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Bicyclist fatally injured by truck
NCSU junior, 21, faces DWI charges

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/crime_safety/v-print/story/1048055.html

RALEIGH - After shin splints sidelined her running hobby, Nancy Leidy turned to biking. It was something she and her husband, Ross, enjoyed together.

So when she called Ross on Wednesday morning with plans to bike a 10-mile path the two maneuvered together Sunday, he simply reminded her of a good parking place and then wished her well.

Nancy Leidy, 60, was half-way through the trip when police say an N.C. State student hit her with his pickup truck about 11 a.m. She died just before 8 p.m. Wednesday.

Brian Anthony Reid, of 302 S. Sixty Court in Graham, had turned 21 on Wednesday. The arresting officer said he smelled of alcohol, had glossy eyes and slurred speech at the scene. Records indicate Reid had a blood-alcohol content of 0.12. A level of 0.08 is considered impaired.

He was charged after the accident with one count each of felony serious injury by vehicle, driving while impaired and failure to reduce speed. Those could change because of Leidy's death, Raleigh police spokesman Jim Sughrue said late Wednesday night.

According to the police report, Leidy was riding on the right side of the road when she was hit. She was thrown 58 feet by the impact. According to the police report, she was wearing a helmet.

Leidy was taken to Wake-Med Raleigh Campus, where she died, officials said Wed-nesday night.

Reid was not injured. He was released from Wake County jail Wednesday after posting a $10,000 secured bond and signing a promise to appear in court next month to answer the DWI charge. He will appear in court today on other charges.

Leidy's interests

Ross Leidy said his wife took on many tasks when she stopped working in 1991.

She worked for free as an entomology professor at N.C. State University. She ran a local support group for wives of soldiers stationed overseas during Operation Desert Storm. She also hunted for antiques and racked up ribbons for her jellies at the State Fair. And she biked.

"She was the kind of woman that when she got into something, she really got into it," he said.

Wednesday night, as Leidy mourned his wife, he also empathized with the young man charged with hitting her.

"I feel bad for the guy," Leidy said. "I was young once, and I remember getting [drunk] before. I don't think it was at 11 a.m., though."

What a week this has been. Last weekend seems like it was months ago. On the positive side of things our oldest son lost his first baby tooth. Then a couple days later he lost another. We got him a really great used bunk bed off of craigslist last weekend. He had outgrown his race car bed and wasn't sleeping through the night because it was uncomfortable. That was fast. I can't believe that he is growing up so quickly.

Somewhat out of the blue we ended up getting a great deal on a beautiful 2001 Volvo C70 which will be my new commuter vehicle. I usually drive the 10 miles from home to the ballpark and then get on my bicycle and bike the last 9.5 miles into work. It even has a trailer hitch so I can take my hitch mounted bike rack off my gas guzzling truck and put it on my Volvo. The convertible mechanism is so cool it almost gives me a woody, but not quite. I feel like such a rich businessman driving this thing around. Funny how a car can do that as I'm not really rich nor am I much of a businessman.

It's odd how we go into consumer mode at times. (That's "we" for my wife and I, not the collective "we") I think in general we have less of those tendencies than most Americans in our age and income brackets, but on the other hand we're no slouches in that department and I do feel very self-conscious when we have these little spurts of spending. I imagine the Durham Quakers will disown us sooner or later for having too much "stuff". Then again I can't ever imagine wanting something like a big screen plasma HD TV, so maybe there is hope for me yet. When my kids grow up maybe L and I will go and spend 6 months at Pendle Hill to do penance and get deprogrammed from our stuff acquiring, non-simple ways. Maybe not.

I feel like a Quaker with Tourette syndrome most days. I don't know if they can fix that at Pendle Hill.

On the not-so-positive side, my doctor is sending me for a brain MRI to see if I have a brain tumor or tumors. It's too weird to even think about. I guess it would explain a lot, but I'd prefer to find other explanations. I fluctuate between being really calm and ok about it to being totally freaked out and on the verge of tears. I hate not knowing and having something like this hanging over my head. Hopefully there will be no tumor(s) and life will just continue on with our regularly scheduled programming. It feels weird to even mention it to anyone, but I was never that good at keeping things to myself especially after years of AA. What can you do? To top the week off, something happened at work that is a total bummer. It's something I've worried about for a while so it doesn't come as a huge surprise, but it sad and will require a big adjustment.

I'm not sure how I got into this position of being a husband, a father and an employer. They all take a lot of mindfulness and energy and I can be so damned clueless at times. My wife is beyond amazing so that doesn't really take that much energy. It actually feels like the most natural thing in the world most of the time, but the other stuff can be hard, amazingly hard. 15 years ago I woke up sleeping with the homeless people in lower Manhattan, and now here I am, "Mr. Gotta lot to Loose". Hmm (scratches head).

Life is so bizarre. It coasts along for a while and then there are periods of upheaval. I believe I have a lot to be grateful for, even in the times of upheaval. It would probably serve me well not to loose track of that.



ps: I'm a totally pretentious turd for putting this picture here.

Here is my fundraising total for this year:



Here is the GPS data from the Friday night ride:

http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/player/4308372

And a few photos:

Habitat for Humanity - Full Moon Meander

The ride was great. Wish I could have ridden in the Saturday 50k also.

I owe a few folks some mugs and Habitat gets 6 hours of volunteering from me.

It was a great week. Can't wait until next year

The first cold nights of fall arrived last weekend. When I woke up on Sunday morning it was 39° which is pretty cold for this part of North Carolina at this time of year. One of the weekend chores was to refill the firewood rack on the front porch. In the winter we keep half a cord of wood on the front porch and we try to have another 1 1/2 - 2 cords of wood by the big shed, away from the house, stacked up between three big pines.

When we first moved out to Bahama we had a guy who delivered our firewood. I'll call him D. D always helped me stack the firewood he delivered and he always made sure to bring us some cedar kindling. He liked to talk a lot while we were stacking wood onto the large piles. He had worked at Nortel during Nortel's heyday and he seemed to be really effected by the downsizing. He used to tell me that he was retired but he didn't seem any older than I was. I knew he had a wife and kids and that he was divorced or separated from his wife. Being away from his kids seemed to bother him the most. Now that I have children I can imagine how he felt. From what I could tell first he lost the job, then he lost the family. I read at canadianencyclopedia.com that Nortel had "hacked away nearly two-thirds of its staff" starting in 2000. I've met a number of people who were pink-slipped by Nortel and they all had that same deer-in-the-headlights look about them.

D always seemed pretty depressed but he was talking about how he felt so you figured that he was ok, maybe he was going through a rough patch but that things would turn themselves around eventually. The last time I saw him he was delivering a load of firewood to us a few years ago. He had had an accident with his chainsaw and had cut the backside of his arm up pretty bad. I think he said he had over 100 stitches and that he had almost bled to death. This time things seemed bleaker than they had been before. He had a lot of physical pain on top of the mental pain.

The next fall when it came time to call him I had a feeling that something wasn't right and I was scared to find out. After a while I asked my neighbor if she had heard from him since I knew that she got her firewood from him also. She said that she had called his house and his son answered and told her that he had killed himself over the fourth of July weekend.

It's been a couple years gone past now since we got that news and we get our firewood from another person now. But as I was going through the big pile of firewood I recognized some of the wood that D had brought us. I have a feeling that I'll think of him every year at this time of year. The firewood D brought us got us through a terrible ice storm when my oldest son was just a baby and we had no heat or electricity for over a week. As soon as the ice storm was over I remember D checked up on us and brought us some more wood since we had gone through most of ours trying to heat the house with a drafty old fireplace.

I'm not sure what I want to say here but when I was looking at that old firewood I got the feeling like I needed to say something. You think, maybe I could have done something, then you think maybe not. Maybe I should have tried a little harder to have been a friend to D the firewood guy but then again maybe it just wouldn't have mattered. I'll never know.

Here's the second entry in the "Stuff I've bought" category. I ordered this a week or so ago but since it just came I'm going to include it. Here we have 12 pieces of rubber and two wiper arms for my MG Midget. The shortbread is a little treat that this vendor throws in. So 12 pieces of rubber which more than likely were made in China, and will probably not last very long since Chinese rubber is crap, plus two wiper arms which were made in Taiwan, plus shipping comes to $57.

Now it would be one thing if these parts were up to the same quality of the original parts and I could put them on the car and expect to get a good 20 - 30 years worth of service out of them. But these are not the same quality and will last no where near as long. Oh the joys of globalization and putting corporate profits above all else. I should start keeping tabs on how long the parts last. I just put in a new signal / high beam low beam switch on the steering column just a couple of months ago and the other night the high beam switch stopped working. At this rate I will probably be better off in the long run financially by buying a new Porsche Boxster than to pay to continually replace substandard parts on a 37 year old MG.

I'm sitting here at work, waiting to go to a meeting and that thought just crossed my mind that there are some things I'd like to do with my life beyond get up, go to work, go home, have dinner, go to bed, get up, go to work, go home, spend the weekend doing chores..... I figured I'd put them here when they cross my mind so I won't forget them.

1. Ride a bicycle across the country or at least across the damned state. I've wanted to bike across country since I was in high school. I'll probably have to wait until the kids are older, yadda, yadda, yadda
2. Along the same lines, get back to riding 3000 miles / year on my bicycle. This year has sucked for bike riding
3. Buy and restore to show condition an old MGA
4. Go camping more
5. Become a better guitar player
6. Become more creative
7. Work less and have more money at the same time. (Sure, yeah, right)...

As my 5 year old son would say, whatever.............

I buy a lot of "stuff", probably way too much stuff. So why does it always feel like I want to buy more stuff? I have a lot of different interests but I still don't think that accounts for the bulk of it.

I came across someone's flickr page where they were making sketches of everything that they've purchased. That got me thinking that trying to keep track of my purchases on this blog might be a good way to get an overview over time of what I'm buying and where the money is going.

For the first entry in this new category we have my brand spanking new Ibanez classical guitar. Last weekend I was super depressed and in the dumps for a variety of reasons. Since I didn't seem to have much control over the things that were bumming me out and since I don't have cigarettes or drugs or alcohol to fall back on I resorted to some retail therapy to pull myself out of my hole. I know it's not the best way to deal with things but then again it worked and I am no saint.

The guitar was $299 at my local Guitar Center and it sounds great. I've been learning Leonard Cohen songs since I got it last weekend. It's got the Leonard Cohen sound in spades. The friendly sales person threw in a $39.95 retail gig bag for $15 (how do they do that?) bringing the grand total to just over $335.



I think that this was one of the better recent purchases. We'll see how that holds up over time. I still have twenty some-odd days to return it if I change my mind.

Pros:	Cons:
Relatively inexpensive	Made in China
Sounds pretty good	Bought from WalMart of guitar stores instead of local mom & pop
Got me out of my funk	Didn't really need to spend money on another guitar

This has been a particularly hard summer with me being sick almost constantly and when I haven't been sick it seems like one or both of the kids were. Anyway this seems an appropriate quote / lyric to describe how I've been feeling. Score one more for the Drive by Truckers:

What used to be is gone and what ought to be ought not to be so hard
So I'll meet you at the bottom if there really is one
They always told me when you hit it you'll know it
But I've been falling so long it's like gravity's gone and I'm just floating

Mike Cooley / Drive-By Truckers ©Wayward Johnson's Music (BMI)

Here's a video of the acoustic version of the song and more proof the Mike Cooley is the coolest:

I've moved over to here for a while:

http://www.white-weeks.com/

Y'all come on by and visit sometime.

Robert

I just spent five days straight working on the new MG. I'd wake up early in the morning and work until late at night. I spent the first day cleaning out my shed / workshop, organizing parts and tools. Here's a partial list of what got done on the car in no particular order:

• Put in ebay radiator.
• Remove leaking ebay radiator
• Rebuild brake calipers
• Install Crane electronic ignition
• Go to local MG club tech session on carbs
• Adjust carbs - they were set way too rich
• Polish Carbs
• Take soft top off of '69 and install on '70
• Take spin on oil filter fitting off '69 and put on '70
• New sparkplugs
• Strip and paint shift lever
• Polish chrome
• Replace door outer window rubber seals
• Remove overspray from parts
• Replace defroster hoses that had been painted red
• Strip black paint off of chrome grille surround and poilsh
• Re-install grille surround and install new top piece
• Clean out oil pressure flex line
• Replace all hose clamps
• Replace flex gas lines
• New fuel filter
• Adjust drum brakes
• Re-glue console covering
• Attempt to fix reverse light switch

There's more but I can't remember it at the moment. One thing is for sure. It sure beats sitting in front of a computer all day.