The combination of this article and this picture:

(click for larger, readable version)

really makes me think.

This morning I was driving to work in the pouring rain. I left my house at 7:40am. 1 hour and 20 minutes before I was due at work. At about 8:05, I had traveled two miles. I watched around me as common people broke down and became insane. You know how sometimes you’ll be stuck in a lane of traffic, and the turn lane next to you will be empty, and you’ll watch some jerk speed up it and cut into the line you’ve been waiting in. This morning, everyone was doing stuff like that. And I do mean everyone. I watched a school bus blatantly run a red light. It was just plain chaos.

It was at this point I decided it would be better for me to just ride my bike the rest of the way to the MARTA Bus Station. So I pulled into the parking lot next to me, parked my car, donned my poncho, and headed out on bike. It was raining pretty darn hard, but I couldn’t help but feeling satisfied as I passed dozen after dozen of cars. I couldn’t decide whether motorists thought I was crazy, or if they were slightly envious. Proper the first one.

I covered the rest of the trip (4 miles) in about 15 minutes. So I traveled four times faster on my bike than I did in my car. Perhaps this is what kept me happy as I waited at the bus station, soaking wet from my thighs down.

I look forward to my trip home, though I think I’m kind of impartial to whether its raining or not. I’ll be more prepared tomorrow, so I don’t have to walk around work barefoot all day, but I think this may kill my car’s use during the week. Which just makes one of the points in that article all the more poignant.

So late last night Teresa, Noah, and I got back into town from our week long vacation. I have a nice long recap that I’m working on, with a bunch of photos, but it won’t be posted until later. For now, I will complain.

Yesterday was a bad day. We didn’t plan anything for the day, so we ended up driving around the Tennessee mountains with nothing to do until 5:30pm, when we would drop the Gray’s off at the airport. Once we started top head home, our GPS unit gave us a route we weren’t happy with, and trying to figure out how to get to the highway proved daunting. We had driven on enough small local roads for the week, and we just wanted to get on a highway and drive 70mph, even if it meant taking longer.

A couple hours in Teresa realized she didn’t know where her phone was. I called it, and rather than hearing the familiar tone in the car, I hear “Hello?” in a much more manly voice than I’m used to hearing when calling my wife. So Teresa left her cell phone in at the Applebee’s in Alcoa, TN.

We finally make it into Georgia, and just about the time we get inside the border, our home state greets us with rain. We had managed to have beautiful weather though the whole vacation, so I guess this is only fitting.

We finally get in right after 10pm, and as soon as we walk in, I smell something weird. I figure its a side effect of setting your A/C at 85 for a week. But as I head down the hall to the thermostat, the smell decreases drastically. Why does my front door smell funny? The “maybe something died behind the screen door” theory didn’t pan out. We’re both too tired to spend too much time investigating, so we get ready for bed.

So Teresa goes out to get her nightly glass of water, and returns with the question, “Did you turn off the water from the Fridge?”

I walk into the kitchen, open the fridge door, and it is immediately apparent that no amount of animals stuck in a screen door could sin against my nose in the same way as a fridge full of food that sat at 85 degree for a week could. It would appear that when we unplugged the microwave from the wall, it tripped the circuit breaker, and shut off our fridge.

We do our best to try and go to sleep, ignoring the disgusting task that lay before us bright and early in the morning. It doesn’t work well, and both of us wake up from dreams of rotting food only to smell the fridge all the way from our room.

So you can understand why I’m having a hard time figuring out why I left the beautiful mountain-top abode to come back here.

- From a 6 or 7 year old boy on the swings, to the woman next to him, who is swinging her 8 month old daughter:
“Excuse me! Excuse me! I’m swinging much higher than she is!”

- Under Armour makes makes kids stuff.
- People are crazy enough to buy their kids Under Armour stuff.

- Note to dads at the park: Get off the phone. No matter who it is you’re talking to, you still look like a tool who doesn’t take time to appreciate his kids.

The Land of the Free.