We have a railroad bridge around here that’s 10’9″ above a four lane road. I don’t know when it was built, but it looks pretty old (it looks like something they made back in the good old days when they didn’t cheap out on material), and it certainly predates me. Every now and again, a vehicle that’s taller than that (typically a tractor trailer) tries to drive underneath it, which generally results in the top of the trailer being peeled back like the top of a sardine can, and the truck getting stuck, holding up traffic for hours as they try to pry the damn thing out.
Over the years, they’ve tried pretty much everything short of lowering the road (it’s right next to a lake, and would probably flood constantly if they did that) or raising the bridge (did I mention this thing looks awfully solid), including painting the edge of the thing fluorescent orange, adding flashing lights, and putting a humongous yellow warning sign across the road about a mile away, equipped with flashing warning lights. I get the feeling that drivers must think they’re kidding or something. Still, people keep hitting this thing (I think the score is something like Bridge: 47, Trucks: 0, and, as far as I can tell, the bridge hasn’t moved even a faction of an inch in all these years).
Anyhow, in the wee hours of Saturday morning, a “Mega Bus” (which is apparently what we call double-decker buses up here) sitting about 12 feet, 8 inches high and on its way to Toronto, got lost, missed a turn, missed all the warning signs, and slammed into the bridge and flipped over, killing 4 people sitting in the front of the top deck (whose heads, if you do the math, would be, well, not in a very good spot), and sending a whole lot more to the hospital where I work. Pretty nasty looking crash.
So, anyhow, while I’m sure the view is very nice from the top level of one of these buses, my advice is to sit on the first level (and toward the back).
The first Sunday of football season is in the books. The Bills lost, which is always nice to see, and I hope Eagles fans are happy now that they’ve finally gotten rid of Donovan McNabb, who didn’t have a spectacular debut with Washington, but at least beat the Cowboys (which is the team I most enjoy seeing lose – not that I saw the game, ‘cuz I go to bed pretty early these days). Speaking of games on too late for me to watch, the Jets play tonight. Let’s hope they manage to come up with a win, after a less than impressive (and fortunately meaningless) preseason.
Oh well, time to get going. I have a tractor to pay for.
It’s Monday. No surprise there, I’m sure. But it was the first conference of the year for me. It started promptly at 9 and ended at 3. I read the paper, did the crossword and still had lots and lots of time to listen to stuff I could have covered in one hour or less. And there is that one person who has to ask stupid and repetitious questions just to make sure we are all properly bored.
I did get to listen to an NPR report on the affects of Compstat, one of the legacies of ol'[ Giuliani. Originally it was a way of tracking crimes in a precinct so that the captain of said precinct could more effectively deploy his cops. It worked quite well and crime went down, so the chief of police, Bratton at the time, decided that crime should keep going down and he’d have the stats to prove it: compstat. Well, of course crime can only decrease so much and the police, who were under pressure to bring down their crime stats, started to under-report crime and fake the statistics in other ways. Thus the police became the servants of the stats instead of the other way around.
But compstat has made it’s way around the nation and even to places like Australia where…surprise…initial success at lowering crime has become a demand that crime keep going down and thus police all over are faking their stats among other ingenious ways of making thing look much better than they are.
Speaking of making things look better than they are, it was 1/2 bath Monday for me with sanding, painting, caulking and priming a 4’X4′-ish 1/2 bath off the kitchen. Invested in some new tools including a Ryobi detail sander and a baby 7-1/2″ Ryobi miter saw for trim work (which I have yet to un-box and figure out). I only wish I were channeling my father’s great creative fixing-upping and mechanical skills, but I’m doing the best I can … which ain’t great, but PJ is a great support and we do the best we can. He does the heavy stuff with the Big Tools & I do the little stuff with my Little Tools because my fragile female aging frame cain’t wangle bigass powertools around. 😥
This tiny bathroom space originally had an oversize toilet & sink along with orange, brown, black, white and yellow striped 1970 wallpaper over white ceramic tile that looked like it was recycled from our original local gas station’s bathroom. I ripped the ugly wallpaper off the wall about 2 months after I moved into this place 17 yrs ago, only to reveal a hideous dark aqua 1960 paint color covered over with the glue from the hideous wallpaper and we have lived with that for all those years. :barf:
We bought a new toilet and sink for this 1/2 bath, oh, maybe almost 10 yrs ago or so, and I kept moving the boxes here & there in the house to get them out of the way because this project just kept getting postponed because the old sink & toilet were functional and PJ just didn’t hate the white f*#king tiles as much as I did. Finding Green Acres did the trick, though, & I hauled the old toilet & sink & tiles to the dump last week & did a ritual purge of the past.
My lungs are still twitchy from all the dust generated from the sanding-of-the-ugly-horrible-wallpaper-glue & layers of bumpy paint (I did wear a mask, which fogged up my glasses so I couldn’t f*#king see 😡 & gave up on the protective eyewear because my goddam glasses were f’d up anyway 😡 ).
But, got the glue-shit off the walls & primed the bare wood & glue shit sanded walls, so tomorrow is the big day for the actual painting of the walls, window & woodwork and then we need to install the “new” (10 yr old unused) toilet & sink. :banana: :billcat:
Anyone wanna buy a very nice house in Syracuse that’s the same age as PJ? :yinyang:
RG, perhaps Trixie would be willing to give my cats a lesson or two in mousing. I think they don’t want to get their paws dirty.