Friday

So, this blind woman with seeing eye dog started writing me about the room available for rent on the 1st. I have received something like 15 emails from her, all of them long, drawn-out, rambling about how her friends have to come over here and look at the place and on, and on, and on. Redundancy up the ying-yang. I was thinking, since she kept referring to her friends so much, why THEY don't just put her up? Yeah, I can imagine. Probably not a good fit, this person and my house.

Things I saw yesterday:
I was driving the semi down 40th street - a surface street in Phoenix - going to a vendor. I'm in the middle turning lane. I car comes ROARING by me - I'm guessing at least 80 mph in a 45 zone. Instead of slowing down for traffic in front of him (or her), he decides to use the middle/turning lane to pass! Freaking scary - taking everyone's lives in their hands by virtue of the fact that if that driver crashes, their probably going to die and they're probably going to take someone or several someone's with them. One of those "where are the cops when you need them?" type of deals. Going that fast on a street like that - they would have taken that driver to jail.

Our street where my company's building is located. They shut half the street down at the intersection where our street ends and T's into the main surface street. They put up barricades for traffic to come into the street and exit. The lanes were so narrow, I had to move the semi side to side as I was navigating through the barricades. I had to pull straight out across 3 lanes of traffic, across the center lane and into oncoming traffic to execute a turn out of that mess.

There was a cop sitting there, in his car - doing nothing. I came back later - same mess and same cop, seeing all of this going on, not directing traffic, not doing anything. Took several minutes of waiting before the street was completely clear of traffic so I could execute the turn that needed to be made to get into the street.

Coming back out. Same cop, same nothingness. This time, a utility truck was in front of me. He made a turn out of the street onto the major street - too sharp. The barricades were so close, the rear of his vehicle took out a sign, then a barricade, then 2 more barricades, knocking them all over. I thought maybe I had stepped into the Twilight Zone and was watching a real-live showing of the 3 Stooges with all of this nonsense going on and the cop - doing NOTHING at all. What's the point of him being there? Take a nap all day long and get paid for it?

Well, anyway, it's Friday. I got my new rollerblades and tried them out yesterday. Whatta hoot. The extra money spent was well worth it. I bought the most expensive pair in the store - for several reasons. 1, the construction of the blades was much better than anything else they had. I figured they would last several years if treated well. 2, the bearings and the wheels were high quality - ABEC 5 bearings, where are good bearings and the wheels were much higher quality than anything else they had. 3 - and foremost - it was the only pair there that had a good fit. The rest of the blades there were too tight a fit and would have caused a lot of discomfort in using them.

I took all 3 dogs - consecutively - for a walk - well call it a galloping run, actually. Prince about knocked me over a couple of times - he has a mind of his own and when something gets into that pea brain, look out, he's going to do what he's going to do regardless.

Anyway, those blades performed very nicely.

Well, here we are again: work day almost upon me, gotta get offa here and get ready to start the day.

Later.
ben