Chilly Morning and a "Moral Dilemma"

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

It was a chilly 27° at 5:30 this morning when we showed up to row. Unfortunately there were not enough people to take out an 8. Borrowing one of the collegiate rowers we could have had a 7 but it is hard to do drills and have control the boat being short of people. Hopefully it will warm up a bit Thursday and we will be able to head out.

I heated up Grape Nuts Flakes in the microwave with fresh strawberries for a pre-row breakfast. After I got home and did my E-bay and internet stuff, then it was time for a “real” breakfast: Homefries with onions, pepper bacon, egg and more coffee. Nothing beats a good greasy breakfast. I’m trying to eat heavy in the mornings and then taper off to where I just have a light supper. I’m not going hungry and when I weighed in at the Y yesterday I was down to 165 from 174 at my peak. If I could only get my six pack stomach back again! I used to tell people that my family was so poor growing up, my mother had to wash clothes on my “washboard” stomach!! (I can’t lie I never had one!!)

Got down t the Y and erged for half an hour total on the rowing machines and worked my calves and shoulders. Hopefully it will warm up enough in the afternoon to do yard work. Tim showed up a bit late, just as I was leaving. I had printed out my entry on Tom Day for him to read along with the information I sent in to the NPR program “Marketplace” about the GM “job-banks” and how it affected my work life. My God, what I sent in to that program was two pages single spaced!!

I heard a mention of the GM “job-banks” on a radio news show where some union official from Lansing, MI (I think, I’m not certain) was on a tear. He was livid saying how the people in the job banks did community service work and they did not just sit around and watch movies on TV. Maybe that was how things worked in his local, but here in my old factory in Tuscaloosa, AL we were not allowed to leave the plant. Workers begged to be allowed to do some kind of alternative work/service for the community. The brick wall was supposedly “insurance coverage”. The end result was a cross-section of the work force that wasted years of their lives doing nothing, getting paid for 40 hours a week.

Walking home from the Y gave me more drama than I needed. This city is famous for drivers running red lights. I was two blocks away from the intersection of 10^th Street and 21^st Ave. I heard a crash and saw two SUV’s crunched up. The light was red for 10^th street so it looked pretty cut and dry that somebody had run a red light. A young woman was driving one of vehicles with a baby seat on the font. Thank God nobody was hurt. I told her what I saw if that would help her any. Then one of the occupants of the other vehicle started screaming they were going to sue for every penny she had and they were going to get rich. I did not witness the accident; I just heard the crunch and saw the light was red. That man started harping on me. Then one lady on the side said to me, “You don’t have to say nothing.” I took that as my cue to leave. Now as I write this I’m having second thoughts if I should contact the police dept or not.

Being plagued by a “moral dilemma” is the last thing I expected to happen today.