Posted on 04/07/2012 1:58:19 PM PDT by SamAdams76
So in my neighborhood, there is some kind of “controversy” involving school buses. Apparently the town needs additional tax revenue from homeowners (by way of property tax) to keep them going for the next year and now a referendum vote is on the ballot for the next town election. A “YES” vote would increase property taxes to keep the school bus program at status quo. A “NO” vote would keep taxes the same but cut the number of school buses for the coming school year and would force kids that live within a mile of their school to walk to school.
Naturally this has set the “mother hen” contingent among us a-clucking and a-fluttering in seething indignation and yard signs are popping up in my neighborhood to “save” the school bus program so that our fat and overweight kids don’t have to walk a few blocks down the road to get to school. But I’m thinking the real reason is that our soccer moms don’t want to have to tear themselves away from Regis Philban, Kathy Lee, (or whoever it is appearing on the morning TV talk shows these days) in order to load up the Honda Odyssey so they can take their their whining, high-maintenance tykes to school because you know that their kids will throw up a major kick and fuss at even the thought they might have to walk further than the distance to the mailbox.
Hell, there are already enough soccer moms driving their kids to the bus stops! I see them every morning as I’m taking my dog for a walk before heading to work. You see them backing out of their driveways with their kids texting away on their cellphones in the passenger seat and then they will literally drive about a block down the street and sit there idling in their mini-vans, waiting for the school buses to come, so their precious kids don’t have to spend more than a few seconds in the chilly 50 degree weather. Of course, you can somewhat see their point as for some reason, our kids insist on wearing shorts and flip-flops to school even in the dead of winter. But that’s a rant for another time.
Well the vote is coming up in a couple of weeks and I haven’t seen a single lawn sign in support of cutting the school bus program, so I’m going to hand letter a sign for my yard that reads: “Let The Kids Walk To School - Vote NO on Question 1”. I realize this will likely result in some eggs on my house this coming Halloween but so be it. There is a school just a few blocks from my home and yet you have kids spending up to 15 minutes shivering in the morning air waiting for the bus to arrive when all they have to do is walk about 10 minutes down the road and they are there.
Speaking of that 10-minute walk down the road to the local school, it is actually a nice, scenic walk with plenty of woods and only a couple of houses and a farm (pumpkins and corn). However, due to it being somewhat isolated, drivers using that road seem to think of it as their own private trash bin. I walk my dog down that road twice a day and it’s sad to see all the trash that people throw out their windows as they drive down it.
You have the usual assortment of McDonald’s containers, Dunkin Donut’s coffee cups and cigarette butts. But what never fails to amaze me is the empty beer cans and especially the empty miniature liquor bottles, that literally pile up along the side of the road. Every spring, my neighbors will get together and walk up and down that stretch of road and fill trash bags with all the crap that people dump out of their cars. This year, I was one of those helping out and I was amazed at how many miniature liquor bottles I was able to find and pick up. Smirnoff and Absolut vodka, Bacardi rum, J&B scotch, Jaegermeister, schnapps, you name the poison, I likely picked it up in miniature bottle form that morning.
Now the only time I’ve ever personally used these type of bottles was when I order a vodka and tonic on an airplane as I’m a nervous flier and a little alcohol makes me fear a plane crash a little bit less. But I never realized until I helped clean the roadside just how prevalent these miniature bottle are in automobiles.
When I went to the liquor store this morning to get some wine and beer for Easter dinner, I noticed that the checkout counters had these miniature liquor bottles all over the place - kind of like you see candy bars at checkout counters in supermarkets. I then realized that a lot of people must stop here after work to get a “little nip” before they head home to the family. Maybe they chug them straight or maybe they dump them into a Coke that they picked up at the McDonalds drive-in. In any case, they don’t want to toss these at home where the spouse might notice them in the trash bin and they definitely don’t want them in their car should they get pulled over by the cops. So they toss them out the car windows before they get home and that rural road near my house must be a perfect dumping spot as there is hardly anybody around to notice them littering.
Speaking of that road, it has a pretty sharp turn just before it hooks up with the main road leading to the interstate. A couple weekends ago, after work, I’m walking the dog when I notice about four police cars, a tow truck and an ambulance as I approach that turn. There was an SUV turned upside down. Apparently, the driver was distracted and didn’t realize they were coming up on a sharp turn and thus flipped the car over trying to make it at the last minute. The cops told me that the woman driving was just then being put in the ambulance but there was also a dog in the car that was taken to the animal hospital in a police cruiser. I checked my local paper but nothing was mentioned so I was never able to determine who it was in the car and how the accident happened. I would not be surprised however if it was one of those “liquor-bottle tossers”.
SO in my neck of the woods, gas has just now broken the $4 a gallon barrier. Now it costs me $70 or more to fill my 8-cylinder Ford F150 and at least $60 to fill my 6-cylinder Nissan Maxima. They say that we will be at $5 a gallon by Independence Day. You would think that with the high gas prices, there would be less people on the roadways but alas, that is not the case at all in my neck of the woods here in New England. Traffic sucks as always and doing my errands this Saturday morning, all the roadways were absolutely jammed with traffic and it was still a challenge finding a parking space at the mall, at the Dunkin Donuts and at the Kohls.
The “casual-eating” joints in my area continue to bel absolutely slammed with business and on Thursday night, my wife and I tried to eat at the Bahama Breeze in Nashua, NH and forget about it. The parking lot was completely full and people were parked out on Route 3A. We parked at the nearby shopping mall and walked over and it was a 2 hour wait! This was 8PM on a Thursday night. No way did we want to eat at 10pm so we went up the road a piece to the Longhorn’s where it was only a 20-minute wait. It was worth it though as the Outlaw Ribeyes were absolutely fantastic and melted in our mouths. I will have to check out this Bahama Breeze at another time and report on it then. Still, you have to wonder why casual eating joints are so damn busy in spite of our lousy economy and those high gas prices.
Reading the biography of Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson and also “Crusade In Europe” by Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, for those under the age of 40, was Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during WW2 and president of United States from 1953 to 1961. Damn, this Eisenhower really made an impact in mid-20th Century America. That Benjamin Franklin did a lot of good stuff for America too. If I ever get to heaven, I want to take the both of them out for a couple of beers. The tales they could tell!
Consider this verse from the song “All My Friends Have Settled Down” by Hank Williams Jr: Hangovers hurt more than they used to...and cornbread and iced tea has taken the place of girls and ninety proof...” Well when I first heard that song some 30 years ago, I vowed that would never happen to me. No way would I let myself prefer cornbread and iced tea over going out on the town but it went ahead and happened to my anyhow. So here it is Saturday night, and I just want to cook some burgers on the grill and sit home and maybe watch a movie on the DVD player because I am wiped out. I did some yard work this afternoon, nothing major, just some brush clearing, a little raking and trying to get my chain saw to fire up. But after a few hours of that, my legs feel like cement and I have barely enough energy to put the tools away. Getting old is not good.
Now the hamburger on a bun is perhaps the greatest culinary invention in American history. I never get tired of grilling hamburgers at home. What I do is get the patties from a butcher shop (supermarket ground beef will not do) and grill them about 5 minutes a side on my Weber grill, leaving the middle reddish and juicy. I throw some hot peppers (mixture of jalapeno, anaheim, serrano, etc.) on the grill for the same amount of time. When the peppers are done, I chop them up and pour some olive oil over them. I then put the burger on a potato roll, pour the peppers/olive oil over it and then lay on top a thick slab of swiss cheese. No soggy tomato or wilted lettuce. No other condiments at all. Just the burger, cheese and peppers with oil in a potato bun. That is the perfect outdoor grill hamburger.
Chaos in the yogurt section at the local supermarkets. Absolute chaos. They just can’t keep yogurt in stock, it seems. Everytime I go to the supermarket, they got some young kid with a dolly full of yogurts, trying to keep the shelves stocked. Meanwhile, shoppers are darting and and out, trying to snatch the last few containers of their favorite brand. Now my favorite brand is the Stonyfield Farms whole milk French Vanilla, as you can dump frozen blueberries and blackberries in it at home, and with the whole milk, it tastes just like ice cream. But they are usually out or down to the last few whenever I go there.
So this particular day, none were on the shelf but the boy stocking the yogurt had a case at the bottom of the dolly. So without wanting to ask him to get it for me (in which he would give me a blank stare, shrug his shoulders and mutter something incomprehensible), I decided to grab that case myself. So after moving several cases of Dannon and other types of yogurt aside, I finally get to the bottom and pull out the case of 24 French Vanillas, just at the boy turns around and gives me the evil stare. I just grabbed my case of yogurt and went on about my way. When I got far enough away, I took out half of them and put them where the cheese was. I figure somebody that works there will move them back to the right place later.
Now the whole milk version of yogurt used to have a cream layer on top and I thought that was very good. However, Stonyfield Farms decided to mix it all up so that the cream layer is distributed evenly with the rest of the yogurt. I don’t like it that way all that much but I’ve learned to get used to it. The Brown Cow yogurt still maintains that cream layer on top but that particular yogurt is even harder to find - though you can usually get it at the Whole Foods.
New England is chock-full of “rail-trails”. These are old railroad beds that have been converted into paved bicycling/dog-walking paths. When they first started converting them, I figured it was some liberal feel-good “crunchy-granola” environmentalist thing and a waste of taxpayer money but I’ve come around on them since. They make a great place to take a long walk without having to worry about getting run over by automobiles.
You do have to keep an eye out for “suspicious activity” on these rail trails however.
I was out walking my dog on one of these trails last weekend when I came upon what appeared to be an orgy of sorts going on. I was in a rather isolated section of the trail and the giveaway was about five or six parked bicycles off to the side by a trailhead leading into the woods. Curiosity getting the better of me, I veered off the paved path and headed down the trail. I only got a few hundred yards in when I heard some groaning sounds. Thinking somebody was having medical problems and needed first aid, I picked up the pace and came into a semi-clearing where there were several half-naked people “getting in touch with nature” to use a family friendly euphemism. One of them looked up at me in shock and my dog started barking at them. Suddenly everybody in the pile started scrambling. I merely told them that I was “just passing through” and I headed back to the trail just as fast as I could get there. I wanted no part of whatever it was that was going on back there.
Let me know if you dare to be on the “ping list” of my intermittent ramblings about society and nothing in particular.
But I'm guessing Ben Franklin, despite his own admittedly libidinous ways, didn't have to write up a lot of neighborhood orgy reports.
I buy those little bottles to cook with.
Put me on you ping list. I love your essays.
There’s a mom here who sits with her kid in her idling mini-van AT THE END OF HER DRIVEWAY. The bus picks her kid up AT THE END OF HER DRIVEWAY. Nothing wrong with the kid - he hops out and runs into the bus when it arrives. It’s a safe, low-traffic area. I don’t see where THE END OF HER DRIVEWAY is such a hazardous place for her little snowflake to stand for a couple minutes. He’s out there alone on his ATV all the time.
Maybe she’s trying to keep him from playing hooky.
My brother worked as a highway engineer in MN, in one of the outstate regions. He once referred to these converted RR right-of-way walks as ‘rape trails’, as they give a false sense of isolation and security.
Sam, if you really want to cause a stir, make up a carbon-tax ticket book and hand them to the moms in the idling cars at the bus stop. Start with the Volvos. Heads will explode!
Yes, I’m not a big yogurt eater, but we have Stonyfield Yogurt. Very good.
We also have that beer can and bottle problem. Everyone around here is very green, including the teenagers, but I think some of them still seem to get a kick out of throwing their used cans and bottles out of the car window. Our town has an annual pickup day.
Anyway, that’s better than whoever threw a used washer and dryer down from the dirt road into our woods. A bit much to haul back up the hill, but someone did eventually get it—probably the road workers who were fixing a nearby culvert.
Actually, Vermont has a long tradition of junking cars and trucks in the woods. When a car is used up, they would just drive it into the woods and leave it to rust away. We had a clump of old Model A’s and Model T’s, off of a logging trail through our woods, but in the past ten years they have finished rusting and now are resting under the soil and the fallen leaves. Too bad, in a way. There were some really neat looking fenders.
I’m assuming the getting in touch with nature event was coed.
(An assumption I wouldn’t make here)
Grilled Jalapenos
Crumbled bleu cheese
Buffalo wing sauce
Bacon
Simple, elegant and veeeeery tasty!
we have a rail trail in my town in sc. i think if kids live with in a mile they should walk.
Yeah, the kids in my country neighborhood raises hell all of the school breaks on their four wheeler and motor bikes but can not even walk a quarter mile to the bus stop.
WALKING SCHOOL BUS
MINNEAPOLIS - Some students in Minneapolis are trading in tires for tennis shoes when it comes to getting to school.
Lyndale Community School is embracing its “walking bus” which started a few years back and has been growing ever since.
Every day, the “bus” operates on a set route, picking up more kids along the way. Four different routes operate on Friday.
Interesting blog. Add me to the ping list.
As an avid runner and cyclist, I wish we had them.
Added to my ping list. I will try to get one of these out every Saturday but I’m going to have to take better notes during the week because after I posted this, I thought about another half dozen things that happened this past week that should have been in this column.
C. 1970 I lived about 3-4 houses inside the 1 mile limit, over which you could ride the bus. I walked in decent weather, on rainy / extra cold days the moms would carpool. It was all quiet subdivision roads, nothing busy/fast. It is absurd people think they have to have a bus for <1 mile.
I live a couple miles from a rail trail and put in 100 to 250 miles a week on it. Bicycle, not foot. :)
Goes thru some of what are euphemistically referred to as “bad neighborhoods.” Wouldn’t recommend it for a woman by herself.
I live a couple miles from a rail trail and put in 100 to 250 miles a week on it. Bicycle, not foot. :)
Goes thru some of what are euphemistically referred to as “bad neighborhoods.” Wouldn’t recommend it for a woman by herself.
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