Paralympics

The Paralympics are on. NBC has them buried deep in one of their offshoot channels, but nevertheless, they are showing a little bit here and there. As you may have guessed, my being a fanatic about watching the Olympics I am of course watching these, too.  It's a bit different than the regular Olympics. There is a lot less ... what would be the word ... standardization? Everyone seems to just use whatever equipment they feel is best. There doesn't seem to be anyone checking that all the athletes are essentially using the same equipment and equal. So the better your equipment the bigger your advantage. And the less your handicap affects you, or the more recent it happened to you, the more advantage you have. I guess I find this odd in light of all the controversy surrounding any athlete accused of using performance enhancing drugs. I mean, what difference does it make if an athlete used EPO if their competitor has a totally different ski sled and poles and a decided leverage advantage as a result of sitting much higher?

Anyway, I didn't come here just to talk about that. I really only came to check in and say "I'm not dead."  There's an irony in this. I started this blog with the idea being that I was going to write a little something every day, no matter how trivial or small the post, and not worry about whether anyone read it or not. And here I haven't written much in awhile and I am blogging just to say "sorry I haven't posted much lately." It's the total opposite of what I set out to do.

So, still very busy and unable to be online much. The telephone answering machine is flashing "F" for Full because so many people are calling. I'm just super popular and in-demand. No, most of the messages are in-laws calling to speak to my significant other and she just doesn't bother to clean off the machine.

So, to tell you what's going on and yet tell you virtually nothing, today I asked the police to fingerprint me and they said "No." I told them "its for the government" and they said "no." What does a man have to do to get the police to take his fingerprints around here?! Dammit!

I cut down 6 or 7 trees in my backyard the other weekend. They all seem to have died all of a sudden and without warning. I had been back there spraying poison ivy and poison oak vines several years in a row and I had worried that I myself might have poisoned my own trees. But my neighbors are all experiencing the same thing, dying trees, and no one is really sure what has killed them. Almost all the dead trees in my yard are Sweet Gum trees. I don't remember the correct name for them, but that's what they are called around here, more often than not. One particularly large one snapped in half mid-way up and is now a jagged pole in my backyard. It's about 3 stories high where  it snapped. The other half went into my neighbor's yard and I don't know what he did with it. I don't own a chainsaw so I didn't exactly race over to cut it up for him. Maybe he got sick of waiting on me and cut it up himself? I really need to buy a chainsaw. The first tree I cut down with an axe. That was a ton of work. The rest I cut using a bow saw. But it's not large enough to cut the really big trees. I'm going to have to buy a bigger one.

So anyway, that's about all I have to update on. Nothing exciting. I've just been chasing cops trying to get them to print me and they won't do it.