Where to start

Dang,

Hard to keep up on this bloggy thing with so much going on. I got crazy overlapping projects at work that keep me away form home for too many hours. The tyke is picking up new words like mad. He still isn’t fully walking yet. He’s been on the verge for months, but he just won’t take those steps. Comfy where he is, just like his old man. Sometimes you gotta take those unfamiliar steps.

I haven’t been on the bike much lately… at least not for any long rides. OTOH, I have been taking the tyke on the city bike to the park, store and back. We actually logged about 5 miles so far in 4 or 5 trips. The new WeeRide seat showed up. The thing is great. I can actually see my boy’s face as we toodle around. Priceless, I tell you what. Only downside is that I have to peddle bow-legged a bit, and peddling ‘a la danseuse’ (that is, out of the saddle, standing) is out of the question.

Pics:

Oh, and on a sad note… Sheldon Brown passed away on Sunday. The man was a legend in the cycling world. Not for winning TDF or anything like that, but for being such a passionate cyclist, a mad scientist (the man made a 63 speed bike and a two speed fixie!), and being just about the biggest walking cycling encyclopedia to ever grace the sport. The length and breadth of his knowledge is amazing in itself, the add to that his oddball sense of humor. I learned proper wheelbuilding form his site, and have a serious bug to build one of his homebrew tandem bikes. I want to learn to weld just to do this. Captain Bike, you will be missed. The light of the world is slightly duller without you.

The first race of the season is upon us. The CCCX race in Fort Ord (or is it Toro Park?) is this weekend, and I haven’t even turned a crank to a sweat in a month. I’m gonna race, and I’m gonna come in DFL, but that’s okay. Gotta start somewhere.

The political thing is heating up. I was always stunned that Dubya made it as far as he did with his crap. Take side as you will, conservative, neo-con, liberal, moderate, whatever. We all have our opinions. Y’all probably know pretty well where I land on that scale. But the guy managed to take the Constitution and put it aside as he saw fit… as if the rules didn’t apply to him. The way I see it, he put aside what is the framework of what our country is about. He was not on our side.

Anyway, I see great things happening. Mostly the voter turnout in the latest Primary. Whoa, baby! If people cared this much in 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006 we would not be in the serious messes we are in today.

IMO, our country is (or at least was) arguably in shambles. We seriously lost our way. Heck, IMO we lost our way back when Reagan turned this country from a land of ‘us’ to a land of ‘me’. Kinda like Kurt Vonagut’s line of ‘we could have saved the world, but we were too cheap’. That idea applies here too, methinks. It became about the individual taking as much as he could from the system with no regard for how it effects our society as a whole for the long term. As we have seen over the last 27 years, it has become all about how much can be shaved off our taxes, how much the useless crap costs us from the store, how much it costs to fill the tank. I think there is lots of places the gubmint can save a few bucks, but schools, public services, health care, and infrastructure are not places to cheap stuff out. Call me a commie all you want (and those who do should look up what Communism actually is… because it has never actually existed on this Earth), but that is the investment in We the People. We are just mortgaging our future. Ove rthe last 27 years we have seen our jobs go overseas to save a couple bucks, and the middle class is being hollowed out to create working poor, and richer rich people. The folks in power have us arguing over the color of the drapes in the kitchen while they steal the TV and stereo from the living room.

I know it isn’t about the cruddy politicians.  It’s about the people. It’s entirely our fault for largely not being involved. We have to remember that first preamble of ‘We the People’. They wouldn’t have gotten away with it if we didn’t let them… on the whole. It seemed that just about everybody knew about the lying, cheating and stealing (well documented, I might add) and still didn’t turn up to vote the scumbags out. I’m not limiting this to the Republican Party, either. The Dems knew full well about the torture, lying and cheating, but went along with it because they wanted something out of it politically, not to mention the failure to investigate the blatant high crimes. The Dems were asleep at the switch… the enablers.

Point is, this latest Primary’s record turnout gives me great hope in the future of this country. This country would be a politically very different landscape if everybody voted… heck, even if 75% voted instead of the typical 50-ish percent that turned out in the past.

Anyway, that’s my little sleep deprivation fueled ran for the evening.