"Every RuleThat We Almost Have"

Everybody's heard about the Tennessee legislature last week by now. Everybody in the world with modern communication. In the midst of a protest asking them to finally, FINALLY, enact some common sense gun legislation that might stop the next school shooting after three students were killed in a Christian school along with three adult staff.  In another couple weeks that incident will get lost in the abundance of mass shootings in this country, and people are more and more standing up against the unrestricted possession of guns, both in quantity and quality, also known as the ability to kill the most people in the fastest time just because somebody has some kind of perceived grudge.

Representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, both black, along with Gloria Johnson, white, joined in the protest. First it was from the floor in regular debate until the chair cut their mikes. When they returned wth bullhorns to continue making their points without their microphones, the two men were expelled by the super-majority of Republicans, which exists thanks to extreme gerrymandering. They did not expel the white woman because "reasons". They made excuses, but we all know what those reasons were. The two were "uppity blacks" while she was white.

One of the (white of course) Republican legislators, Cameron Sexton, went on camera to spread some "truth" in defense of the expulsions. He unknowingly spread some real truth when, on camera and widely broadcast now, he explained it as being because the two "broke every rule we almost have."

We can guess with little imagination what those rules they "almost have" might be: 

Don't be a Democrat. 

Don't be black. 

Don't be uppity, especially if you're black, though by definition any black man who speaks up no matter how just the cause, is "uppity". 

When the Republican super-majority doesn't like your speech (because you're black, because they're likely paid off by the NRA and gun manufacturers and action threatens their livelihoods) they have no need to listen to your opposing point of view. 

They are allowed to cut your mike off because they can.

It's just not allowed for you to find a way to continue to be heard.  

Any time a Republican White legislator breaks a rule it can be ignored or perhaps a minor scolding may ensue, wink wink nudge nudge, pat on the back and a handshake of eternal loyalty. 

Should the Democratic "uppity black man" dare to be uppity, kick them out and teach them all a lesson.

There are probably other rules they "almost have" but which simply haven't come to light yet, or at least not so publicly. We'll start by seeing how they treat the two Justins when they are returned to the legislature by their constituents. I expect there will be more eyes on the body in the near future, at least.

Perhaps they should "almost" have another rule in that legislature, borrowed from Lord Acton: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Oh wait: I think they've got that one down pat.

Spring In The Desert

It's taken so long this year. We've been cold. Lots of rain though, so when opportunity presented, stuff bloomed. Having Steph down to get me out and about after so long was just the nudge I needed to go see it. 

And shoot it, of course. 

She did too, only with her cell. One of her goals in coming down was to be able to send pictures back to northern friends still stuck with snow cover showing them a place with flowers everywhere. The cactus weren't blooming yet, though they've started now. She did see a few on her last day. But those first travels were full of bushy yellow daisies, or so she called them after some internet searching, orange penstemons,  and some blue roadside rows and rows of what look like skinny lupines along with purple bushy spikes of... who knows? There were some red flowering bushes as well, and ocotillas just starting to attract hummingbirds. Desert poppies were scattered around in most places, though on our final day of touring we passed numerous roadside slopes covered with them.

Just like it's always the fish that got away that sticks in your memory, it's the shot that got away that resides in my memory. I was driving, and on the freeway with no possible way to slow down, much less pull over because the only shoulder was straight down. Climbing the other side of the valley were huge patches of poppies, broken up crazy-quilt style with equally huge patches of the blue flowers lining the roads everywhere. Saguaro and other green bits broke them up in places, but it was mostly the yellow/orange and blue. Maybe some day I'll be the passenger heading south on the 17 down into The Valley and can roll down my window and capture a dozen shots. Or maybe it requires another wet early spring, though I wouldn't ask California to repeat what it's been going through to grant us this blessing from their weather leftovers. 

At least I think I wouldn't.

Here's what my blog would let me upload for this, just the desert poppies, individuals and part of a hillside. Anything else and it balked.

I guess for more pictures I'll have to make more posts.

Are You Ready For Climate Disaster?

 No, not in a hundred years. Not in 70 or 80. Much sooner. I'm willing to bet many of you haven't a clue how bad it is yet. One has to really dig to get the information from the scientists who are studying all the influences. The media is concentrating on TFG ("The Former Guy", not to be encouraged by acknowledging him by name despite the hopefulness of his araignment and arrest) to the point of covering his plane from Mara Lago to New York and motorcades on either end non-stop the last couple days, with refreshers today just in case anybody with usable electricity may have missed it, on top of nonstop coverage of the closed courtroom door. So they're not going to give the latest climate news many headlines.

But they are available from reliable sources. Not just the headlines, but the in depth explanations of how conclusions were reached, sometimes way over my head, sometimes explained for the ordinary non-science expert. If you think you can still deny this "extinction level event", start informing yourself and see if you still believe that.

You may think you're informed by paying attention to the weather anomalies in recent months. You may even remind yourself of the caveat that weather isn't climate. Perhaps right now it makes you feel better to do that. Fifty tornadoes in a day, repeated several days later, and coming much earlier in the season than usual, isn't climate. Record snowfall, melting and flooding rivers and eroding banks with the spectacle of our seeing homes destroyed, that isn't climate either. Nor are the expansions of droughts around the world, especially how easily one can discount them with any particular rainfall.

All that is true. But climate change is the runaway engine driving all of it. Climate changes are becoming more extreme in the direction of higher methane and CO2 in the atmosphere in amounts never measured on this planet before. They are producing changes in clouds. Never heard about that one, right? Those changes are reducing the depth of our atmosphere. Never heard that one either I bet. 

You have probably heard that glaciers are shrinking, even disappearing or soon about to be. "Soon" is nebulously defined of course. So you think you have decades left to act, to continue as normal. It's so easy to do when they are so far away that you may never have seen them. You will likely have heard that sea levels will rise when glaciers go away, and all sorts of people with a voice in the media will have poo-poohed the effect of that on sea levels. The ocean is so big, after all. You remind yourself that even the hugest of icebergs is still already 7/8ths under water, so how much effect can it have when it melts? It's easy to ignore how much on-land ice this planet has, thinking that it's not going anywhere fast. But huge ice shelves are collapsing, allowing glaciers to descend more swiftly. We are only now seeing how much their under-glacier rivers are carving them out from the bottom up.

Even more sinister than higher sea levels, the deep ocean currents are slowing down due to less cold water input. Those currents bring nutrients to feed the microscopic organisms at the bottom of the food chains. Without those, plankton dies, and without plankton, all that feed on it die, and so on all the way up. We are at the top of that food chain.

Glaciers melting ties in with permafrost thawing. Permafrost is a great carbon sink, and an even better methane sink, so long as it stays frozen. Now that it is thawing both of those greenhouse gasses are rising at unrelenting rates. Winters in either hemisphere are not refreezing at a level able to slow the process, much the less stop or reverse it. It is only speeding up.

You keep getting news about climate change these days that is nowhere near as grim as I'm talking about.  Scientists report threats against their careers if they tell the full truth. Petroleum industry moguls are doing all they can to hide the truth or at least minimize it. (Profit motive, anybody?) A recent study of air quality near rigs in the Gulf found CO2 levels twice as high as what the companies were reporting. Much of the science getting reported is not in details easily understood by non experts. The whole field needs its version of Carl Sagan to make it understandable to us lay folks. You think one could get the needed air time?

There are sources out there, people who collect the information, and do their best to distribute it in easy to comprehend yet comprehensive versions. They don't get picked up in the mainstream media, although some  there are starting to state climate change as a fact, finally. But the loud official voices are busy looking way out ahead, putting the tipping point into the next century. We respond by ignoring it pretty much. We don't see the need to change our consumption, slow our breeding, because we still believe it's wayyyyyyy out there. Too many experts are starting to tell us we've passed it.

I've been following this closely for months now. Mostly it's been on a website called "Daily KOS". It's prime focus is liberal politics. There are a lot of sub-groups with other interests like science advances, gardening, photography, etc. A couple specific members have been collecting climate news, and if you wish, you can go over there even without signing in and read what is posted. (You won't be able to comment or post your own content until you join.) Two I follow regularly are Pakalolo and Meteor Blades. Pakalolo in particular has posted so  much that the recent ones typically contain a bunch of links to other relevant posts. Cawfeemug is a frequent contributor to the discussions and posted a compilation on his own site with Medium. It is a great quick summary of most of the recent factual information - along with some personal reaction - and lots of links for those looking for more in depth information. I strongly recommend this as a starting place, both for you and for anybody you want to pass this along to:

https://gilbertweaversatchell.medium.com/urgent-warning-f2ae93919c86

Still Loving My Hyundai

I had to go to the dealership this morning. When I shut the car off last weekend, it made a kind of clanking gurgle (technical term !) for 5 seconds or so. It sounded like something's timing was off. I lifted the hood, determined I needed a quart of oil, but doubted that had anything to do with it. So I called Richard over.  The only thing he could posit as a cause was an old belt. Most likely the serpentine belt, especially after I contacted the dealership and verified that the engine has a timing chain, not a belt. 

That greatly erased one worry, that of destroying my engine by procrastination. The chain should last "forever," per their service department. The car currently records a history of 145,500+ miles, a long way from forever in my many Accents' driving history. The serpentine belt has an official expectation of 50k miles. (Uhhhh, oops?) It was definitely due for replacement. 

More Googling, and I researched the consequences of continuing to drive the car if the serpentine belt snapped. So long as my only "long" trip was to the dealership, the car shouldn't overheat to get there. Still, it was a cautious half week with only a couple <1 mile trips. I didn't even drive far enough to get that quart of oil. The dog's toenails had just been done, the larder was full, there were few club duties in the next few days, so I found no need to invoke my paranoia by putting the car to the test. 

Well, at least not paranoia over that part. Back to Google, I tried to find out how much the new belt installation would cost. Results ranged from $860+ installed down to $78 if they didn't count installation. I did of course. No way was I going to fool around with that on my own or with some wannabe mechanic. There were the usual offerings where I could get a more precise quote if I gave them a lot of information. 

Screw that!

I at least had one ace in the hole. When we switched satellite companies, we were promised a "rewards card" with a debit balance of $300. It wasn't good for cash, only for purchases. I'd been waiting and waiting. At first I thought I'd apply it two weeks ago to the annual renewal of our Rec Center dues, or at least a bit over half of it. But that deadline came and went so they got paid out of the budget.  

Then Steve and I agreed a good place to spend the money was in replacing the propane grill. The old one had a leak somewhere in the line between tank and grill. We'd researched getting a new line but our grill only had them from some RV supply store. Not worth the effort. No grilling for over a year, but we got by. Now that the card was coming, and my daughter was coming to visit, having a functioning grill seemed like a great idea.  I went online, found a decent price and decided to get one delivered. The old one went to the curb and disappeared instantly, before we could even call the garbage company for a price to haul it away. (Good luck, whoever you are!) The new grill also came out of the budget with no card in the mail yet. We'd spend that amount on some regular bill or something and juggle the books later. Last time we'd switched and gotten one of those cards, it simply was applied in full to a bill, with no payments needing to be paid until the $300 ran out. They were happy, we were happy.

Saturday the mail included the long awaited card. FINALLY! It at least would pay $300 worth of the new belt installation worst case, or have a balance left in the best case. Turned out we had the best case. I now have to keep track of the balance and be sure to spend it within 6 months. That won't be a problem. Remembering the 4 digit pin if I used the card somewhere which required one might have been. I know I wrote it down. It just wasn't where I keep the rest of the information for logging into the Satellite company website. Fortunately, after finding out the car dealership didn't require it when I used it there, it popped back into my head... an hour later. Steve and I developed a system for pins, basing them on a word instead of random numbers. To use it we just have to look at my phone number pad where numbers = letters in order to come up with the numbers. It's just like an ATM keypad, which helps us every time Steve needs to change his bank pin number because somebody's stolen his card number... again. And yet again. He comes up with an apt word (not all are curses) and then spells it into the ATM.

I keep the pin with the card, on the same piece of paper wrapped around the card which has the latest balance. WTF you say? It's not the actual code. Just another word that cues my memory. We've already found out that the local grocery store will accept the end balance on one card and the rest of its payment from another, or cash, so we can spend every penny. 

With that card, in a way, my serpentine belt replacement was free. Not only that, but had I been paying more attention, and replaced the belt every 50,000 miles just because somebody decided the old one only lasted that long, I'd have already bought two more in the meantime.  That's one of the reasons I love my Hyundai. Now if this one is like my last one, I should need to get the starter replaced at around 287K. Then there'll be the decision as to whether to replace the tranny shortly after the 300K mark.  I'm not halfway there yet. The car is a 2013, bought at the end of 2013 after that school bus rear-ended me. It got less than a year of high work miles on it before I retired, and gets few enough miles now to require only two oil changes a year with our traveling back and forth to Minnesota. With my luck with several of these cars now, this one may outlive me.

Mental Illness, My Ass! A Rant

 A long time ago, children died from diseases, starvation in famines, birth defects, even in wars. In more recent times, many died in automobiles when they crashed. Even seat belt laws didn't stop those deaths, though they helped when used. We have a new primary cause of children's deaths now: mental illness. The Governor of Tennessee was on TV insisting that the cause of the recent school shooting was mental illness. He didn't say that the true highest cause of children's deaths is now guns. He didn't mention guns. It was all mental illness.

People can and do get mental illnesses. It happens all over the globe. We are no sicker than any people anywhere else. Other countrys' children are not dying in such numbers with bullets ravaging their small bodies, despite mental illness in their populations. But ours are. Toddlers find adults' guns, think they are safe, or toys, and suddenly a bullet goes where it shouldn't. Or several bullets do, because it is so easy to shoot off multiple rounds. That was curiosity, or playing what they see on TV. Not mental illness. Not unlesss you count the parent's inability and/or unwillingness to keep their guns out of the reach of children. 

Older children, even adults, get angry just like the rest of us, get mentally ill, learn to hate. They "act out", grab a gun from the home, or a friend, or wherever guns can be found these days which is practically everywhere. They go hunt their targets, whether teachers, classmates, or whoever needs to pay in their minds, and find their fame. We can blame mental illness, bullying, thrill seeking, or whatever. Those things used to be "solved" by a schoolyard fight, where bruises, bloody noses, possibly even a stabbing or a broken bone might have been the result, followed by suspension of those involved. These days there is too often no one left to suspend, with the final victim often being the shooter.

We lump it all under "mental illness". Who else would go around shooting bunches of people if they were mentally healthy? Calling it by that name means we are not at fault for what is happening almost daily in this country in schools, churches, anywhere people gather.  We as a nation fall back on the reasoning that our constitution gives us the unimpeded right to bear arms. It's just a few bad apples who misuse them.

Those bad apples are finding close at hand the tools that have only one purpose: kill. Kill as many and as fast as possible, without stopping to reload, to think, to let any inconvenience slow them down. We call that misuse to pretend we don't know that is exactly why they were made, call them hunting rifles as if we were going to feed ourselves on a deer with 30 bullets in it. We blame the shooter for picking up the weapon so easily at hand, call them mentally ill. We stockpile guns, play soldier on the shooting range with them, pat each other on the back for our prowess at pretend killing, hitting targets with human shapes instead of circles on them, and find ourselves innocent of any wrong. We are so "innocent" that we defend rabidly our right to do that, without restrictions of any kind, just because of a piece of paper back when muskets were necessary for safety and defense when our white invader ancestors were claiming territory in this country. We hadn't killed off wolves and bears which might have found our presence an invitation to attack for a ready meal or to fend off a danger to their young. We hadn't yet destroyed all the peoples already there who were willing to fight for their lives because they were here first, or others from overseas who also wanted to claim this land for themselves and a different king.

But muskets had to be reloaded for every shot. Better have good aim and kill immediately what you aimed at rather than risk vulnerability while reloading. After some years one could shoot six bullets without pause, then 30 or more. You didn't need to aim anymore as the spray would find its victims. Any victims.

We kept interfering in attempts to regulate the possession  of firearms, arguing "rights". We stopped the bans on instruments of war for home use and entertainment, because "rights," and because the aftermath of a tragedy of a mass shooting just "wasn't the time" to do it. Now they come so frequently that there never is a right time by those standards. We refused to stop violent people from owning them, or home grown militias from stockpiling them. We defined "rights" as absolute, inviolate. No other rights were given limits, after all. Right?

We have the right to freedom of speech. This freedom can come with penalties, however. You can't tell lies about another and defame them without expecting consequences. You can't  incite violence, start a riot,  or cause panic in a crowded theater by falsely yelling "Fire!" Too many don't understand that being free to speak one's opinions is not also the guarantee of an audience.  Having nothing worth listening to is not to be equated with somebody shutting down your rights.

We as citizens have the right to vote, but persons of color are less able to use that right. The poor are less able to travel to where they can vote, after first having to travel to procure the "proper" ID and getting time away from work to do all of that.  Felons can't vote under many different circumstances in individual states. We impose age restrictions and all sorts of requirements before that right is actually allowed. 

Pick a right, and you'll find laws about how and where and when. But laws to control the use of guns, or even who should be able to own which kind of them, are fought against tooth and nail. People gotta make money, doncha know.

So maybe it really is all about mental illness after all: the mental illness of American society that can support the blanket defense of the tools of violence while decrying their use in the way they were designed. Pretty sure that's not how the Governor meant it, though.

Tracking A Package

I love tracking with the USPS. When I ship packages, I always follow where they go. When I order things to be delivered, I "appreciate" some of the wild journeys they make. Take that appreciation however you will. One of those is due here this afternoon. Maybe. It's been on an interesting journey.

It started in Durango, CO on the 21st. The first entry is that a tracking number has been provided. Often it means only that the shipper has generated a number. It doesn't guarantee the item has left the shippers location. I've seen that take as long as three days before the package is acknowledged somewhere as having left the shipper's location.

An hour later, to the minute, it is recorded as SHIPPING LABEL CREATED USPS AWAITS ITEM. Impressive progress, right?

In an hour and a half it has progressed to "SHIPMENT RECEIVED ACCEPTANCE PENDING" followed just over an hour later as "PRE-SHIPMENT INFO SENT USPS AWAITS ITEM" which clarifies that the post office hasn't actually gotten it yet. Busy, busy tracker, but all of it gets summed of as a kind of "we're planning to see you."

In a total of nine hours, and 5 notices of progress later, it actually arrives at the post office in Durango, only they describe it as "ORIGIN ACCEPTANCE".  Whew! I've been through Durango several times. It's totally charming and scenic, but not very large. Maybe they walked it through town, enjoying the views? Stopped for coffee?

Exactly one hour and 15 minutes later,  however, it is "PROCESSED" through the Albuquerque, NM USPS. So far all of this is the same day, March 21st, from 11:17 AM to 9:48 PM. Such a lot of paperwork before action, but when it finally moves, zip!!!

And now it sits. People gotta sleep, you know. But early birds take over and by 5:49 AM it "DEPARTED" Albuquerque. Now we start to see actual progress, not those "we see you" kinds of notices which fill the tracking form. At 11:47 AM it DEPARTED" Flagstaff, AZ. Despite appearances, that actually takes 7 hours, due to a change at the state border from daylight savings time to standard time. Aside from the Navajo reservation which covers contiguous parts of 4 states and thus has chosen to exercise their sovereignty by keeping the AZ part in the same time zone as the other three states through the entire reservation, Arizona does not set our clocks ahead and back. It confuses a lot of people who are used to certain hourly differences and then they change, and change again, twice every year. I long since lost track of how many times I hear,"Oops, I thought you were awake by now, sorry" or it's opposite, depending on which way others' clocks changed.

Note here another shortcut in tracking. It hasn't bothered to "ARRIVE" in Flagstaff, just depart. Heaven help us if it should have disappeared somewhere in there. We'd never know whom to blame. However, it has "ARRIVED" in Phoenix three hours later. Nice drive down the 17.

An hour an a quarter later it gets "PROCESSSED" in Phoenix. It sits overnight. Apparently the processing hit a glitch, because the next morning, a bleary-eyed 2:55 AM, it "DEPARTED" to be noted as having "ARRIVED" 45 minutes later... in Scottsdale. Not Sun City. Nope, Scottsdale. It went north, not west. The zip codes share the first 2 digits, but that's all.

Now we're really having fun.  I keep checking on it all day of the 23rd, and the only posting is at 11:00 AM that morning: "MISSENT" from the Scottsdale location. I go to bed waiting in vain via tracking info for it to be sent back to the Phoenix processing center which it would have to go through before being sent out to here.

This morning, the 24th,  there were several interesting postings. The first one seemed to be a misguided attempt at CYA. It is now positioned on the tracking chart by yesterday's time code, despite never showing up yesterday on tracking, but claiming that it "ARRIVED" in Sun City at the post office 11 minutes after it was also somehow noted as "ARRIVED" in Scottsdale. It apparently sat in two places yesterday at the same time. Hey, I did not order Schrodinger's cat! My only conclusion is that it was way too big an ass for somebody to cover despite their best efforts.

This morning at 3AM it was again "PROCESSED" through the Phoenix facility.  Two hours and 17 minutes later it "DEPARTED" there to "ARRIVE" in the Sun City post office 58 minutes later.Within 11 minutes it was loaded on the mail truck, finally, officially, "OUT FOR DELIVERY" !

Whew!

I'll be looking for it around 1 PM at the house. Unless.......

 

An Atypical Day

And thank goodness it wasn't typical.  So many things don't need to be repeated.

Rich has one of those emergency type phones the government gives out to people who can't afford modern smart phones. As a downside, mostly it works - at least so far as Rich had worked with it - via some wi-fi system. So I guess one better have their emergencies near public hot spots. I hope 911 calls have a better instant connection, but he hasn't needed to try that out yet.

My sleep patterns are... uh... interesting these days. Often I wake  up around 3 or 4, get up for a couple hours until I feel sleepy again, and return to bed. While I was up this morning, and Steve had gone to bed, his phone gave the beep that means he's getting a text. I ignore them for two reasons: I don't text myself so don't know how to access them, and even if they weren't private, they mostly are junk texts or from another sleep-deprived friend. It beeped about three times, and I made a mental note to let him know once we were together and awake. Neither of us does a good job of checking our phones periodically to see what we've missed unless we have a good reason.

A bit after I returned to bed, and hadn't quite fallen asleep yet, I heard my phone ringing across the house. It was 5-ish, and that usually means my Minnesota friend is calling, either having trouble with our sudden two hour difference , ot thinking this is one of my early mornings. I just called her yesterday, but she had company. She promised to call me last night but it didn't happen. No real problem, but I just wanted her to know I cared to reach out and see how her brand new job was going. The net result of that 2 second reflection on who likely was calling, and the need to cross the house to find a hangup instead of getting back to sleep, meant I didn't pursue it. I also forgot about it for hours.

It was after 8 when I mentioned to Steve he had some texts. It turned out they were important. Rich sent them. His bike had broken down (flat tire we later found out) and he need Steve to tell me to go to his friend's house, the friend with the really big pickup, to come rescue him, his bike, its trailer, and its huge load, at a specific intersection. 

There were problems with that request. I don't know where his friend's house is. I have been there, but don't know the address. Besides, the friend was by this hour likely busy working on other people's tax returns, and not available to do a rescue. I did call and left voicemail with Rich's request. At 4PM, I haven't gotten a call back.

Another problem was I was unable to reach Rich with a call back for more details. What happened? How worried should Steve and I be? Which quadrant of that intersection should I look for Rich in? I had after all determined by then, at least partly due to the hours of cold rainy weather he was stranded out in, to drive myself there to see what I could do, even if it was only to provide a very warm and dry seat for a bit. I knew he was on his bicycle, and would be towing a trailer he'd build especially to use with his bike for hauling things, even a person, around in. His need for a large pickup might be mitigated if he could unload some of whatever was on the trailer into my hatch. Despite not having breakfast or coffee yet, I popped in the car as soon as I was dressed for the weather and took off. I'd left him a voicemail, and had Steve text him, to inform him I was on the way.

There was no response.  I went anyway. It was an intersection I knew how to find. 

Once there, I found a major intersection with a stop light. Three corners were heavily commercial and one had a large apartment complex. I looped here and there through them, looking for any sign of Rich or bike. After fifteen minutes of that, I left him another voicemail, letting him know where I called from, and which way I was  heading home from there as the most likely way he'd try to trek back home, looking for him all the way.

Nada. 

A while after returning, I got a call from him. He confirmed one of our early guesses, that he hadn't charged his phone enough to be able to call back. That was fixed. And yes, now he'd gotten my voicemails. No, he hadn't heard from his friend either. But he was fine, inside, warm and dry. I heard a female voice in the background. Since he indicated his location was over a mile (further away!) from the intersection he'd originally called from, I presumed he'd found a bit of a rescue. 

I asked what I could do. He needed a replacement bike tire. It was currently on the front wheel of a bike in the back yard, and he proceeded to direct me to the location of his crescent wrenches, with instructions of how to remove the wheel so I could bring both wheel and wrench to his new location.  I told him 'd see if I could take the wheel off, and call him back. My muscles aren't what they used to be.

It was unexpectedly easy. Those nuts were not tight! We arranged the location to meet, only this time I asked for a landmark to meet him at. He gave me a grocery store and which quadrant of the intersection it was in. Back in the car I went, this time with the dog along. She wasn't included the first trip since I had no idea whether there would be any room in the car if I were bringing some of Rich's stuff back. The original plan from this call was that he'd direct me to where his bike was, but instead he just asked for the wheel and wrench. I did him a bit better, including the washers and nuts which came off the wheel I brought. He seemed pleasantly surprised that I brought them. I simply had assumed that not every bicycle tire axel was identical and it was a good idea to know they fit.

I got home for breakfast by 11. Rich just showed up, almost 5 hours later. It was a ten mile trip. Must have been either some very nice company connected with his rescue, or one hellacious load to haul back.