Monday, 22 December 1997:
Slip-Sliding Away
I woke up this morning to the sonorous strains of the radio informing me of today's weather forecast: freezing rain. Yes, it's the middle of December in Wisconsin and it's raining! I know we're supposed to have a mild winter due to El Nino, but this is ridiculous.
It's dangerous, too. I walked down to get a haircut (another sign of a mild winter; I have incredibly thick hair*, but if it were a normal winter I wouldn't get a trim for another couple of months) and the whole sidewalk was a sheet of ice; I walked on the grass. On the drive home, I saw a guy in front of me spin out on a downhill and slam into a signpost on the sidewalk. I looked in his window as I went by and he looked okay (he was only going about 10 MPH), which is good since I had no opportunity to stop for another half-mile, due to the traffic patterns.
Fortunately, I carefully pumped my brakes on all the downhills (careful readers will recall that it's all downhill from my workplace to home) and got back without any mishaps. Nasty.
My cats greeted me tonight with a broken lamp; they'd knocked the clip-on thing attached to the bookcase by my bed down. It was probably Newton, who's wanted to jump on top of that bookcase a lot lately, and I've been moving stuff around trying to dissuade him. He must have tried again, missed, hung onto the lamp, and brought it down with him. The bulb shattered into little bits, which required vacuuming and pliers. The lamp still works, thankfully, and the cats don't seem hurt. Dummy.
I'm being good tonight: I'm doing my entry early so I can take care of some other stuff. I'm also not starting on my Babylon 5 Web page, which I've wanted to do for a while. I want to at least finish some projects for my baseball page first. I need to stop just starting projects when the mood strikes me. It's not that I never finish them, but rather that I end up with too much on my plate and it feels like I never finish them, which is no fun.
I think that all expected Xmas gifts from family and friends are finally here, although I do apparently have one more at the Post Awful to pick up. Not sure who it could be from; my Dad's brother's family, maybe. Yes, I'm actually going to wait 'til Christmas Day to open them. That's just the way I am.
If you enjoy on-line quizzes, check out Where Do You Fit? by The Pew Research Center for The People & The Press to see where you fit in their division of the political spectrum. I'm a Secularist, which was really the only choice for me among the ten classifications they list. Any religious class is straight out, and I'm fairly anti-(big-)business and moderately pro-government.
* To go with my incredibly thick head, I guess. (Hey, if you think I'm gonna give you straight lines and not snatch the opportunity away from you, you've got another think coming!)
Michael Rawdon
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