Suppose you're visiting Anchorage. People suggested you rent a bike and try the bike trails. But there are side trails here and there, many unmarked. Finally, you get to this map.
Below is a closer look.
The "You Are Here" sign is part of the map. I added the numbers. Suppose you want to go:
to #1 which way do you go? a. Left __ b. Right__ c. Back___ d. Forward____
to #2 which way do you go? a. Left __ b. Right__ c. Back___ d. Forward____
to #3 which way do you go? a. Left __ b. Right__ c. Back___ d. Forward____
to #4 which way do you go? a. Left __ b. Right__ c. Back___ d. Forward____
I've added the big W and big E to the sign. Why can't they put the signs facing north, so when you look at them, the right side is east and the left side is west, like in a normal map? I couldn't find anything that said where north was on the map.
About a year ago, I came across a woman studying another south facing map on the bike trail. She was going totally in the wrong direction because she assumed that left on the map corresponded with left in real life. How foolish of her.
On the other (north) side of the path from where the map is, there is plenty of space to put this sign. There, left would match real left and right would match real right.
For people who work with bike trails I have a few suggestions:
Maps should be oriented to match the geography they represent. General custom is to put N on top, E to the right, S at the bottom, and W on the left of maps. Thus maps generally should be facing north so that what is left on the map corresponds with what is left of the person reading the map.
Take a regular bike rider along with you so she can point out problems bikers might have, such as:
walk buttons on street lights are off the trail and/or facing away from the trail, so a person on the trail (walker, runner, biker) can't reach them from the trail
make signs as carefully as you make them for cars
take down temporary "trail closed" signs when you stop working and generally keep the trails open as much as possible so cyclists can still use the trail.
Not everyone processes information the same way. Take a couple people with different ways of processing visual cues and ask them to follow the directions, the map, etc. See if they all can. If they can't, ask them why. Try to find another way of showing things that everyone can understand.
Give bicyclists the same attention and respect you give car and truck drivers.
Answers: #1 - You have to go right. (The arrow doesn't really match where you are. It should be where the black trail ends at the red trail. If you look at the first picture, you can see there is NO trail behind the sign.) #2 - You have to turn around and go back away from the sign. #3 - You have to go left. #4 - You have to go right.
After the meeting was over yesterday, I had lunch with S, then met M&J. Before heading out to their place I stopped to see if I could find Mike. He wasn't home, but his wife and Sky were. While we were talking, hummingbirds were stopping to fuel up at their feeder. And everytime Sky would tell me there was one, it would be gone before I could get a picture. But one rufus hummingbird actually sat on the perch and took a long drink.
I'm used to hummingbirds, having grown up in LA. I've even held a couple of hummingbirds. One I rescued from a cat who split when I came running over. The bird was lying flat on its back, wings outspread. It was so light. I put it in a box and gave it to a neighbor, since I'd just been pulling out of the driveway with my son in his baby carseat. The bird flew off when the neighbor opened the box a while later. The second time was more recently when I found a hummingbird lying on the grass with an apparent broken wing in my mother's backyard. After calling the bird rescue, we ended up taking it to the nearby city animal shelter.
I've never seen a hummingbird in Anchorage, though I've heard they get as far north as Girdwood, and rumors of sightings in recent years in Anchorage. The web found me this from Stacy at Elmendorf:
If we increase people's awareness of the possibility of Rufous Hummingbirds here in spring and summer (and Anna's or Costa's hummingbirds in fall), will they be noted in higher numbers than previously? Or are there simply so few hummingbirds in this area that we won't notice an appreciable increase in reports no matter how widely we publicize the possibilities? How about Anna's Hummingbirds specifically? There are a few records of this hummingbird for Alaska. Can we generate more just by encouraging people to report ANY hummingbird they see in fall? Hmmm! I think so. Let's try it!
SO -- if you see a hummingbird in the Anchorage bowl (shucks -- how about southcentral Alaska) at any time, please send an email to: stacy[at]trochilids.com. Replace the "[at]" with "@" of course! If you can get photos, send them along, too.
I won't kid you. I'm a federally licensed hummingbird bander (permit #23148), and part of my hummingbird research involves the opportunity to personally come to your yard to catch, measure, photograph, band, and release unharmed your hummingbird.
Sky is growing fast and talking so politely and clearly.
He also showed me how wide he could open his mouth.
We went back to J&M's house after a few errands, including rescuing some nice lumber from a dumpster. M showed me her recycled hot tub.
Then J and I biked - he to pick up the other car in from the repair shop, and me off to get a quick preflight bike ride in the Mendenhall Glacier valley. I was going to add a little bike video, but I don't have time to finish it now, maybe later. Headed to the Alaska Apple User Group meeting tonight at the Museum. If you're an Apple user and don't know about these folks, you should give it a try. Seven tonight. But normally the second Wednesday of the month - except July.
In a post the other day I used the phrase "$4 a gallon bikers" to suggest that while $3 a gallon gas didn't change driving habits, $4 a gallon does seem to be getting people to seek alternative forms of transportation.
This cartoonist in the June 5, 2005 Anchorage Daily News - I can't quite read the signature enough to confirm it on Google - seems to have the same perception. But I'm not sure whether this violates the Anchorage Daily News' or the cartoonist's copyrights. Like a photo, it is use of the whole piece, but I would argue I'm using it not simply to decorate my post, but as a reference that others also believe that somehow the $4 threshold reveals that the price of oil is indeed not inelastic, that there comes a point where consumers change their gasoline purchasing habits because of price. And that $4 is that threshold for a significant number of people. And that the phrase $4 biker has meaning to others besides myself. So, is the name ARIAZ? ARIA?
I discovered Clark's Mt. View Forum tonight because he left a comment on my bike rack post. From what I've read on his site, I'd describe it as a local activist site that is keeping track of what's happening in Mt. View. He's got posts on the Heritage Land Bank's plans for the old Native Hospital grounds, debates over the lighting at the Bragaw and Glenn Highway intersection, pictures of the new Clark Middle School construction. This is a real service to the folks in Mt. View and perhaps a great model for other community bloggers to emulate. Great blog Clark!
His blog also sent me to a couple of commuter biking blogs that have thought about this sort of stuff much more thoroughly than I have.
You Just Don't Want To has some tips for experienced commuter bikers when giving advice to the new $4 a gallon bikers:
I suspect that most people wanting to give this bike commuting thing a try will more or less load up the old bike in the garage and head out instead of researching things a little. They probably don't read blogs like this until they get hooked. So I say to you, the knowledgeable, don't let your neighbor go forth to wreak havoc in the public arena alone with his inexperience. Engage him. Offer him your experience and wisdom. Avoid telling how much he needs to buy because his stuff is junk. Avoid pressuring him to ride every day, and under no circumstances make light of his fear of riding in traffic. Make sure he has the tools and knowledge to repair a flat tire. Failing that, make sure he knows where the buses go and how to use the front bicycle rack.
There's some wisdom here, but I also sense a bit of bike snobbism and no consideration at all that my neighbor might be a she. I seem to be doing ok on my ten or 15 year old piece of junk, but then I don't have too far to ride to get downtown or most places I want to go. But the patch kit advice is good, but I was able to get a bus with a bike rack home.
Discovering new (to me) Alaskan blogs raises a dilemma. I only have a few Alaska blogs listed in my links. The whole idea of exchanging links to increase your various blog ratings makes sense at one level, but then you get such a long list of blogs that it really doesn't mean anything. Maybe I could have a section that says "Blogs I check regularly" and one that says "Blog Link Exchange List". There are some Alaska blogs that are listed in almost every Alaska blog I go to. I started out by linking to blogs I read regularly and/or thought were unique and that (at least at the time) didn't get much attention. We're learning the 'rules' as we go, which is perfectly fine with me.
As a kid I despaired that I would never be able to read all the books in the library. But we accept the fact that we can't be friends with everyone in the world, or even all the people we really could spiritually connect with in the world, or even keep up with all the people we have met and do truly connect with. So, it's ok if we can't read all the blogs, or even keep up with the ones we've started reading. There's our own lives to live too. So, hi Clark, it was great to run into you tonight. And Smudgemo in Berkeley too. And Philip who went skinny dipping at Harbin Hot Springs today. Harbin is Anchorage's sister city in China, but Phil was in at a different Harbin - in Northern California.
When the price of oil hit $3 people groused, but didn't seem to significantly change their energy use patterns. But now that it's flirting with $4, I'm seeing friends who are reconsidering whether they can use their bikes to commute to work, at least sometimes.
For people to use bikes more, we have to have infrastructures that make bikes more convenient - like good and plentiful bike racks. Portland has lots of bike racks and they are often interesting designs.
Friday afternoon I used this bike rack at the Court building when i went to the wedding.
At the Sullivan Arena for the Elton John concert, we couldn't find the bike racks (I'm assuming there are some somewhere.) Neither could these folks.
Or these folks.
Trees and parking meters and no parking signs are fine right now, but when more people start using bikes, non bikers are going to get tired of bikes tied up to everything strongly fastened to the ground.
And then I always wonder when I see a lock like this. Was the bike stolen? If so, why didn't they at least take the lock home? Or maybe these reflect people who lost the keys for the locks.
My last post on flat tires was April 8. (Though not necessarily my last flat post.) Getting it fixed led to finding things, people, and places we might not otherwise have seen.
There seemed to be some larger purpose for today's flat too. It didn't happen until I was within blocks of where I was supposed to meet Brendan for lunch, so it was easy to push the bike and still be on time. After lunch we walked together a ways and then I headed toward the transit center on 6th and G.
There was a bus, sitting out the green light right there at the corner, giving me time to get a green and cross in front of it and see that it indeed was a #2 bus that would drop me within 200 yards of my house. I'd never had cause to use the bike rack on the front of the bus and the driver came out to show me the release lever and how to lock the wheel in. I got on the bus and off it went. Mind you, at that time of day, these buses go once an hour.
As I got on the bus I saw James, someone I had on my to call list, who I hadn't seen since probably last October. We sat together and caught up - nothing major except he's getting married next week! I couldn't help but think about how the flat had gotten me onto this bus so I could see James. I know that statisticians could show me that it was all within the probability of coincidence, but it is eerie.
I got home fine, found my patch kit, found the hole. Well, it turned out there were two holes, and got the tire fixed for my evening meeting.
But I do think having little tire repair shops scattered all over the place where someone else will fix it in a few minutes for 20 baht (60¢) would be nice too.
Riding home from the Shining Lights dinner last night. It's about 10:15 as I get onto the bike trail in the middle of town, yet in this ancient woods. The sun's behind the clouds for a moment. The cool spring's delayed the greening. It's beautiful nevertheless.
I stop and wait a few minutes for this moose to wander a little further from the trail.
Almost home, now, I catch a glimpse of the sun setting from 36th. It's 10:30pm. Solstice is still a month off.
Today's ADN has severalbikingarticles, which reminded me I had started putting together a video of my ride to the office in Chiang Mai. I'd wanted to find a way to strap the camera to my chest as I rode, but that never happened. Finally I just tried biking one handed and that worked. Sort of. Here's the daily ride I had, pretty much in real time, but using clips put together over several days.
Now that we're back after two and a half months without a car, we're reassessing all our daily transportation - can we walk? can we bike? Can we do this without using fossil fuel? A lot of the time we can't, but a lot of the time we can.
As gas gets more expensive, biking becomes more of an option for other people as well. But why are some people so torqued by bicyclists? I've thought about this a lot. I think people get irritated for different reasons - about anything, not just bikes. Sometimes it's legitimate because someone has done something rotten. Often though, the anger is more about the angry person than the target. Here's my list of reasons people don't like bicyclists.
Problems with the cyclists
Cyclists driving in traffic without regard to the dangers they are causing to themselves and others - this is especially a problem in the winter when drivers have enough trouble with slick streets already
Smug, arrogant cyclists who use their cyclist status as a holier than thou platform
Problems with the angry person suggesting deeper emotional reactions to cyclists
For some people, having a car is a symbol of success. Perhaps they had hard times growing up, perhaps it was pounded in by parents, but a car shows you've made it. Cyclists are seen as losers who haven't made it, or cyclists' talking about the merits of cycling seem to be attacking them as drivers.
For some people cars are a symbol of progress and development and cyclists are seen as greenies who would stop progress. This can be tied up with one's faith in capitalism as the only true path. People on bikes are thus seen as childish and preventing the economy from developing the way it should, essentially they are attacking the American way in these folks' minds.
People with health and weight problems may feel mocked or slighted by slim bikers zipping along in their tight shorts.
Some people are just mad at the world and bikes just make one more target - it's easy to play bully to a cyclist when you're in a Dodge pickup
I'm sure readers can add reasons. But it seems that one way to get past seemingly intransigent problems is to step back and look not at the apparent issue, but address the underlying problems. We need to stop using bikes as symbolic whipping posts for other issues. As we face the need to cut back on energy use, we could learn that there are plenty of viable ways to use less fossil fuels.
In addition, people have all sorts of reasons why they can't use a bike to commute to work.
Reasons people can't commute to work by bike
need to stop along the way to shop, pick things up
takes too much time
no place to shower at work
too far away
too dangerous
too cold
need to wear nice clothes at work
what if my kids got sick at school and I had to pick them up?
I have to carry things that I can't fit on a bike
We could add more and more such reasons. Many are valid, but only up to a point. This isn't an all or nothing proposition. There's no reason why we can't have hybrid car/bike/bus commuters. Someone could bike a couple days a week, when they don't have to be dressed up. Or they could leave an extra set of clothes or two at work. Buses have bike racks, so you could bus the bike to work and ride home.
The danger parts are legitimate in many cases - but if more people got serious about biking, bike lanes could get bigger and could be kept free of debris and could be well plowed. Cold is sometimes an issue, but if people can be out all day skiing or snow machining, they can bike 30-60 minutes each way to work.
When we are faced with something new, the normal reaction is to think about how it is going to cause problems. What we won't be able to do. The list above gives some reasons people offer why biking to work is impractical. But there are also benefits which are unseen. Things that make me feel great when I can use my bike instead of a car.
The benefits of biking
Individual
Little or no traffic on the bike trails (of course that's a good reason not to encourage too many people to start biking to work)
Get exercise on the way to work or on an errand (and Anchorage is cool enough, and biking allows one to move forward while coasting, and biking always creates its own breeze so one needn't get all sweaty)
Great scenery along the bike trails - I'm literally in the woods part of the way instead of on city streets
Great parking - free parking close to where I need to be
Time to think and reflect
No gas bills when I ride
It just feels good
Community
One less car per cyclist on the road (carpoolers excepted)
One more parking space per cyclist (carpoolers excepted)
Less oil used
Less pollution
Healthier population - lower medical costs
Happier population
This is not an all or nothing proposition. Not everyone can do their jobs without the storage space and speed of a car. Not everyone can ride a bike every day. And while the oil savings, for instance, of one commuter may seem negligible, if 30 million people (10% of the US population) rode a bike and saved one gallon of gas per work day, that would be 30 million gallons of gas. That isn't going to save the world by itself, but if we take a US Department of Energy estimate prepared for then Senator Frank Murkowski that there is
a mean or expected value of 10.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable undiscovered oil in the ANWR coastal plain
and that there are 42 gallons of gas in a barrel of oil (it's more complicated than that, but that will do for now)
That comes to about 432,600,000,000 gallons of gas from ANWR. Divide that by those 30,000,000 a day saved by the hypothetical bikers and you get 14,420 days. Divide that by 260 workdays per year (we'll forget about all the people who work on weekends) and you get 55 years. So, just having 10% of the US population save 1 gallon of gas a day by biking to work would save the equivalent of ANWR's mean estimated oil in 55 years. (And that's estimated, it could be less. And it could be more.) That cumulative amount of savings is not insignificant.
(On the other, according to the Department of Energy's Weekly Petroleum Status Report for the Week Ending May 9, 2008 (page 6), in the US
Over the last four weeks, motor gasoline demand has averaged nearly 9.3 million barrels per day.
While barrels of motor gas and barrels of crude oil appear to be slightly different, if everyone - including commercial drivers - took a one day driving holiday per month, we'd save the equivalent of ANWR's estimated mean value of 10.3 billion barrels of recoverable crude in about 10 years.
Humans are amazing. We're amazing in how easily we get used to the status quo and don't want to change. But we're amazing in how we can solve problems and come up with totally unexpected solutions to problems.
So bike to work at least once this summer. Or bike part way to work and take a bus the rest of the way. And if you can't bike, find some other way to move your muscles and save gas.
When you live in Alaska, you get spoiled when it comes to fresh fish. If you can smell it, you shouldn't eat it. We did have fish dishes now and then in Thailand - local river or lake caught, or farmed fish - but the idea of sushi or sashimi, which was readily available, just didn't seem appetizing at all. Not that far away from the ocean.
So our first trip to Yamato Ya was a real treat.
As was the bike ride home. Cool is such a great concept after hot for so long.
Last Wednesday I rode my bike to the bike shop to get the rear brake tightened. He fixed this and that too and then I rode into the old town to meet J for dinner. Since she doesn't have a bike here or show an interest in one, she walks a lot. (If you ride anywhere besides the back sois I take to work, you really have to ride in the traffic.
No bike lanes, no sidewalks you could ride on - you can barely walk on them. So it can be pretty intimidating.) So we walked home - it took about two hours. Just before we got home I realized we needed bananas and I was ready to ride up Thanon (road) Suthep. But my bike was weird. I had a flat in front. So I just pushed it the rest of the way home. And the next day we left for Mae Sai.
So yesterday (Sunday) I borrowed a monkey wrench and took the front wheel off and we walked to a little shop that fixes flats.
We left the wheel there and walked up the road to Wat Umong. This temple is known as the forest temple. I ride past it every day on the way to and from work, but I'd never been in it. J had gone in once to look around. This is a major wat that tourists go to, but it isn't in the middle of town. For most people, you have to work to get to it. So it seemed like, since it's in our neighborhood, we ought to check it out.
After looking at a few books on Buddhism, environmental issues in Thailand, meditation, we moved on.
Looking at the map, we decided to just follow the trail. This is not your average Wat. It's in a forest and the buildings are scattered here and there amongst the trees. First we went to the library. I haven't been in one for a while, so it was nice to browse the books - they had English as well as Thai and other languages.
The middle sign is in English and says there will be Monk talks in English on Sundays from 3-5 at the fish pond. It was four. The blue arrow signs points to the fish pond. So we wandered down and found about 15 foreigners sitting in a little round pavilion next to what was more a small man made lake than a pond, listening to a British (I think) monk talking about Buddhism.
A young man asked for a definition of Enlightenment. The monk explained why simple explanations were problematic. Then he described enlightenment, using his hands, as two sheaves of grass leaning against each other. One is a person, the other is reality. Then his hands collapsed. When man no longer sees the world from his subjective view, when this separation between a man and the world collapses - that's enlightenment. (I've fudged a bit because I can't remember exactly the words he used.)
I was struck by how this parallels one of the points of post-modernists who talk about how we objectify the world instead seeing ourselves as being part of the world. (That's not quite right either, but there is a connection here that I can't explain well.) The monk had to attend to things at 4:30 and so we wandered further along the trail around the lake.
[The internet connection ended last night at this point. I was going to write more on this post, but it's long enough and I'll do a part 2 later to finish Sunday. I'm in the office again, working on my presentation that will be sometime this week. No one else is here again - they were supposed to get back yesterday (Monday) night - so I have a quiet place to get this powerpoint so it makes the points I need to make in a fun way. They really have a lot of their planning in place - thanks in part to the requirements of the original grant application to Oxfam. Now it's just a question of being able to break down the major expected outcomes (it's taken me a long time to learn that in Thai well enough to roll easily off my tongue. In Thai it translates as "results that we expect to receive" or ผลที่คาดว่าจะได้รับ) into steps that need to get there. Maybe I'll do a post on that too. So this is it for now. I'll do the monk and gaur in part 2.)
Friday, February 29, 2008 10:40pm (This is my Thailand time, the blogger stamped time is normal Alaska time) Got up early and enjoyed the birds a bit.
I tell my students to do something you've never done before every day, so I decided to ride the bike to the airport and we could take a song tao home. The map showed a road that cut through neighborhoods and missed all the detours with the one ways at the moat around the city center.
I even asked a policeman if I could get to the airport taking that road before leaving the main road. He said yes, in Thai and English, with that "look the foreigner is riding a bike to the airport" grin on his face.
And the road was quiet and peaceful. Too quiet and peaceful for such a useful short cut to the airport. I stopped to get a picture of this delightful potted backyard fence. (Catherine, that one's worth double clicking on to enlarge it.) And then I took I got to a dead end. Various people assured me there was no link to the main road. I could even see the high fence of the golfing practice range that's there, but there were no ways to get through. But I got to the airport in time. Joan was ready to walk, not ride a song tao back. (I better put up a picture before long. It's a (usually) red pick up with a covered bed that has a bench on each side for passengers.
Two people walking with a bike (fortunately J didn't take much to Singapore and her small duffel fit into the basket) on Chiang Mai streets is not the easiest thing to do. As you can see, sidewalks disappear.
But sometimes we walked through parking lots, and this new building even had a ramp!
Before long we were at the vegetarian center - where'd I'd been taken for lunch once before - and stopped for brunch. The yellow sign says 0 Baht, You still can eat. This has some sort of Buddhist affiliation and they had clothing recycling, and there were separate garbage bins for glass, plastic, paper, food, etc.
Although the first block on my bike this morning felt chilly, it's been getting hotter - at least a lot more humid. When we got back from the airport, (It took about two hours including brunch, and we walked pretty slowly, hampered by my having to get the bike up and down curbs and steps along the way) I really wanted a shower. I shut off the water heater in the bathroom, the 'cold' water was even warmer than I wanted.
Then off to work to get my presentation ready for Monday morning. I think it will be fine. I've had different people look at different parts of the presentation, so there is someone who understands my intent and can help when I need the right word in Thai.
Spent most of the day working on my seminar. Preparing a presentation in Thai and English with pictures to help get the points across. My Thai is frustrating. On a basic level - market Thai - I’m fine. But when I wander off to try to explain things of a more complex level (and some things not so complex) I stumble, my tones are terrible, and I feel kind of stupid. I really need a good teacher who can diagnose my Thai and design a lingual and cognitive therapy that will get the most improvement in the shortest time.
At lunch, Bun and I walked over to Wat Ramphoeng and ate in the lovely garden. A pair of striking white crested birds with a black band through the eye hopped around in the trees around us taunting my Canon. My shots are great, but you can see them. It appears that one was much more black and white, the other had a lot more brown. After going through the Thai bird book, I’ve decided that they must have been White Crested Laughing Thrushes. (And in the lobby with internet connection, I've confirmed it.)
The temple dragon was much a more cooperative photo model.
After work, I rode my bike over to the track at Chiengmai University - maybe a kilometer a way at most - and finally ran. Time, traffic, heat, and particularly dogs have been my excuses for not running. But I pushed myself over there and did eight slow laps around the track. I’m guessing I did a little over two miles. That’s ok for the first time in weeks. And I hate going around the track - it’s so easy to stop. When you go off on a run, once you get out there, you have to come back. But going around the track you can stop at any time. But it was very pretty. Here’s a shakey picture of Doi Suthep from the track.
Rode through the campus afterward to the main gate and had dinner at the vegetarian restuarant we ate at yesterday for lunch. Very good. When I got back to the southern gate, it was locked. There was enough room to walk through between the posts, but the handle bars wouldn’t fit. I was seeing if I could lift the bike high enough for the handle bars over the poles - I could but I couldn’t get through the narrow opening holding the bike - when a guard showed up and unlocked the gate to let me out.
Did some laundry and watched a French movie with English subtitles. I’ll post about television here soon. We have a wide choice of national televisions. Watched Hong Kong television with Japanese news programing in English covering the New York Philharmonic Orchestra playing in Pyongyang. This was a very political event, with the announcer speculating on the timing a day after the new, hard-line toward North Korea, South Korean president Lee Myung-bak's inauguration. With China, the first event was ping-pong, here it’s the symphony. Who says orchestras are apolitical?
The internet isn’t working again, so I’ll go downstairs and use the wifi and then go to bed. It’s Tuesday and J won’t be back until Friday morning. The manager offered me his car to go pick her up, but I don’t think it’s worth it for that one short trip. The soi is very narrow and you drive on the left side. But it was a very nice offer. He has a sticker to go through the Air Force compound so it’s just a quick shot.
I was going to be late if I walked, so I grabbed the bike. Part of the bike walk had been covered by the snow plowed off the street. Now, I think riding your bike on the road in the winter is more than tempting fate, but I did two blocks when the traffic thinned out and found the guy with the plow for the sidewalks. The rest of the short trip was easy. And mine wasn't the only bike in the Prov parking lot.
I didn't know I wasn't going to see my dentist. They usually ask and I always say I want to see Mark. They did ask about the hygienist, but not the dentist. Well as Tom worked on my teeth he told me about a great little concert he heard at Girdwood over the weekend. He's a closet guitarist and all was fine. But he hasn't been able to improve the inhouse music in the office. Without the staff, the dentists can't do much, and when it comes to what station is on in the office, the staff rule.
I caught the 7:19 bus (well it came at 7:29) and got to court with 15 minutes to spare.
Here's the jury waiting room. It got packed. The 12 jurors called today for Judge Volland were told at 9 that we could have a break til 10. So I went out and walked in the snow.
There were ice sculptures in the town square.
I stopped in the Hilton to warm up a bit and shake off the snow. I know this guy must be tremendously proud of shooting these bears. And I'm sure some biologist could make an argument about it being ok with the balance of nature. But personally I don't understand why he thinks killing this bear and having it stuffed is a great thing.
Well, sure, I remember the thrill of proving my power by breaking windows and other destructive acts, but I got over that when I was nine or ten. I understand it more when they actually eat what they kill. And I'm sure there's a hunting gene or two that helped humans survive when we had to hunt. But I can't help but think its a sign of arrested moral development when grown men spend tens of thousands of dollars to kill magnificent wild animals for trophies. Do you think he has a trophy wife too? (The sign is in the lower left corner of the bear case)
We had to wait until 12:15 before they told us we could go. But the twelve of us (minus one or two who weren't there) were pretty much the only ones left in the waiting room. And this clock. While being on the jury would have been interesting, this wasn't the right time for a three work trial as we're getting ready to head out for Thailand. So I was glad they were able to fill the jury without even calling us into court.
Well, the next bus wasn't for 30 minutes. I figured I could walk home in an hour, so off I went to the bike trail.
I saw a robin several times around the house last winter, but it is always a little strange to see them here in January. The second one was a little camera shy. It is a Robin, right Catherine? It isn't some bird I never heard of is it?
Well, I didn't quite make it home in an hour. An old friend, PM, skied past me and then looped back and we talked for nearly half an hour.
The "You Are Here" sign is part of the map. I added the numbers. Suppose you want to go:
I've added the big W and big E to the sign. Why can't they put the signs facing north, so when you look at them, the right side is east and the left side is west, like in a normal map? I couldn't find anything that said where north was on the map. 
