DAY 2

A few weeks ago I decided to get a bicycle. Nothing fancy, an eighty five dollar special from Wal-Mart. No hand brakes, no gears, just a good, sturdy cruising bike. I ride it to work and back everyday of the week, excluding weekends. I'm fortunate that where I work in downtown Kalamazoo has showers so I can clean up before reporting to duty at the print shop.
I think that I like the rides into work better than the ones home. On the way to work it's just before 6AM. The air is nice and cool and there isn't a lot of traffic. Not a lot of people either. I take the same route everyday and I pass by a warehouse/factory called Root Spring Scraper Co. I have no idea what they do there, but they have five huge bay doors open every morning. The place is filled with a wide variety of machinery and there is a little group of guys in chairs just sitting outside, chatting and relaxing before the day of work begins. They always give me the nod as I pass.
Lately, we have been cursed with the Michigan Mugginess. Being surrounded by water on three sides can make for a pretty soggy state, especially here in Southwest Michigan. We're one step removed from swampland as it is. Kalamazoo is so swampy that we were known for growing celery in the good old days. Seems you need a lot of swamp for that kind of thing. At least that's what I hear.
Anyway, we have one more hot day tomorrow and then the undependable weather people will change their forecasts. I hope it's nice on Saturday, though. My youngest son, Dan and I have a party planned for our respective birthdays. I even made up some invitation flyers at work yesterday. I did a riff on the poster for the movie 300. They turned out pretty good, in my opinion, of course.
Everyone in the house is pretty sluggish this evening. My buddy, Stew, showed me the ropes of this whole bittorrent downloading. I think I have it, but I'm waiting to see what happens when I try to burn the files to a disc. So far I'm just downloading some Eurotrash flicks. I leave the mainstream stuff up to Stew. Good pirate that Stew.
I wrote this one a little earlier than planned, but by the time it gets late enough to encompass the entire day I will have melted away from the humidity. I never mind the heat. The heat warms my bones and feels pretty good. It's the humidity that really messes with me.

Today in History: This is one of those horrible news things that make me sad when I hear them. It seems that Chris Benoit, a wrestler for WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) murdered his wife and their 7 year old son and then hung himself in his weight room. While they have not blamed anabolic steroids, the well known side effect known as 'Roid Rage seems to be what happened in this case. What a waste! And why can't these suicides just take themselves? Why do they think they need to take others with them. We are not the masters of other people's destinies no matter what we think. If you want to be self destructive, that's your choice. Just leave others out of it. What a waste!