Wreck-free post on my Death Day

Twelve years ago this morning at 0119 I was hit by a man driving a white pickup truck. That much I know from what I remember of before and immediately after the wreck. What I know from what I learned later is the white pickup was a city vehicle and the driver had made a u-turn to get on my side of the road and pretty much floored it to hit me as fast as he could, and that this was the same driver of a white pickup truck that shouted at me to “get off the fucking road” before I got hit.

I have recounted my injuries in brief and at length in other posts in this blog, in fact there are 2 pages devoted to those injuries, one serious and one humorous. I have also waxed at length about the consequences of those injuries, so that is why I’m not talking about them here. They hurt, they still hurt from time to time, and they changed my life. That is enough about my injuries.

On the runup to this day I was confronted by a large number of coincidences from other people whose lives have been changed by motor vehicle wrecks. Their stories are very similar to mine in most respects, differing only in details that revolve around the different injuries they we got. The hospital stays were very similar, the painful PT was very similar, and the psychological recovery was very similar. Then I started getting stories about soldiers wounded in battle, and saw the same thing from them, down to the problems of recovering from brain injury, and the stigma of not being able to think the same as before the injury because brain injuries normally don’t leave scars. You can’t look at someone and say, “I should be careful with them as they have a damaged brain.”

What I wanted to emphasize in today’s post is that life is for living. Living is not eking out survival but in experiencing as much as you can. In some religions it is said that God created man that He might experience His Creation, others state pretty much the same thing about sentience, we exist that the Universe might experience Itself. All I Know is I am here to live my life to the best of my abilities, to experience as much Life as I can before I can’t any more. Tonight I’m going to a party to celebrate the fact that “I’m not dead, yet” and have my Warlock6 kick some ass fighting political corruption in whatever the name is of the town we are in at the moment, a three-way struggle between the Royals, the Priests, and the Mage Guild. As a magic user my character tends towards supporting the Mages but as I have a Good alignment (Chaotic Good, but still Good) I am ambivalent about all the parties involved in the confrontation. My deity is one that likes to puncture the dignity of the officious and the pompous because that is funny, so the other two parties in the conflict are both “fair game” from those teachings. Also my party (in-game party, not the party IRL to celebrate not being dead) has 3 stage props from one of our performances, the Exploding Radish. I was tending the garden of magical vegetables when the bard came to keep me up to date on the news of the party so I pulled 3 ripe radishes for her. These are the equivalent of a “flash-bang” stage prop and are (mostly) harmless but might be useful as a distraction at some point in the future.

So, anyway, I’m going to go to my party in a bit. Y’all kick back and have a cold one of your preference for me, and remember to kiss your significant others, hug your kids, and remember that live is for living. Tomorrow I’m going to attend my grandson’s first birthday, which as Mrs. the Poet points out is something else I managed to live long enough to experience. I’ll be back Monday (yes I work on holidays).

PSA, Opus

I’m back, and Wreck-Free Sunday

Sorry about the blog not being updated yesterday, But I had a couple of gigs, one in support of my church and community, the other in support of someone that supported me when things went oblong and pear-shaped.

The first was helping man a table (no sexism implied) to sell fruit at our local Pan-Pagan Mabon celebration honoring the trees that had to be cut down in the park we use for such celebrations during the temperate months here in the suburbs of Hell, a little shindig called CommuniTree. One of the things we celebrated was the life of a tree that had been in that park longer than there had been a park to be in, or even a city of Dallas to create a park. The city dates from just before the Civil War, and the ring count on that tree put its “planting date” within a year either way of that. What was initially a single tree in a large forest was cut down because it was deemed too old to be safe where it was in the courtyard of the Bath House Cultural Center. and several other trees that were nearly as old were also cut down. Of the ancient stand there only remains one tree off to the side that still remains.

The second thing I did Saturday was to go repair the headlights of someone that has been there for me when I needed someone to be there. Well the plan was to repair the headlights from their yellowed and oxidized state. The kit I got was marked down from $30 to $6, for a reason. The disks that had the fine-grade wet sandpaper on them worked perfectly, but the bottle of polishing compound was set up so thick that it would only barely come out of the bottle, leaving the job half-done in spite of completely draining one battery pack and nearly so on a second on my cordless drill. I have more polishing compound had I thought to bring it that would have finished the job, but I thought the contents of the kit would have worked. Silly me.

But don’t worry, any links that are still active come Monday will be included in the Monday post, so you’ll still get your fix on bike wrecks and pithy comments about the wrecks and the people that investigate them, just a couple of days late.

PSA, Opus