Yesterday after eating dinner and visiting my aunt at the rehab facility (Hip surgery. Not booze.) I headed out to gas up the scooter and joy ride a little. I ended up in the K-Mart parking lot, across the river, and suddenly remembered that it was the place where I first left the Fly in a parking lot while I shopped.
I remembered the very strange emotion I felt when I raised it onto its stand and walked away from it. It felt as if I was abandoning a child as I looked over my shoulder at it and made my way toward the store entrance.
The poor little thing - all alone in a parking lot!
I don't remember what I was shopping for, or if I found what I was looking for, but I know I cut the time I might have spent there short for fear of something happening to my new little scooter which I'd left all alone in the big parking lot. I felt guilty leaving it there!
On the way back home, taking one of many long ways, I realized that I do something with the car that annoys my wife and kids, but that I don't do with the scooter. With the car I tend to race toward a red traffic light and lay on the brake at the last minute leaving them feeling queasy. With the scooter I ease back on the throttle long before I get to a red light and coast slower and slower in hopes that I won't have to stop and put a foot down before the light turns green. I'm sure that I occasionally annoy the guy behind me, especially if he's driving like I usually do on four wheels, and even more so when, after following me at 7 MPH for a while, I zip away from the pack when the light turns green and leave him in my dust. He might catch up and pass me, but only after he gets the inertia working and momentum up that I don't have to worry about.
I still do things that annoy myself when I'm riding, like sometimes cocking the wheel too hard when I'm making a slow turn around a parking space and feeling that worrisome moment of instability, or pulling too far to the right when stopping at a corner. Roads often slope at the edges and my last fall was the result of putting my right foot down and not finding anything to stop me from going over. And, now and then, I still let that hurried cager behind me get to me and cause me to speed up to accommodate his apparent urgency when I really want to slow down even more and let him stew. Have you noticed that a tractor-trailer or dump truck driver can go as darned slow as he wants and nobody thinks to ride his bumper to try to make him speed up? A scooter going the same speed though, is fair game? Grrrrr!
I'm really starting to hate Blogger. During editing it keeps messing with the spaces I'm putting between paragraphs and sections, seeming to add or subtract them mysteriously and with no rhyme nor reason. Anybody know a way around that?
I'm really starting to hate Blogger. During editing it keeps messing with the spaces I'm putting between paragraphs and sections, seeming to add or subtract them mysteriously and with no rhyme nor reason. Anybody know a way around that?
2 comments:
Trust me when I tell you Joe, that Truckers have their own particular frustrations with cagers (otherwise known as four wheelers to truckers). I grew up riding in the cab of those trucks with my father, cagers can act like real fools, whether you're on two wheels, or 18.
As far as the blogger thing goes, I know what you mean, I had that problem with a couple of my earlier posts but for some reason or another, it seems to have worked itself out. One thing that I do more frequently now is to write my post in Microsoft Word and then when I am ready, I just cut and paste it into the blogger text box.
E.T.
I have taken to writing my posts in the HTML window and adding my own paragraph tags. The div tags that Blogger puts in there are the problem. If you write in the HTML window, it doesn't do that. But you have take your own responsibility for the spacing.
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