BeMused

It appears I’m having some commenting issues on some of the entries here. Can’t figure out why though, as the comments are enabled by default in my settings. So I’m basically posting this to see if the comments appear here, or not, or do something totally weird.

Thanks to Allen for pointing it out…

You’ve seen the the people I’m talking about; the Ijits who feel the need to drive while talking animatedly on the phone, or who are trying to eat. Women who put on makeup, men who shave. I’ve seen both in the last week. Nothing irritates me more than Ijits in the driver’s seat.

Yesterday, however, I was the Ijit.

I’m not sure where my head got off to, but it certainly wasn’t on my shoulders as I was heading home. As the weather has been absolutely gorgeous here the past week, I’ve been riding the bike to work every day. As a motorcyclist in an urban environment, I am very attentive when driving. I watch everyone and everything, constantly. It’s the only way you can survive the blacktop chaos that is rush hour in these parts.

Yesterday was not my day though. Coming out of the parking lot at work, I got annoyed at the line trying to get out, and cut through the line of cars and then cut some poor lady off as she was making a right. After realizing that, I told myself to knock it off, and just drive.

Then as I was heading up Rt. 28, I found myself in the type of situation I usually try to avoid. I was in the center lane with an SUV on the left of me, and one on the right. And there I was, like an Ijit, coasting along right in their blind spots. The SUV on the left made to turn into the center lane, and I goosed the throttle, not only getting ahead of them, but making the pipes rap a bit so she knew I was there. After I was in front of her, I just shook my head in a kind of “Geez yer dumb” way.

But it wasn’t all her fault. Yes, she should’ve looked over her shoulder to check, but what the hell was I doing sitting there in the first place? I know better than that. So the “Geez yer dumb” shake of the head was repeated, this time aimed at myself.

I made sure I paid extra attention on the way to work this morning. It’s stupid stuff like that that will get a motorcyclist killed, so all senses were at 100% this morning. I got my comeuppance though: I had an asshole in a BMW cut me off, missing my front fender by about 2 feet. I gave him a justified “Geez yer dumb” shake of the head this time.

So to all those riding the cycle today, be careful out there. And to those of you in cages….you be careful too!

If any of my neighbors looked out their windows around supper time last night, they might have seen my wife leaving my house…in the back of a cop car.

Yes, you heard me right. My wife was taken away in the back seat of a Loudoun County Sheriff’s cruiser.

And that’s about as dramatic as I can make it. No, she wasn’t being arrested or anything like that. No spousal abuse, no domestic disturbance, and no, she didn’t short circuit after having finally finished her mid-term and term paper. Let me tell you the story…

Right about supper time last night, I happened to notice a kid walking through the neighbor’s yard. At first I thought it was a neighborhood kid and made the comment about how I couldn’t believe he’d have the brass to walk through their yard, as they have some rather large dogs who can be over-enthusiastic. A couple of minutes later, I saw he was in the back yard of Debbie’s house, a different neighbor. It was obvious this wasn’t who I thought it was, and even more obvious that he was mentally challenged in some way.

I walked out to keep an eye on him while Gail left to start combing the neighborhood to see if anyone was out looking for him. The poor kid was in a pair of sweats and long sleeved shirt, but that was it. No socks, no shoes, not even a coat. And it was cold and drizzly. From my admittedly uninitiated observation, it appeared he was autistic: he had a stuffed cat that he had by the tail and was twirling it around non-stop. I tried approaching him once to see if he wanted to come into my house to get warm, but as soon as he saw me, he turned and went around the backside of Debbie’s house.

Not wanting to lose sight of him, I walked around the front and then just kept him in sight. He went to another house and tried to get in the front door, which was locked. Then he went around the back, tried the basement door, then climbed the deck and tried the door there. Both were locked and he found a swinging chair to sit in.

Gail showed back up at this time and said that she thought his name was Andrew. I called up to him and he did seem to react to his name. Gail, having experience with these types of kids, walked up the deck and simply picked him up. He held on to her willingly so she brought him back out to the street. About this time the sherrif’s deputy had arrived.

Gail had found where he was from, so she and Andrew hopped in the back of the cruiser and the deputy took Andrew home. Turns out he’d wandered away from his sitter, and they were all out looking for him. Luckily, Gail had found one of the people searching, who in turn told her what house to go to.

So all’s well that ends well. Andrew was home safe, hopefully with some socks on to warm his feet, and we now have his parents phone numbers, as well as his sitters.

I just wish I’d had my camera when the deputy left with Gail in the back of the cruiser.

Don’t anyone move or sneeze or anything. I actually got the layout looking the same in IE as well as Firefox, Mozilla and Safari.

Holy crap. I feel like I just gave birth to an elephant.

As an addendum to the previous entry, I just noticed the layout in MSIE sucks ass. Well…what more could you expect? Get a real browser (Former is for windows, latter for Mac…)

Damnit.

Ok, I’m finally getting this to look how I want it to look. Nice and tidy, and very grey. I’ll have to do something about that, but I wanted the colors low key for now until I get the layout all squared away. I have a lot of work still: I need to get the comments into the same format, as well as any other pages I have lying around, not to mention getting the photo’s and other sections up. But the blog itself is starting to look a bit better.

So, now if I could just keep my grubby little paws off the CSS file, I’d be fine.