Back to the road?

Tomorrow, Sunday October 29, 2006 will be six weeks since the last time I went running. Six weeks. I am going to try out the legs before the week is over.

Last week was a week's vacation. Some vacation. My grandpa's funeral was on Monday. It was an emotional day. He was a humble, hard working, honest man and I agree with my brother, the world would be a much better place with more like him. Every one who knew my grandpa will miss him.

The rest of the week was spent working on my house. We're remodeling. It's a big project and has been a great learning experience. My father-in-law has been a huge help.

I've been listening to several good podcasts all week while working on the house. The new headphones I bought provide a great deal of hearing protection from the sounds of power tools and hammering so wearing them serves two purposes. I think my favorite podcasts right now are the history podcasts from the University of California Berkley, History 7B, Introduction to the History of the United States, 1865-2005 and History 5, European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present. There are a number of interesting parallels in the two histories.

Yes, I will be releasing another podcast soon, lately my free time has been spent elsewhere.

Bad Air or Terrorists

I was listening to a story this afternoon on NPR about the EPA's recent decision to keep clean air standards at their 1997 levels though 20 of 22 members on the advisory panel advocated the adoption of more stringent standards.

According to the radio story, more stringent standards would save the lives of five to ten thousand Americans a year. Speaking as someone who has lived with asthma all my life and seen it affect my children, I'm obviously biased towards having cleaner air. It's another reason I try and be self-propelled, relying on my feet or my bicycle for most of my transportation and errands. I rarely need to drive my car any where, so I try not to and I only mowed my yard three or four times this year, which may not have endeared me to my neighbors, but some things are more important than a well-manicured lawn. As my grandpa used to say, "You can't eat it."

But I digress. Only two of the 22 members of the advisory panel advocated leaving clean air standards alone. According to this story at ABC News, one of the two dissenters was a former, long term employee of General Motors and the other was the former president of the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology.

If the Bush administration and conservative Republicans in general, value human life so much, why in the hell would they choose to prevent the adoption of cleaner air policies? You know the answer as well as I do, big corporations lobbied and won. It boggles my mind that we'll send hundreds of thousands of our best and brightest overseas to kill or be killed (we're nearing the 3K mark of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, nearly as many as were killed in 9/11) and we'll spend billions of dollars (bankrupting ourselves in the process) to fight terrorists who may try and kill us and yet we'll allow five to ten thousand American's die every year by not adopting stricter pollution standards.

I couldn't find any numbers, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that adopting the new standards would have cost us less than the war in Iraq and the new standards, unlike the war in Iraq, actually would have made us safer.

When the Walls Come Tumbling Down

We were ripping apart the garage this weekend when we found this little guy/gal living in behind the sheetrock: