Girl Cooties - Don't Let Them Keep You From Engaging Your Audience

There are some men who, when they speak to a mixed sex crowd, never make eye contact with the women in the audience.  For instance, I was one of ten people on a committee which had a meeting last week and there was this guy giving a presentation to us and never once in the enire hour did he ever make eye contact with me.  I think this is not unusual, this failure to be comfortable with conversing with women on the same level as the men.  I don't mean to be a profiler here, but I truly think that this is more common in men from some cultures than others.  I think they are raised to not be comfortable talking with women.  No worries.  I know what it feels like to be afraid of something, to think you are going to catch cooties. Things like that use to frustrate me.  Now they are a source of distraction from a boring talk.   No worries.

 

How much would you pay for a glass of water?

How much would you pay for a glass of water? I wish I had a more subtle way to say this, but people put no value on water. There is just a belief that knobs will be turned and water will run magically run from the tap. “Sure we pay for water.” In reality to say that we pay for water is a joke. Rates charged for water in Travis County are based on usage. I know what you are thinking “the more water people use the higher the price”. Well that would be the sane way to price a commodity that is in incredible demand wouldn’t it. However, it is all relative to the starting point right.


This glass of water costs the average person about a 1/10th of a cent.


The first 2000 gallons of water a household in Travis County uses costs 0.735 cents a gallon. Yep you heard me right. Not 73 cents per gallon, but zero point seven three five cents a gallon. Not even one penny per gallon. That’s ok, we get you on the next 43,000 gallons, cause the next 43,000 gallons you use will cost you 0.42 cents per gallon. Not even half a penny a gallon. Man! I can hear those sprinklers being turned off right now. The rest of this sad tale runs something like this:

The next 15,000 gallons – 0.51 cents per gallon

The next 15,000 gallons after that – 0.62 cents per gallon

The next 25,000 gallons after that – 0.752 cents per gallon

Then finally if you really think you need more it’s gonna really cost you, 0.921 cents per every gallon you use over 100,000. Because if you need more than 100,000 gallons of water a month then we feel you should have to pay darn close to a penny a gallon.
So I repeat my question. How much would you pay for a glass of water? Now how much would you pay if you were standing at your front door facing a raging brush fire. Probably more than 0.921 cents.
Until we treat water like the precious commodity it is and stop thinking that we deserve to have lush golf course like lawns in central Texas we will continue to use the resource in an uncontrolled fashion. If water costs were able to fluctuate on the open market according to demand, much like oil and gas, we would see these prices more reflective of the value that water possesses. Water would likely jump to several dollars a gallon. In times of extreme drought, such as what Texas is experiencing today, water would be costly. Too costly to water your lawn.

"The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men.....

Team Ride Red Mouse
(image from istockphoto.com)

"I gotta warn you.  There is a mouse in the Rider RV."  Thus the warning of Dolores after spending three days driving the RV out to Oceanside for the start of RAAM 2011.  Pete and Dolores had endured tire blow outs, forest fires, and apparently rodents to take the RV out to RAAM.   I didn't worry to much about the rodent.  I figured it would ride out in the RV, arrive in sunny California, find a nice condo to occupy on the beach at Oceanside, bless itself for having the common sense to move from Austin in the summer to California in the summer and it would do all right.  If I had known what was coming, I would have made sure it got out in California, as the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals might have gotten me on the way to Annapolis.  

In 1785 Scots poet Robert Burns wrote the poem ""To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough" Probably the best known part of that poem is as follows.....

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,

An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!
Our team did an immense amount of planning for the RAAM.  Every event,  anticipation attempted - every contingency planned for, an every solution readied.  However, it is impossible to plan for every scenario that life will throw at you.  You will always run into something that you could not have anticipated happening.  With an event the magnitude of RAAM, it will happen.  The ability to handle issues as they arise, and not as they were planned for calls for flexibility of character, measured thought, a willingness to consider multiple options, to problem solve without thinking about the process of problem solving. All of these characteristics change with changing amounts of sleep, food and rest, some people simply find it hard to make decisions, and decisions must be made, actions taken - sometimes with limited opportunity to evaluate the situation.

No one gets on their bike and thinks.  "OK, I'm going to put one foot on the peddle and push down and forward with enough force to clip in my cleat, then I am going to push down on that peddle to get myself rolling at 2 mph, or at least enough speed to stay upright while I put the other foot on the other peddle and push down and forward with enough force to clip in my other cleat, then I am going to push down on that peddle with enough force to keep my momentum up and building to maybe 10mph..... etc. etc. ad nausem."  You just get on your bike and ride. If you stop and think each step out you will fall over.  What if your cleat doesn't clip in? Well you problem solve that as it happens. 

RAAM requires that you solve problems as they come at you.  If you stop or hesitate at every unforeseen event, you will stall and not move forward.  This is tough for people who need to think things through completely before acting.  It is a very uncomfortable place to be.  You can see the pain in their faces.  You can hear the frustration in their voice.

As Burns said in his poem, something unforeseen is going to happen no matter how much you plan for it.   Your ability to decide how much analysis is warranted before you act is part of how rapidly you can move across the U.S. during RAAM.

The mouse stayed in the RV.  It went to ground, building a quick but comfortable nest out of TP paper (2 ply I'm sure), stocking a few power bars, and watching the drama unfold around it.  It came back out last night while the RV was parked in our drive way.  Probably wishing it had avoided the heat and gotten off in California, but unwilling to miss the drama of RAAM unfolding before it.  I felt the same way.

   It really wasn't this bad, but it could have been.

HOA Nazis

Do HOAs really work? Can you rule a subdivision by fear?

I have new neighbors who moved and built next to me because my Homestead has a very limited, and informal HOA.  We like it that way.  They were basically "driven" from south Austin by HOA fears, and into the arms of the anarchists in Bee Cave.  Welcome you refugees of the Lawn Nazis! 

Do these types of set ups really help sell homes?  I do understand the need for some regulation.  Lawns can get out of control.  Patios can be a blight. If we don't edge the lawns what will the yard workers do for a job. I had a friend get in trouble in Katy because he didn't have curtains up on his windows.  So he hung up seismic lines.  No one seemed to care that the neighbor had a wooden cut out of some bent over woman's butt with her drawers showing, or another with a water hose coming out of some unspeakable portion of the wooden painted overalls crotch.  Apparently such things are considered "cute yard art".   But I guess the thought that Gerald (my friend in Katy) would run around and do his daily functions in a Glass House so to speak, was just too much.

It is good that I don't live in a lawn nazi area.  I would drive both myself and them crazy.

In addition, Home Owners usually PAY for the privilage of being harassed.

“First they came for the failed lawn waterers, but I was a lawn waterer so I did not care. Then they came for the failed lawn edgers, but my lawn was edged so I did not care.  Finally, they came for the landscape code violaters and there was no one left to help me.”

Food in a Bag - Just like the Astronauts

RAAM food is food in a bag.  We generated an immense amount of FIBs, as I call them, for the RAAM.  Sweet potatoes with cinnamon, butter, sugar; Crack peas (sauted onions and butter, mash potatoes, frozen peas, organic meat; pasta and sauce packets; rice and eggs.  Gotta love it.  Clip the end, put it to your lips
and squeeze it like yo mama.

In addition to FIBs, we produced about 257 burritos. They are "dinner in your hand". Anything you can wrap in a tortilla you can function with. Burritos are mobile, whether you are driving the get away car or running across the border or swimming a river. You can move with a burrito.  It ain't pretty but it is functional.

Duct Tapers

Duct tape has always been around, since the dawn of time - like fire, like the wheel.  But it took man a bit to learn how to USE duct tape.

It takes a certain type of person to survive on a RAAM Crew. To survive RAAM you gotta have a duct tape kind of attitude.  When things begin to crater, no time to whip out the welder or the soldering gun. No time to wait for the drying of the glue, just pull that "duct tape" attitude out of the hoister and fire away.  When you get finished, it is never pretty, but it is working, functional.   Some people hate duct tape.  They think it is messy, it is ugly, it is cheap looking.  It might be all of those things, but those who have a duct tape attitude will be sitting on the East Coast enjoying a scotch when others are trying to stitch, glue and solder their way across West Virginia.

A DEATH IN CORTEZ - NOT A DEATH IN TUBA CITY

We made our way across Arizona, through Monument Valley, up into southern Utah, then over to southwestern Colorado where our Soccer Mom van promptly died. Really, completely died in Cortez. Apparently the van decided that 48 hours of continual abuse was enough and it preferred death over the prospect of being abused for 7 more days. I can relate. If dying were an option, I might go there. But with RAAM dying is not an option.

Take for example our fellow cyclist with another team who apparently was hit by a semi in Tuba City, Arizona, suffered broken bones but, thank god, is alive.  Cycling is dangerous no matter how you cut it.  I am always amazing about people who "got hit by a semi".  I mean give me a break!  Cyclists must be like Superman.  A semi whacks a person on 20 pounds of bike and the person comes away with few broken bones.  I think that is amazing.  You should have seen the semi!