Howdy everyone.  It has been a very busy weekend so going to crank out a quick post today.   That is if my fingers hold out long enough to get all the words typed out.  I am literally sitting here too exhausted even to get up and turn the channel to something other than golf.  The cause of this discomfort is the 3 hours on Friday, 12 hours on Saturday and 8 hours today spent finishing off the bridge decking.  The good news is, this completes the last major task on Operation River Kwai.  There are some odds and ends to complete, but the stress is basically over.  The bad news is I can barely stand at the moment and the arms are like Jello.  There will be a future post covering the progress in more detail.

It was a definite struggle to come up with the graphic for this post and opted for the easier way out and just set up quick picture with the two key components of the observation.  It also provided a great reason to show off my favorite toy car.  Not only is it a replica of my dream car, it is painted up as my favorite comic book theme.  Not positive anymore, but pretty sure Pakage got this gem for me!  Lately I have been checking out the various drivers encountered while motoring around the city of Peoria.  Apparently, there is a serious problem with wrecks occurring due to someone “texting” when they should be watching the road.   Strangely (for being so prevalent), I have never encountered a driver actually doing this.   There are plenty of distracted cell phone users and makeup appliers out there, but no one doing the thumb olympics.  While doing my investigations, I came upon two very interesting scenes.  The first one involved a green Cherokee that came up alongside me.  Catching my eye was a huge prescription bottle that the passenger was raging war with to get open.  Finally outsmarting the child proof locks, the lady took a large yellow pill and handed it to the driver.  Fairly mundane.  However, the lady then took one out of the bottle and washed it down with water.  This I thought was odd, since I can’t remember anytime where a prescription was given to a party of people.  This was either another buried feature in the healthcare reform, a rare case of two related people needing the same medication or something that likely was not legit.  It could have just been a handy storage container for over the counter drugs, but that would have been an interesting discussion should they get pulled over since it still had the medical label on it.  They drove away when the light turned leaving me still pondering a situation I had not encountered before.  Eventually, the Sixteen Candles quote “Now we are both on the pill” came to mind giving me an internal chuckle.

The other interesting visual I had was when a blue GMC Jimmy came up next to me on the right at a stop light.  As soon as the car came to a stop, the driver turned toward the passenger seat (away from me), grabbed a 6 inch by 4 inch by 2 inch piece of white plastic and started blowing heavily into it.  After one long breadth he brought it down and looked at the top and then repeated the whole process.  On the second read, he put it down on the seat and exploded off the line when the light turned green.  My best guess is he had a portable breathalyzer.  This seemed odd and a little troubling that he felt the need to check it at 4pm in the afternoon leading to the assumption he had spent a good deal of time drinking and was concerned enough to check it.  On additional scrutiny, a thought occurred that it was a contraption for convicted drunk drivers that prevented the car from going unless the breadth was clean.  I had heard of contraptions to get the vehicle started, but didn’t think it was required to get the car going again it came to a stop.  If this was the case, that could be a serious safety risk above and possibly beyond actually driving drunk.  Obviously, I’ll never know the actual reasons, but like the first situation, this still seems like it would be an interesting discussion if he was pulled over by the police.  “Look officer, I’m not legally drunk, my handy breathalyzer says .0799999999, which means I’m still legal!”.  “Why do you have that?”  “Because I need to know when to drive really fast to avoid being pulled over when I’m drunk.”  “Please step out of the car…”  I cleverly let this individual get a number of car lengths ahead of me before leaving the stop light, no reason to take any chances.

Good news, Linda just showed up.  Hopefully I can convince her to get the remote (sitting 2 feet from me) and change the channel.  Be safe out there!