August 2001
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August 2001
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Life Lesson No. 8442: People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. From J. Milewsky Wednesday August 1, 2001 I woke up with considerable remorse about not stopping to see Dick... Oh well... it was just too late. If I had stopped It would have been two hours out of my way not including the visit... I was too anxious to get home... Last night I stopped at a rest area in Upstate New York... I was almost out of gas... I had pulled off the expressway twice because the signs said Gas... once Mobil once Chevron... both times the stations were closed. In the morning I passed a sign saying McDonalds, I passed by but thought that a cup of coffee would be nice... a few miles later I saw another sign saying Mc Donald's and pulled off the freeway... I saw no McDonalds... I followed another sign back four miles to the McDonalds that the first sign was pointing to... It really irked me... for an outfit that claims to want to serve the public, that's a pretty sleazy thing to do. Upstate New York does have some pretty scenery, some valley areas were fogged in, reminded me of Sleepy Hollow... New York has tried to spark spending by having "Tax Free Holidays" one time for a three day weekend they will have a "Tax Free Computer Purchasing Holliday" Another weekend will be tax free for Large Appliances... pretty cool idea. I got to thinking about this WebPage... I really missed making my nightly entries... but the thing that really had me thinking was the realization that I am not exactly a "Mainstream" thinker... I have some very nonstandard beliefs about the way the real world functions and the way I function in it... the thing that really amazes me is that there are people who agree with me... if not kindred spirits at least we share a concept or two, there really are people out there who look at the world and see it pretty much the same way I do...
There is a much better picture of the school on the Net. http://www.rootsweb.com/~patioga/daggett.htm Daggett is a nice little town, I was surprised at how well kept up it was, I wouldn't call it prosperous but it wasn't dead by a long shot either... I took some pictures in the cemetery and of the church and one-room school house... (a historical site)... I got the
Back on the freeway they were adding another lane, from all the dump trucks I passed going down to Daggett it seems they are getting most of the gravel from the pit just inside town limits. I was traveling through New York... I went into Pennsylvania to see Daggett but it is just over the border... I went back to New York to continue on West and it dawned on me why I was developing a dislike for the State... it is old, everything seems to be falling apart, I drove by a bridge and the concrete had fallen off the side of a bridge I was on, you could see the steel exposed, they still suspend traffic lights over the intersections, there are at least three time as many men working on any one highway project... it reminder be of an ant hill with a couple hundred guys just standing around wearing orange vests... doing nothing. then you could travel for miles looking at tractors and earthmovers just sitting idle, it looked like they hadn't moved in days... I said on the tape "It seems like there are an awful lot of people working very hard to make the roads worse." I have never seen so many people on one construction site... it looked like some sort of convention... I remembered the Strikes in the late Sixties and Seventies... we were always settled before New York... they were always holding out for some outrageous perk... The Unions really missed the boat... they got greedy and almost put themselves out of business... they should have morphed into an OSHA like position, become mediators and arbitrators for the workers... instead they kept asking for more and more money, diminishing the profit margins for the companies that employed the people that kept them alive,,, them to the point where they couldn't expand and grow with the times...many companies almost went belly up in the seventies and eighties because they couldn't compete with the rest of the world... I think we still have troubles because of the greed of the Companies and the Unions... I was pulling into Cleveland and saw a sign on a church, I wonder if the acronym was taken into consideration when they decided to name their Church the "First Assembly of God"... I was traveling down the freeway and I noticed a youngish man in a gold Cadillac driving erratically, he was all over the freeway and he passed me about four times... he was fiddling with papers and talking on a cell phone, he was obviously trying to conduct some sort of business at 70 miles per hour... he really started to piss me off... it was his total disregard for the people around him, conducting business on a crowded freeway at 70 MPH oblivious to the people swerving out of his way to keep from hitting him or being hit by him. Here I was getting absolutely livid and I started to laugh... some little Jewish guy (It wasn't the Cadillac or the driving or the black beard, it was the yarmulke that gave him away) was actually ruining my day... I was getting so mad at him I couldn't think about anything else... so I pulled over and got my self a milkshake at Arby's... and forgot about him. Chicago is all messed up, the roads are all tore up, toll roads are down to one or two lanes... awful drive... at least the roads are well marked... Crapped out in a truck stop outside Rockford, Ill, thunder and lightning... lots of rain... I had made a stupid mistake and
gotten on the wrong road and was half way to Madison Wisconsin... Thursday August 2, 2001
I couldn't use my phone in Waterville I drove down to Colfax, Iowa, about an hour from Waterloo and stayed the rest of the day and night at Orvil and Cheryl's Williams's house. Orvil was debating with himself about taking what sounded like a really demanding job in Omaha, Nebraska... headquartered there anyway... he would be supervising power installation jobs for some telco... wonder if he took it... I will call tomorrow. An observation; the diference between Orvil and I... one of them... is that Orvil was trying to talk himself out of taking the job... I would have had to talk myself into taking the job. Interesting subtly... but what really amuses me is that we both seemed to agree that it was a crappy job. I met The Wiz and her husband Kevin and their son (my brain went dead,,, I can't remember his name) The Wiz is Alice, Cheryl and Orvil's daughter... she is the computer Guru in the family... I have been chatting with her for years... least I used to... her job and marriage seems to be monopolizing her time... I think the boy lives with Cheryl about 90% of the time... at east he would if Cheryl had her way. Cheryl cooked dinner and we talked till I couldn't keep my eyes open any more... I got my shower and then I slept like I'd been drugged... Friday August 3, 2001 I left Orvil's house at about 0600, and headed to Denver, I was going to swing south to Tulsa to avoid the mountains but changed my mind... Denver and Salt Lake is faster and shorter... I saw a sign saying "Monument ahead, do not stop or slow down!" sure enough there was a huge arch-like structure over the freeway... it looked like an old army fort, and it looked like it had an indian motif too, pterry ingenious actually... about a mile or so past the structure was an place where you could go back to see it close up... and go to Wendy's too of course.. it's Called "The Great Platte River Road Archway Monument" http://www.archway.org/ ... only in America. I got to Paxton Nebraska and the car started to overheat... I took it to a mechanic and we looked it over... it was low on radiator coolant and the reservoir was over flowing with it... go figure. I kept on going, I made it through Denver I hit it at rush hour, Denver drivers are very aggressive... the yuppies around there figure that they bought some sort of special privileges when the bought their SUV's that allows them to drive like they are immortal... why otherwise civilized people can get into their air-conditioned little boxes and turn into rude, insensitive idiots I will never really understand. I wonder if I look like they do to them. I am thinking about the bumper sticker I want to get made..."Remember, you are the idiot ahead of the guy in your rear view mirror"... and was climbing back up toward Loveland Pass but I didn't even make it half way.. about 6000 feet it vapor-locked. I said, to hell with it and drove back down to Denver and took 25 south to Santa Fe... no problems... no overheating either but I couldn't take my eyes off the gauge for more then a minute all the way home... I slept just outside Gallup New Mexico
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