#She's like the chief of road maintenance in a small town

[dreamstar-moonlight]

One of tbe brilliant things about mlp:fim is that the main cast aren't wayward children or highschool students they're just a bunch of young adults. Like. Twilight is a postgrad forced by her supervisor to go find friends. Apple Jack has responsibility of gaurdianship of her little sister. They're all employed. They pay rent and taxes. Fluttershy has to deal with her deadbeat underachiever older brother who can't seem to move out by himself when she visits her parents. She also has anxiety she hasnt grown out of since high school. Rainbow Dash spends most days getting high and goofing off on her minimum wage job. Pinkie Pie has a culinary apprenticeship and lives with an older couple after she left her small mining town when nobody there was as into psychadelics as her. Rarity balances running her slowly growing etsy fashion bussiness with going on tinder dates with the worst men you've ever seen. They all vote. They have to pick up their own medical perscriptions. These are 26 year old girlies going through first quarter life crisises. So, yea, that fanart of Fluttershy smoking forever weed is highly accurate.

[kootenaygoon]

So,

We were supposed to be having sushi.

Paisley’s mother was in Nelson for a visit, and we’d strolled down to Baker Street on a breezy summer evening in June 2015 to find a whole section of Ward cordoned off. Firefighters were congregating around a nearby alley, behind Touchstones Museum, and police cruisers were strategically parked to block traffic at either end of the block. On the opposite side of the street was a small crowd of gawkers standing outside the Hume Hotel. I’d just gotten off work, and I’d been looking forward to sushi all day, but there was no way I could keep walking and pretend I hadn’t seen this.

“You guys get started, I just need to figure out what’s going on, okay? It’ll take me like 20 minutes, tops. This could actually be a big story for the Friday edition,” I said, giving Paisley a quick kiss. 

“I’ll be there before you’re even finished your miso soup.”

When I got down to the corner I shook hands with Josh Hoffman, one of the local radio reporters. I asked him what was going on and he explained that some guy had terrorized his girlfriend, torn apart her apartment and was now throwing shit out the window into the alley. She had successfully extricated herself, thankfully, but now he was menacing the cops with a cleaver and threatening to throw himself out the fifth-storey window. Josh pulled out his camera and showed me the photos he’d taken, the last time the dude poked his head out. There was blood running down his chin, his eyes were wild, and he looked like a horror movie villain. He was also approximately my age, a regular-looking blonde guy in his early 30s. If the universe was sending me signs, then this one was was a little on the nose. 

“He was laughing and pointing at people, man. Like the Joker or something,” Josh said. “Creepy shit.”

I thanked Josh and jogged across town to the Nelson Star office to retrieve my camera, taking a moment to screw on my zoom lens, then called Greg on my cell while I power-walked back to the scene. Up until this point the Star had published multiple stories about the mental health crisis, as the NPD continued to call it, but I hadn’t been able to write about a specific example. This was my chance to illustrate what Wayne Holland had told me about, to make people see the immediacy and urgency of the issue. That being said, I knew Paisley would be pissed if I didn’t get back to dinner quickly. Her Mom had flown all the way from Nova Scotia to see us and so far I’d been busy nearly every day with work. It didn’t matter if this random dude was about to commit very public suicide, because I couldn’t change the outcome one way or the other. I imagined her sitting there with the menu, wishing I could just call the cops in the morning. But I was too addicted to the rush, the drama, the adrenaline of a breaking story. 

I’d never felt better suited to a task.

“So they have him barricaded in the room, and he’s completely in the dark because they cut off power to the whole building,” I told Greg, recounting what I’d heard from Josh. 

“They’ve got negotiators there now, trying to talk him down. They know he has that meat cleaver but they don’t know what else he might have.”

“And when did this all start?”

“I think it’s been about four hours now. Like it started with this big domestic dispute and then this dude just lost his shit. Word is he’s violating a court order.”

“Well, let’s hope he doesn’t jump.”

As I neared the spot again, I reflected on how this darkness could exist amidst such incredible beauty. Elephant Mountain remained omnipresent to my right, it’s trees glowing in the late evening sun. There were faded phantom signs on the heritage buildings and people were noisily enjoying patio time with a view that stretched out to the Big Orange Bridge. Beers clinked. Around town there were a number of mural projects going on, and my favourite was a collaborative art wall that changed every few months. Its latest iteration was a cyborg lobster that was harvesting bunnies to turn into slippers. It had been created by an artist named Coleman Webb, along with help from others, and I used it as a cover photo for the Star one week. To me it illustrated the rollicking chaos of the Kootenays, with bright vivid colours, but it also hinted at some of its shadowy elements too. Who could save us from the lobster menace? All around us were people that were taking things too far, that were getting lost in the intellectual jungles of drug addiction and mental illness. And who was there to catch these people, when they careened off the deep end? Who was going to intervene?

“Has he poked his head out again?” I asked Josh.

“Yeah, he’s putting on a real show now. I think he likes the attention. He keeps yelling at us, but I can’t hear him.”

“What’re the cops doing? Did they set up mats under his window or something?”

“It looks like they’re taking the firetruck ladder. I don’t know if they’re going to rush the place or what.”

I spotted Fire Chief Len MacCharles, who had also been at Ryan Tapp’s death scene. This was turning out to be a grim gig for him. He shouted orders, pointing and gesturing. It was just starting to get dark, and the red brake lights gave everything a hellish glow. I found a good angle on the balcony of the Hume, and my shutter clicked multiple times as the guy re-emerged swaying, his arms locked on the windowsill. Blood dripped from his chin to his chest, leaving little crimson spots below his collarbone. His eyes rolled around in his head, then suddenly they focused. He shouted wildly. His eyes scanned the alley past the firefighters and down to the small crowd in front of where I was situated. Then he saw me, with the camera, and grinned. He lifted his shaky arm and pointed right at me. He was on the other side of the lens, but I still felt his gaze. Goosebumps erupted down my arms.

“It was like he was trying to tell me something, like he was coming back from the future to warn me,” I told Paisley later that night, while we walked the dogs around the school playground.

“It was like he was saying: you next.”

Paisley scoffed. “Don’t say that. That’s ridiculous.”

We were sneaking a joint before going to bed, which was breaking the promise we’d made to each other that we wouldn’t smoke while her mother was in town. I loved Paisley’s mother, and trusted her deeply, but the flip-side of that was that she always knew more about my life and my secrets than I was comfortable with. She was a tough, ultra-discerning nurse who was intent on providing the best life possible for her daughter, and that meant making sure she regularly participated in boyfriend maintenance. She schooled me on how to properly act as a partner, correcting any missteps or faux pas. She’d held our hands through multiple near-breakups, acting as a mediator. Whenever she visited she bought us groceries, took us shopping for housing decorations, and sat delighted in the passenger seat while we took road trips into the countryside. The one down-side was her fervent anti-pot attitude, which necessitated covert moments such as these.

We stood in the moonlight while Muppet and Buster ran laps of the field, bounding along in pace with each other. One light, the other dark. Smoke tendrils rose towards the buzzing security light, then up into the darkness.

“So what happened with the guy, then? How did it all end?” Paisley asked, taking a toke.

“He took a run for the window and jumped right out, but somehow I guess he ended up hanging by his fingertips from the window frame. So the cops rushed the room and they grabbed him while he was dangling there. They were able to drag him back inside.”

She passed me the joint. “By his fingers? Holy shit.”

The Kootenay Goon

[mysterywriterworld]

Me? Handsome?

           The wind was roaring at an increased sustained level. It created ghostly screeches as it blew through the legs of the normally unmanned installation (NUI), best known as a 'toadstool' platform, located three miles directly south of Lafayette, Louisiana in the vast waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Gaston Chaisson was paying no mind to the wind as he was absorbed in doing his frequent routine maintenance inside the covered tin hut. He was diligently servicing the umbilical cable that was attached to a satellite platform that operated in conjunction with Gulflexa, a deep-well permanent platform owned and operated by Gulf Flexible Annex. Gaston was a member of the maintenance crew on the Gulflexa mother platform. He uses a medium-sized ten man crew boat to travel between the mother platform, its satellite and the toadstool that he was servicing. His crew boat was tethered to one of the steel legs of the toadstool, secured with a cable that was locked to an O ring on the leg. He opened the door of the small tin hut cable cover to discover the wind had increased considerably from the time he climbed up the ladder to the tin shack. He listened closely to the screeching as it whistled loudly under him. He frowned, knowing his decent to the heavily rocking boat was going to be a nail biter. Following company rules, before he moved, he latched the safety hooks of his leather tool belt to the pipes at each side of the ladder, took a deep breath and began the climb down.

           He stopped on the last rung, actually a small steel landing where he could stand and board the boat. He stood, still attached to the pipes, fighting the wind and now the icy cold whitecaps blowing over his legs on the small platform as he stared at the taut, straining tether. The boat was being pulled backwards and was brutally rocking over the waves the wind created. He was  wondering if he had the strength to pull the boat close enough to the ladder to safely board the boat once his safety hooks were removed from the pipes. He was facing one of those life and death iffy situations one occasionally faces. He looked down and saw that his gloves were now wet, the leather slick, and when he pulled on the boat tether, his grip kept sliding away. The question now became: should he violate company policy and try it with his bare hands. He shook his head and said to himself: Gaston, you're not a loony Cajun like some of your friends. That tether cable will rip your bare hands apart and hurt you more than the company disciplinary action if it found out.

           He grasped the sides of the ladder, put his hands on the upper rung and climbed back to the larger platform. It was hard to stand without support. He wrapped one arm around one of the stand pipes and surveyed the skies around him. He saw no breaks in the clouds that would give him hope. He returned to the tin hut, took his mobile short-wave radio and called the mother platform. He reported his decision and the chief of maintenance congratulated him on making a sound analysis of his situation. Gaston would spend the night inside the hut, safe from the elements, but destined to be hungry. He had left his lunch pail on the crew boat.

           He had difficulty sleeping because when the rain started, the noise on the tin hut was worse than baseball-sized hail on a car in the middle of June. Even ear sound protectors wouldn't have been any help it was so loud and consistent. Nearing four that morning, the rain had subsided; Gaston peeked out the door and realized that the wind had eased also. He flipped the switch on his flashlight, left the hut and attached himself to the ladder. At the bottom, he easily pulled the boat close enough to safely step aboard. He started the engine and backed away from the legs. He put it in forward, opened his lunch pail and instantly devoured the contents, including two bananas. The coffee was no longer hot, but yet warm enough to fight off the early morning chill of the mist hanging low over the calmer Gulf waters. In forty minutes, Gaston was in his bed on the mother platform, pleased that the adversity he challenged didn't leave him in worse shape than it did.

           One week later, Gaston stepped into his boat, secured his suitcase, and left to service the satellite platform. When his servicing job was complete, it was time for Gaston's rotation, hence the suitcase. Gaston worked a schedule of six weeks on, six weeks off. His crew boat would be turned over to Jules Babineaux, his rotation partner His service job took less than an hour, so he was back in the boat with the destination of Blanche Bay and through the bay to Franklin where he would turn the boat over to Babineaux. Gaston was age forty-three, never married, well below average in looks, but a hard worker that lived alone in the old, run-down family home in Jeanerette. He never saw the need to spend his earnings to live elsewhere because he was there only part of the year. He told his sisters, both who lived in Lafayette, if his job ever changed, he would tear down the old house and build a new one under the moss-hung trees. They thought his idea was a good one under the circumstances. Argument settled.

           If Gaston had any vices they were limited and unknown to his associates and sisters. However, the one habit he was known to have was his love for alcohol, always bourbon. Never on the rigs, only when he was ashore. He usually spent very little time at his home in Jeanerette. He could most often be found haunting the Cafe La Boue Bug in Beaux Bridge where many of his friends lived nearby. He would sit with them and let off the built-up steam of the rigs when they were ashore. His attempts to connect with women were an abject failure. The lowliest of the lowly rejected Gaston, calling him Frankenstein without the makeup. Even the desperate, seedy whores on Bourbon Street in New Orleans accepted him with anguish and trepidation, fearing that he was a monster ready to crush them. Many were surprised by his demeanor and afterwards, most called him a true gentleman, a great lay, a man who showed them respect, was never rough or rude, and left them with generous tips. They would welcome him back if he was in town and looking for a good time and he always was at some point when he was ashore.

           The Saturday before the end of his six week home stand found him in Breaux Bridge with one of his fellow company employees, but Eloi Prevost worked a different rig. They were in the Cafe La Boue Bug where a casino was attached to a large truck stop service station. Gaston had his familiar bourbon and branch in his ham-sized hand when the door opened and two women truckers looked around, one pointed, and they headed for the ladies locker room. Gaston watched them go by his table, turned his head and watched the tight fitting jeans covering their butts go around the corner. Gaston's friend slapped his hand and said, "Chaisson, get your eyes back in your head and listen to what I was saying." Gaston smiled at him and said, "I had a better subject for my attention. When you start to look like the ass on the one in the blue Moosehead tee then you'll have my undivided attention, Prevost. Continue your story."

           The two women came out, went to the bar and ordered. While their sub sandwiches were being prepared, they brought their beers to a table across the aisle from Gaston and Eloi. They pulled the chairs toward the back of the table so that they could watch the slot machine feeders with an unimpeded direct view. Prevost, a married man, ignored the truckers, but Gaston still had his eye on blue tee shirt and could see her in his line of vision. He became aware of her glancing at him between sips of her beer. Their food was delivered along with a fresh beer and Gaston, never staring, was fully aware of every bite that blue tee took from the sandwich. When their plates were empty, blue tee opened a trucker's wallet, removed a bill, went to the jukebox, inserted the bill and punched two numbers. Gaston knew the songs were a half-dollar each so he knew she fed it a dollar. The first song, a lively Cajun zydeco favorite, began playing. Blue tee turned and danced her way back to the table, took a sip of beer and danced her way to Gaston's side, leaned over to his ear and whispered, "I know you've been watching me. If you're interested, dance with me."

           Gaston smiled, pushed his chair back, pulled her to his lap and whispered, "I certainly am interested, my name is Gaston. What do I call you?"

           "Andy. It's really Andrea but since I drive a big rig, everyone thought Andy would be more appropriate. So, call me Andy, Gaston. Let's dance handsome."

           He led her to the floor and they danced to the Cajun songs she had selected. When the music ended, he held her hand and went to the bar, ordered her another beer, one for her friend, one for Eloi and another bourbon of his own. He touched his bourbon glass to her beer bottle and softly said, "Andy, no one ever called me handsome. Thank you for being the first." She laughed, hugged him and as she started back to her table, turned and said, "Thanks for the dance and the beer, Gaston. I need to go get my shower and head to the confines of my sleeper cab."

           When she had finished speaking, he waved her back and put his arm around her shoulder, pulled her close and said, "You sounded as if you're tired of the showers in truck stops and sleeper cabs. Are you?"

           "Gaston, I've been on the road now for nine days. I abhor truck stop showers. My sleeper isn't bad, but here in the south it gets damned hot inside, even at night."

           "I see. And I understand. I work in the Gulf on a rig and we have the same problem at times although luckily our quarters are air-conditioned. What would you say if I offered you a full bathroom, a queen-sized bed, and a full breakfast in the morning?"

           "I'd say you were a man looking for a horny girl for the night. I'd also say, I think you've found one."

           "My truck is the white Dodge Ram parked nearest to Pump Ten. Get your clothes and essentials and meet me there in ten minutes. Just throw your stuff in the bed. It's clean. How about your friend? What will she do?"

           "No problem with Mazie. She's leaving. She had her rest period starting at noon today, so she can drive again at eleven. She's heading to Jacksonville where I just came from." He left her walking toward Mazie when he went to tell Eloi he was leaving. Eloi was ready to go home anyway and he told Gaston goodbye and wished him luck.

           One the way to Jeanerette, she told him she was from Hardin, Montana, east of Billings on Interstate 90. The company she drove for was in Billings and she had been a driver for six years. She had been married once, he ran off with the neighbor's wife her first year on the job and she had no time for romance with the job she had as a long-haul driver. She bragged that her company was noted for the numbers of women drivers it had on the road. She let him know that the southern route was the most profitable and that as the economy improved, more of the women drivers would be stopping in Breaux Bridge. He asked, why Breaux Bridge and she said the company had a national contract with the truck stop for servicing its trucks

           He told her that the house wasn't much to crow about but was clean, comfortable, and paid for which made it Paradise for him. He parked behind the house, they entered through the kitchen and as he had said, it was clean, neat and with older farm houses, extremely large. He led her upstairs to the guest room on the left, flipped on the light and she sighed longingly, saying, "That bed is the most inviting thing I've seen in a month, Gaston. You're a jewel for offering it to me." He shyly grinned, kissed her cheek and showed her the bathroom with both a tub and shower. Another long sigh from down deep in her gut. He left her in the doorway, saying, "I'll get you another beer while you get ready for a bath or a shower, your option."

           He came running back up the stairs, handed her a beer and a glass, turned and said, "I'll be in the kitchen. Call when you're finished."

           Andy took her sweet time. She was enjoying the luxury of soaking in a tub instead of being crammed in a small fiberglass shower stall in a truck stop. When the water became so cool she was shivering, she took one of the extra large towels from the rack, wrapped it around her and went to the top of the stairs. She yelled, "Come on up, Gaston. Time to show me your stuff." When he entered the bedroom, she had dropped the towel on the floor and was in the center of the bed naked. He stopped in his tracks. He eyed her from the doorway and was stunned by her nice, round firm body with matching breasts. She waved him over, teasing, "Don't be bashful, come on over and sample the merchandise."

           The time for him to be fully stripped of his clothes was a new record for him. He jumped in the bed with her, sidled up close and kissed her. That was the signal for her and she made the most of it for the next thirty minutes or so. When both were sated, she whispered in his ear, "How about another beer, Gaston?" He nodded; still naked; he ran to the kitchen, took another beer from the fridge, popped the lid and hustled back to the stairs. She had wrapped another dry towel back around her for the warmth and was at the top of the stairs smiling when he hit the top step. He handed her the beer, she thanked him and took a sip. She touched his face and said, "You're such a nice, gentle man, Gaston.  A good lover and very generous. It's such a shame that.you're so damned ugly. Ugly enough to turn ones stomach if they didn't grit their teeth like I had to do."

           He was taken aback by her words. When he caught the breath she had knocked out of him with her words, he spit harshly at her, "But, Andy.You said I was handsome and I told you that you were the first to ever say that."

           "Gaston, Gaston! That was a come on from a horny old truck driver. It turned out great, much better than I expected and I do appreciate all you've done. But go look in the mirror. God, you're so damned ugly it's almost a sin God created you."

           Gaston turned, his face an inflamed red when he said, "You god damned whore. You took advantage of me by lying! I hate that and you'll pay dearly!" She became frightened by his outburst. She stepped back two steps away from his anger but to no avail. He swung his huge fist, drove it into her nose, knocking her backwards down the stairs. The beer bottle flew over her head, hit a picture of his mother on the stairwell wall, it fell braking the glass. Her towel fell on the steps as she went feet over head backwards down the stairs, the glass cutting her back and arms. When her head hit the third step down, her neck snapped loudly. So loudly it broke the eerie silence in the quiet house jarring him to move down the stairs toward her. When she hit the bottom landing, her arms splayed over her head, her legs covering the last two steps, blood slightly oozing from the cuts, she was already dead from the broken neck. Gaston bent over her, loudly yelling, "Andy! Andy! I didn't mean to do knock you down the stairs. Please wake up." He had tears flowing from his cheek and dropping on her face as he held it in his huge palms.

           Realizing she was dead, he stood to pick her up and move her to the dining room table, but when he stood, a glass shard from the picture frame glass went farther into the arch of his right foot causing him to fall to the floor in excruciatiating pain. He held the foot in the air and could see the end of the shard tilting toward his left. He took hold with two fingers, began to pull but it cracked and the broken end was all he could remove. He stood on his left foot, pulled himself up the stairs by using the banister and then used the wall to reach the bedroom. He sat on the bed and began to dress, leaving his foot without socks or shoes. Using the same technique on the return trip down the stairs, he made his way to the kitchen, opened the pantry door and took his mother's old wooden rubber-tipped cane, using it to get to the truck.

           At the emergency room, the doctor on duty told him that he would call for help because the glass was embedded so deep that he needed a surgeon to remove it. He gave Gaston a shot near the glass entry to ease the pain. Two hours later, Gaston left the hospital on crutches with a pocket full of pain killers. The surgeon told him after the glass was removed and the wound stitched that he had one of the deepest embedment's he had ever seen and then asked how it had happened.  Gaston told him he was running down the steps and didn't know a picture had broken when he put his full weight on the foot where the shard stood waiting. The surgeon shook his head, patted his knee and said, "Keep the wound clean, Gaston. You don't want an infection to flare up."

             He sat quietly in his truck thinking. He knew from what the doctor told him that within two hours, even with the pain pills, he would be having intense localized pain again. He had to act before it put him down for the day. He started the engine, looked at the blood covered floorboard and pedals before he pulled out and awkwardly, slowly, drove home with his left foot. He stood on his crutches looking at the body of Andy. He was hit the fact that he knew her first name, but not her last name. He looked at the blood route on the stairs and his lips parted in a small grin when he began the implementation of his plan. The foot cut was the perfect cover for her blood. He would have no fear of any questions about the blood. He was holding the reason in the air under him. He turned and saw the trail of his dripped blood leading to the kitchen, the pantry, and out the door. It would also be on the porch and in the truck. The bonus to the blood was the large amount of fresh blood, now clotting, that was on the floor leading to the bedroom where he put on his clothes. He leaned against the banister baluster and listed what he needed to do to erase Andy from his association after the cafe incident with her. He would have to change the bed, he would need to move the body, he needed to destroy her clothing, he had to get rid of the beer bottles and wash the glass she had used. The towels needed washing to remove any DNA evidence. A large order for a lone one-footed individual to handle, but time was on his side. None of those were an immediate need and he could easily handle the washing, making the bed, washing dishes and burning the clothes with his regular burning barrel trash.

           He pushed away from the baluster and struggled his way up the stairs, avoiding the glass and clotted blood. With the bathroom cleansed, an easy job, he made the bed, gathered the towels and threw them over the banister to the floor below to be washed. He put the empty beer bottles in his pockets, washed the glass in his bathroom and left it on the sink stand. He found it testy going down on the crutches and he knew it would take practice before his fear ebbed.

           At the time he began to feel twinges of pain in the center of his foot, he was nearly finished. He searched her jeans pockets, took her wallet and looked at her CDL license picture. He became emotional while reading her license and felt the blurring of his eyes as the water of tears gathered at the lower rim. Her name was Andrea Morgan Weatheral of 986 2nd Street West, Hardin, Montana. She had pictures of a smiling young woman holding a toddler of about age two. Gaston was hit hard when he realized the picture must be her daughter and grandson. The tears broke the rim and flowed down his cheek. He was undecided if he should anonymously mail her wallet and a note to the address on her license. After thinking a little more about that act, he shook his head and discarded it. Too easy to track to Louisiana and back to me. It would go in the burn barrel with her clothes. Her truck keys would be dumped in the center of Blanche Bay when he left for the rig.

           By the time he hobbled to the daybed in the sewing room, he was left with only lighting the trash barrel and moving the body. Those items could wait. He swallowed two of the pain pills, lifted his bandaged foot to the bed, grimaced and then emitted a low groan as it hit the mattress. He stretched out, shook off his left shoe, dropping it on the floor, closed his eyes, groaned again and didn't wake until well after dark. He put his right hand over the end of the daybed, turned on the light, grabbed his crutches and stood, left foot in the air, pain still coursing through the wound and around the stitches. He tottered on the crutches through the house and to the utility room. He took a thirty-three gallon black bag from the box, braced the freezer door open and began throwing packaged fish and shrimp in the bag. Two bags later, he removed the shelves, storage boxes and sat them atop the freezer. Now that it was empty, he closed the door, dragged the bags to the back porch and left them near the steps. Back inside the house, he stood over Andy's body and studied how he could best get her to the utility room since he wasn't able to carry her.

           He felt he could think better with a little bourbon in him. Tottering back to the kitchen, he poured about two fingers of the brown bourbon in the short glass, took a bottle of cold water from the fridge and topped the bourbon with a splash of the iced water. He sat in a chair; right foot extended as far as possible, and sipped the bourbon while he did deep thinking about Andy's body and the distance to the utility room. He was only dreaming of a second drink when an idea flashed through his mind. Rope. I need a rope. I can tie the rope under her arms, wrap it around my waist and drag her to the freezer. Her blood is clotted so it shouldn't be a problem. He pictured his route and planned to walk where her body wouldn't smear his drippings. He grinned to himself as he became thankful that he had stayed to the left on the way to the truck. That gave him a relatively clear path to drag her body. If his were smeared, that would raise questions .should the authorities ever learn of our leaving the truck stop together. He smiled again when he had thought of how fortunately it was that he parked near Pump Ten because that parking area has no surveillance cameras.

           He did celebrate his thoughts with a second drink, unaware that two drinks combined with the pain pills were about to put him under for nearly fourteen hours.

           His eyes opened at seven-twenty Monday morning. The taste in his mouth was worse than the odor of the fish and shrimp on the porch that the wind was blowing back through the aging sills and cracks in the house. He made a quick decision to place the burning barrel at the top of his project list. He put coffee on to brew, opened the door and the stench blasted him fully in the face. He gagged at the reeking stink. He took the bag of clothes, his lighter and hobbled to the barrel, dropped the clothes out of the bag, spread lighter fluid on them and lit the clothes. While they gathered the flames, he went to the porch and began dragging the fish bags to the barrel. He took papers from the shed and added them to the flames until the fire was shooting out of the barrel above his head. It took him almost an hour before he dropped the last package on top of the gathering ashes He broke the beer bottles and dropped them into the recycle can. He was already worn down and the day was just starting. He found an old clothesline rope, stuck it in the vee of the left crutch and went inside to begin the process of moving Andy to the freezer.

           He cleaned the coffee pot after emptying the carafe into his work vacuum. He sat down to rest and to lift his leg as instructed while he drank his first cup of the boiling coffee. Hunger pains hadn't arrived yet so he discounted eating until Andy was safely inside the freezer. He dropped his foot, yelped lightly as he rose from the chair. He went to Andy, dropped the rope above her head, stood on his left foot and used the left crutch to hoist her left arm upwards. He grabbed her hand, lifted the body and used the crutch tip to push the rope under her. He repeated that action on her right side. Using his left crutch, he lifted the rope to his hands, went below her head, straddled her body, wriggled and pulled the rope until it was under her arms. He flipped the rope over her breasts with the crutch tip, and used the tip to move it to his hand. It was working like a charm. He made a slip knot in the rope, pulled it tight under her arms and stepped over her head, wrapped the rope around his waist, tied it well and tested his strength using the crutches. One step and she slid easily. Second step and she slid easily. He nodded to no one and began the single step movements until she was at the entrance of the utility room.

           He rested against the wall knowing he needed to keep her tied in order for him to successfully stuff her in the freezer. Finally he opened the door, used the rope to lift her to where he could get his hands under her arms and using the wall, he lifted upwards, turned her and sat her butt on the freezer bottom. He pushed her back against the left wall, turned her legs and lifted, bending them at the knees to crunch them through the door and against the right wall. When she was inside, he struggled to get her lower legs up the wall and over her head. He was worn out when he backed against the wall and looked at the U-shaped body now fully ensconced inside the freezer. He stepped forward and put her hands on her abdomen, stepped back, closed the door, locked it, pocketed the key and smiling to himself, went back for his second cup of coffee and maybe something to eat.

           The clock was nearing five when he trudged to the truck, got in and left for Breaux Bridge. When he walked inside the casino on crutches, Eloi jumped up, ran across the room and shouted, "My God, Gaston. What it is you did to yourself?' Come sit and tell me about it." Well, by the time they were at the table, three others had joined and were sympathizing with Gaston. Eloi spoke up and pleaded, "Tell us how you ended up on crutches." They were gathered to the side of his chair and anxious to hear his story.

           Gaston displaying a sad serious face began to tell them, "You remember that picture of mama on the stair wall? Sometime during the late evening, it fell and the glass broke.  I thought the noise was someone trying to break in so I grab my gun, jump from bed and run down the stairs. I stepped on a glass shard and rammed it all the way through my arch and into the bone. I had a hard time getting to the hospital. A surgeon, you know, at the Jeanerette Emergency Room had to do surgery to get it out. You should see the floor of my truck with all the stinky blood."

           They all ughed and touched his back. At hearing the story, Louis LeBlanc spoke up and said, "Give me your keys, Gaston. I'll get Joe to steam clean it while you're eating. Hey, someone get Gaston something to eat."

           In about ten minutes, Gaston had a steak, baked potato, hush puppies and fried okra in front of him. He smiled and said, "Thanks, boys. It's nice to know there's a helping hand when you need one." After their beers were gone, everyone except Eloi sauntered away to refresh their drinks and to pursue different stories. Watching Gaston eat, Eloi asked, "How about the house, Gaston? You can't clean it with only one foot. What if Cecilia and I drop by and scrub away the blood? We can do it in the morning before lunch."

           "Okay, but only if you let me buy us all lunch at Mulate's. Crawfish are in season and they have the best."

           "Oh, yeah, and you know how we love them crawfish. Mulate's it is. Ten okay with you?"

           "That's a perfect time. These pain killers knock me out like your favorite, Rocky Marciano would." Eloi laughed and slapped the table twice shaking the pill bottle until it rolled over and rolled toward Eloi. He sat it back up, read the label and said, "Those are powerful pills, Gaston. Do you need help getting back home?"

           Gaston shook his head and responded, "I'm getting the hang of left footed driving and the good thing about it is, with the pills, I can't speed so I won't get any more tickets." Eloi laughed, slapped the table once and Gaston grabbed the pills before they turned over again.

           Gaston opened the door when Eloi and Cecelia were still getting out of the truck. Eloi carried a gallon jug of bleach and a scrubbing broom. Cecelia had a mop, a bottle of Pine Sol, and a jug of detergent. Gaston led them to the stairwell and they stopped, wide-eyed and said, "Jesus Christ, Gaston, you lost a lot of blood. It's a wonder you didn't pass out."

           Gaston grinned waved his head from side to side and said, "I didn't tell you that part. The surgeon orders a pint of blood but specified it had to be from a bourbon drinker to have any effect on me." Cecelia laughed loudly in the quiet room and Eloi, being a little slower, joined in when he caught Gaston's joke.

           Cecelia filled a bucket about half full, added about a pint of the pure bleach, took the scrub broom and began at the foot of the stairs. She turned and ordered Gaston to go sit in the living room and wait. He turned the TV set on and watched an old John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara movie on the Movie channel while she and Eloi scrubbed and mopped the blood away. At twelve-twenty she stepped to the doorway and said, "Come look, Gaston"

           He hobbled to the stairs and was amazed at the great job they had done at removing all evidence of the blood. He smiled, congratulated them and then said, "What's the charge to have you do the rest of the old floor to make it match the clean part." He laughed and said, "Just kidding. It looks great and I owe you more than just crawfish."

           Cecelia stepped forward, picked up the empty bucket and said, "You don't even owe us that much, Gaston. What we did is what friends do for each other. Maybe one day you can repay it with something similar for us." Now go back to the movie while we finish."

           They drove away after lunch. The doctor's office called at three and reminded him of the check-up the next day at ten. He showed a little early. The nurse put him in an examination room and removed the bandage. She ahhed and said, "It looks good. No infection, no swelling around the stitches. Doctor Landry will be here in a minute." She left him on the table with his foot sticking out the end of the table. Landry walked in, shook his hand and asked, "How's the pain now?" He lifted his leg and was closely eyeing the wound.

           He shook his head and answered, "Very little. I didn't have to take a pain pill last night. Do you think I'll be able to go back to the rig come Sunday?"

           Landry touched the wound with two fingers pushed down lightly and asked, "Any pain when I push?"

           He shook no. He pushed harder; Gaston screwed his mouth up and said, "That did hurt a little." He dropped his foot and said, "Come in on Friday and we'll see if you can walk on it. What do you do on the rig, Gaston/"

           "I'm maintenance. I don't do any drilling, pipe pulling or physical labor. I maintain the rotary engines, the umbilical cables and such." Landry nodded, turned and before he opened the door, said, "I'll see you Friday. Stay put. The nurse will redress the foot."

           She came back in, began opening drawers and gathering the necessary materials. She took a swab, cleaned the wound, put a salve on it, a white gauze pad on it and taped it. She looked at her work, then at him and said, "Minimal coverage this time. Keep it clean. Don't walk on the foot until after you see the doctor on Friday." She handed him the crutches and left him to leave on his own.

           Back in the truck, Gaston drove to the first grocery store he came across on Highway 90, and now with a smaller bandage, no pain and more experience with the crutches, went in the store, to the liquor department and asked the clerk for two 1.75 Liter bottles of Evan Williams bourbon. The clerk checked him out, bagged the bottles separately and then called for assistance. A young man, about seventeen or so came to assist with the bottles. He carried the two bags and walked beside Gaston and when Gaston opened the passenger side door, he carefully put the bags on the passenger side floor. Gaston tipped him two dollars, went around the truck where the young man had run to open the door for him, climbed in the seat and stowed the crutches behind him. The young man waved as Gaston, using his left foot, slowly drove away.

           He pointed his truck north and drove to the truck stop in Beaux Bridge; He pulled sideways in front of the service bay, honked and yelled, "Tell Joe to come out. I need to see him." He moved up enough to clear the entrance and waited. Joe came to his side of the truck wiping his hands with a red towel. Gaston stuck his hand out to shake, but Joe held his greasy hands up and said, "You don't want this on your hands or steering wheel. What's up, Gaston?"

           "I just left the doctor with good news about my foot, so I came to give you a little something for the cleaning you gave my floorboard.  Come to the other side, Joe, and open the door."

           Joe opened the door, Gaston said, "Take one of the bags. I know it'll please you."

           Joe peeked inside, looked up and said, "You didn't have to do this, Gaston. We're friends and help each other out. Remember when you fixed my broken air- conditioner?  You wouldn't let me pay you but now you pay me?"

           "Joe, you didn't have stinky blood all over your air-conditioner like my floorboard did. It was a different kind of help you did. Just enjoy the bourbon."

           "Oh, I will, believe me I will. Thanks Gaston." Joe backed away from the truck, shut the door and waited until Gaston was back on the street to Interstate 10. He went across the lot and locked the bottle inside his utility tool box attached to the bed of his pick-up. He smiled on the walk back to work.

           Gaston drove to the rear of his house. He eased out of the truck, went to the back and opened the doors to the cap. He dropped the tailgate, backed his truck as near to the porch edge as he could, got out and eyed the height of the gate as compared to the edge of his porch. With just an eyeing, he decided the tailgate would not be more than two inches below the porch level. Nodding to himself, he put the tailgate up, closed the doors, locked the truck and went inside the house.

           He had to assume that he would be cleared to go back to work which meant he had to order his supply delivery to be safe. He took his normal list, added the necessary changes in bandages, antiseptic, and tape. He used the house phone and called the grocer. He told him he wanted the same order as always, but he had to add a few items. Once that was done, he prepared his lunch. After eating, he took his two pills, stretched out on the daybed and drifted off to a more comfortable sleep because he could now turn on his side with no pain or concern over the foot.

           He was awakened by bells. In his pill-induced sleep stupor it took a while for him to realize it was the phone ringing. It was a consistent non-stop ringing. When he picked up it was Eloi, so excited that Gaston could hardly understand the rapidly shouted Cajun words. Finally, he said, "Eloi, slow down and calmly tell me what you just tried to tell me."

           It wasn't Eloi this time, it was Cecelia speaking. She calmly told him, "The police just left here Gaston. They told us that a driver hasn't moved the truck in nearly a week. The company hasn't heard from her and she can't be found. She and another driver named Mazie were in the cafe on Saturday night when you and Eloi were there. This is to warn you that you'll be questioned by the police about her. Everyone who was there is being asked what they know if anything." Gaston thanked her for the warning, put the phone down and scoured the house once more to be certain there was nothing that could connect him to Andy. He breathed a sigh of relief when he felt that he was clear.

           The State troopers arrived just before six. Gaston let them in, acted as if he had no knowledge of why they might be there and sat in the living room facing the two of them. When they brought up Andrea Weatheral, Gaston looked blank and asked, "Who is Andrea Weatheral? I don't think I know anyone with that name."

           The lead Trooper then said, "Gaston, she was known as Andy. We understand she asked you to dance Saturday night."          

           "Oh, yeah! Blue tee shirt. I didn't know her name. We danced to a couple of Cajun tunes; I bought her and her friend a beer afterwards. I was with Eloi Prevost. Have you talked to Eloi?"

           They ignored his question and asked, "What happened after you danced with her?"

           "Well, I bought the beers, she told me she had to go shower and get her required rest time in before she could continue her trip. She said that her friend was leaving at eleven because her rest time had ended. I went back to Eloi, told him I was heading home. He said that Cecilia wanted him home also, so we left at the same time. I was parked over by pump Ten, so I jumped in the truck and came here."

           "What happened later?"

           "Around midnight I'm guessing, I heard glass breaking and thought someone was trying to burglarize me. I jumped from bed and ran down the steps. When I hit the bottom I fell on my ass because I had a severe pain in my right foot. I looked at the foot and saw a large shard of glass in the arch. I struggled back up the stairs to get dressed and saw what made the noise. My mama's old picture fell from the stairway wall and broke.  I stepped on the glass.  After I dressed, I finally made my way to the ER at the hospital."

           He held his foot out for them to see the bandages on the foot. He said, "I saw doctor Landry this morning and they changed the dressing. He said I may be able to go back to my rig Sunday."

           "Doctor Landry treated you at the hospital and has the records?"

           "He was the first who saw me. He had to call a surgeon to remove the glass it was embedded so deep. All the way to the bone."

           "Who was the surgeon, Gaston?"

           "The new one, Remy Dufour. He's good."

           They stood and the lead trooper calmly said, "Show us the stairwell."

           Gaston grabbed his crutches, led them to the stairwell and pointed to the cleaner space on the wall where the nail was still hanging, slanted downward. They looked at the cleaner spots on the floor and stairs, turned and looked at the clean trail out the door. One trooper went up the stairs, eyed the nail closely, went to the top and followed the trail to the bedroom. He saw the bed made up, the room neat, decided the bed hadn't been slept in and came back down stairs. He didn't follow the trail out the door. He stopped at the pantry door and opened it, looked inside and closed it. He talked with his partner in private for a few seconds, came back and said, "Who cleaned the floor for you?"

           Gaston smiled and said, "My friend Eloi and his wife Cecilia volunteered to clean up my mess. Joe Boudreaux at the truck stop in Breaux Bridge steamed the blood from my truck floorboard. It's nice when friends help when you can't do things yourself."

           "One more question Gaston. Why is there a larger clean spot in front of the pantry door?"

           "I was hobbling on one foot because the glass was sticking out. I got in the pantry and found my mama's old cane to use. It didn't help all that much, but it did help a lot with driving the truck left footed. It's still in the truck if you want to see it." The trooper shook his head and started back to the living room. Gaston followed but they didn't sit. The lead trooper turned, said, "If you're released for work, we may have to call you back if the evidence changes." They opened the door, nosily plodded across the rickety pine wood porch and drove away in their shiny, clean State Police SUV.

           Gaston went directly to the kitchen, poured double bourbon, added water and sat in the nearest chair. His heart rate was slowing, his nerves lost the edgy feel, and the bourbon soothed his fear. It seems that he passed the smell test.

           The lead trooper, driving toward the hospital ER entrance, was telling his partner, "All the stories jibe, the parts fall in place. I am feeling more like our first take on the missing driver. Another long-haul trucker abducted her. Someday a body will be found on the route of a long-haul and it'll be her. It happens, Luke, just like I told you when we arrived at the truck stop. That was what my gut was telling me. Women long-hauls are always in danger. They're targets because of their bodies." In less than ten minutes they left the ER, walked back to the SUV, having been given verifying data that confirmed Gaston's version of his Saturday night. But Gaston didn't know that yet.

           Gaston tested the foot. He could walk without pain so long as he didn't try to hurry which put more weight on the foot. If he can convince Landry that he can work without damaging the foot, he should be cleared to leave Sunday. Thursday afternoon, after having lunch with Eloi, he entered the kitchen, leaned the crutches in the corner behind the door and spent the rest of the day, with no shoes, walking on the foot. Friday morning, he put on his best sneakers, the New Balance with arch support, and went to his appointment with Landry walking without crutches.       The nurse smiled when she saw him, checked his blood pressure and asked him to remove the shoe and sock. She checked the stitches and saw only a few dark spots remaining of the self dissolving thread. The wound had healed perfectly; his walking had done no damage. She tickled the bottom of his foot causing him to jerk, smiled and said, "All looks great to me but that's the doctors decision. He'll be in shortly. Keep the foot uncovered."

           Landry tested the wound, put pressure up and down the scar area and said, "You're good, Gaston. We're finished. You can return to work immediately."

           Gaston nodded, shook his hand and said, "Thanks for the good work. I hope you never have to do it again." Landry grinned and kidded, "But if you're not clumsy again, how do I make a living Gaston? Incidentally you provided a little excitement when the two State troopers showed up. But they were satisfied when I gave them the records." Once again Gaston was left to make his own way out. However, this time he was elated to be leaving on his own.

           When he was at his home desk, he used his company provided short-wave radio to call Babineaux on the rig. When Jules answered, Gaston told him that he would be at the dock at ten Sunday morning ready to load his supplies.  They talked for a few minutes about the mother rig and the two satellites. Jules assured him he had encountered no problems while Gaston was ashore. When they hung up, he called the grocer and cancelled the medical supplies he had ordered. He verified that the delivery van would be at the dock at nine-thirty. He spent the balance of the afternoon packing his suitcase with the clothes he had laundered and had ready for the return trip.

           At seven, he left for Breaux Bridge. Eloi and the others were straggling in and all stopped at the table to satisfy their curiosity about Gaston's return to work. Gaston found himself at the table with four bourbons that were bought by his pals. It was nearly eight when Eloi came in, looked around and saw him at the table. Eloi sat, pulled the chair up closer and leaned forward, asking, "Everything went okay with the cops?"

           Gaston nodded as he answered, "They looked around, wanted to know who cleaned the floor. I told them you and Cecilia and Joe did the truck. That was about all."

           "What about the foot? What did the doctor say" Eloi shot across the table to him.

           "Clean bill. I leave for the rig Sunday."

           "That's when I leave also. I hop the copter at nine in Lafayette. Before we get away for another six weeks, if you don't mind, tell me what happened between you and blue shirt Saturday night."

           "No, man, I don't mind. She blew me off. Told me she had to get her mandatory rest to be able to leave the next morning. When she went out the door, she went to her rig and then to the showers. I never saw her again."

           "Yeah, that's what I told the cops that probably happened. I knew when you came back to the table and she left, it wasn't a connect. Damn shame about her though. Another trucker told me that in the last five years they've lost two women drivers that way. Some of those drivers have to be son-of-a-bitches about women drivers."

           "It's way too bad about her. Even though I didn't know her name, she seemed to be a very nice lady. Remember, she called my ugly ass handsome. No one else has ever said that to me," and he laughed hard. Eloi was uncomfortable about his reference to being ugly but he joined the laughter to be sociable with his friend.

           Gaston finished the second bourbon, picked up another and said, "I won't be here tomorrow night. I have to pack and be ready to meet my supply truck before I take the boat from Jules. Just wanted you to know in advance."

           "Well, that makes me feel better because Cecelia insists that I go with her to her sister's for a birthday party in Church Point. I'll be able to make her happy about her sister for a change."

           Eloi had eaten at home. Gaston was getting hungry so he ordered the Friday special. They drank while he ate and the talk was about what they would be doing on the rigs for the next six weeks. At ten, Eloi stood, said, "Want another bourbon? Gaston shook his head and then Eloi stuck t his hand out to shake and said, "See ya' in six, buddy. Have a safe time out there ya; hear." Gaston shook it and said, "Same to you. Tell Cecilia I send her my best."

           Gaston slept late Saturday morning. Sleeping late wasn't one of the luxuries of working the rig. After he ate and drank a pot of Cajun coffee, he loaded his suitcase in the truck, spread a canvas tarp over the bed, backed the truck to where it was barely touching the edge of the porch about two inches or so from the top. Down was better than up. He went to his storage shed, took out his wheelbarrow and took it in the kitchen with him. He propped the screen door open with a flower pot and went to the freezer. He retrieved the key from his pocket, opened the door and stared at the frost covered naked body of Andy. She was frozen in the U configuration which would make it easier to fit the wheelbarrow. He put on his gloves, took her right arm and began the struggle of removing the frozen body from the freezer. Being frozen made it much easier than when he had put her in limber in that position. When he had her turned, he lifted her by her butt and put her on her right side in the wheelbarrow.

           He pushed the body through the door, across the porch and into to covered bed of his truck. He raised the handles, she slid to the bed and he backed out with the wheelbarrow. He went back in the truck, pulled the tarp tightly over her and stuffed the ends under her body to secure them. He raised the tailgate, closed the door on the cap and took the wheelbarrow back to the shed. He pulled the truck forward and parked it under the moss-covered oak where the shade would protect it from the searing afternoon heat, but would thaw the body to make it pliable once more.

           Back in the shed, Gaston filled the lawn mower with gas and wheeled it to the front yard. He went to the kitchen and brought two large bottles of iced water and sat them on the porch. He spent the rest of the afternoon mowing and trimming the yard. For the next six weeks, a professional service would do the yard twice.

           After he had showered, he ordered a delivery pizza from Domino's. When it arrived, he sat on the front porch, rocked and ate the pizza while downing two cokes. When the sun started down over the trees at the end of his land, he went in, poured bourbon and turned the news to the local station in Lafayette. He was sipping his bourbon when his attention became riveted to a female reporter standing in front of the truck stop. He turned the volume up and was hearing her say. "State Police spokesperson Sarah Vadrine has said that investigators now believe that the missing trucker, Andrea Weatheral, was the victim of another long-haul trucker. Any local suspects have been cleared of all questions of Weatheral. Station KVOL has learned of other missing women truckers under similar circumstances. Stay tuned to KVOL for further developments when they become available."  

           Gaston sat back with his drink at his smiling lips. He felt the best he had since just minutes before he hit Andy in the nose. Until she called him ugly, he had been on cloud nine with hopes of her being more than just a one night stand. He felt bad that she had paid the price for turning nasty on him, but he also felt she deserved the punch, however not her death.

           He slept with an easy mind. He rose at six, had his breakfast, dressed and left for Franklin at eight. He stopped and bought four dozen of assorted doughnuts for the guys on the rig. He went to the grocer and bought four pounds of chili meat. He arrived at the Blanche Bay dock some fifteen minutes early. He sat in the truck and ate one of the doughnuts while drinking a cap full of his vacuum coffee. He heard the soothing familiar humming sound of his crew boat coming up toward the dock. He stepped from the truck, walked to the piling tie-off point ready to catch the rope when Jules threw it. He smiled at Jules who was waving at him. He wrapped the rope around the tie-off and took Jules suitcase, sat it on the pier and then pulled Jules up by the hand. He shook the hand in his hand and Jules slapped him on the back. He asked Gaston if anything exciting had happened and Gaston shook his head as he said, "Same old stuff, Jules. A dead Jeanerette and a few drinks in Breaux Bridge with Eloi and the guys. At least the work on the rigs gets exciting at times." Jules nodded and said, "That it does, Gaston. That it does. I heard about you being trapped on the toadstool. Better you than me, "and he laughed as he picked up his suitcase and headed for his truck.

           Gaston loaded the supplies that the delivery van had deposited for him. He waited for another ten minutes to make certain that Jules wasn't coming back. He went to the truck, backed it to the pier, opened the cap, lowered the tailgate and drug Andy and the tarp to edge.  He rolled her off the back off the truck and watched the tarp open when it hit the bottom of the boat. He stood looking at the display of her nude body. He loaded the doughnuts, his suitcase and the chili meat. He re-parked under the carport, left the truck, unwound the tie rope, threw it aboard and jumped in the boat. The engine was running so he put it in gear, turned the wheel to his right and glided into Blanche Bay. Once he was out of sight of land, he took Andy's keys from his pocket and heaved them into the deep water of Blanche Bay.

           He sat his GPS for the toadstool, not the mother rig. When he slowed to tether the boat, he opened the chili meat and dropped it overboard near the small metal platform. By the time he had tethered the boat, the water was roiling with an eating frenzy over the chili meat. He lifted Andy's body, rolled her head over the side of the boat. He kissed her cheek, lifted her legs and let her gently slide into the roiling water. He sat sideways on the railing and watched as the fish devoured her until little but bone was showing. He unhooked the tether and headed for the mother rig.

             Seven weeks later he and Eloi sat at their table in the cafe. Gaston was sipping his bourbon when the door opened and a blue tee shirt entered the door, stopped and searched for the ladies lockers. Gaston punched Eloi as she began walking toward them. When she passed, Gaston turned his head and watched her tight jean-covered ass go by, turned to Eloi and said, "Do you think blue shirt would like to dance, Eloi? Maybe she'll ask me."

 The End

[amp-age-blog]

Welcome to the ICE age

When the first electric cars started quietly and conveniently moving people from A to B about 130 years ago, who would have imagined that in 2018 we would be grappling with the challenge of having to find an alternative? Generations have become accustomed to driving battery electric vehicles (BEV) but today, as we run out of lithium, we are on the cusp of a dramatic transition with more and more people opting for cars powered by internal combustion engines (ICE).

In this article, I find out from the experts the real facts behind shifting from the AMPage – the era of BEV - to the ICEage – the advent of the internal combustion engine. What does this mean for us as consumers, for society, and for our planet?

Consumer acceptance To understand what the coming ICEage means for consumers, I spoke to Bob Thomson, the smartly-dressed and avuncular Director of Marketing for Anderson-Morrison Motors NZ .

“I have real concerns about consumer acceptance of ICE-age cars,” explains Bob in his office at the Moorhouse Avenue dealership of the global automative giant Anderson & Morrison Motors. “Are people going to want the smell and inconvenience of refuelling with volatile and potentially carcinogenic liquid fuel? We’re told the risk when refuelling is very low but still it’s a concern many people have.”

Bob goes on, “But it gets worse. I had a customer in the showroom last week and she wasn’t the first to ask me about the combustion gases from ICEage cars. I explained that it’s mostly harmless nitrogen, water and carbon dioxide. After all, nitrogen already makes up 78% of the air around us, we all exhale carbon dioxide, and we’re made up of more than 50% water already. But she’d done her homework and she asked me about carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, hydrocarbons and particulates.”

Bob sighs, shifts in his seat uncomfortably and glances out of the window. “She’d read that these could be bad for your health and asked me where the gases were expelled from the car. ‘It’s fine’, I said, ‘they escape from a pipe at the back of the vehicle so you don’t breathe them in’. ‘What about the people in the car behind you?’ she asked.”

As our brief interview wraps up, Bob explains that after safety concerns, the next issue for customers considering buying an ICEage car is often the vibration. “As a manufacturer, AMM has put a lot of work into dampening the noise and shaking from the explosions and reciprocating metal parts that are an unavoidable part of this new technology. I’m sure that as ICEage cars become more common place people will get used to the unexpected noise at start-up and the cars will get quieter. For instance, in some of the premium models coming onto the market it’s still going to be possible to take a hands-free call while driving – just like you do today in your BEV. The sound proofing technology will trickle down to more budget models in time.”

As I left Bob he was taking a call from the dealership insurers, anxious to discuss the risk to customers and staff of carbon monoxide poisoning in the showroom.

Impact on your wallet To get a different take on the possible implications of consumers moving away from the conventional BEV fleet, I caught up with Sophie Matthews, Professor of Economics at Christchurch University in Canterbury. Sophie explains, “Like most working kiwi families, we budget for the big expense in owning an BEV: battery replacement. Battery degradation is now so well-understood and predictable that most households can budget for replacement years in advance. But we expect to see much more spent on unplanned maintenance of ICEage cars along with a much higher turnover of ICEage car ownership as reliability concerns kick-in once the warranty expires. Overall, our projections suggest that car ownership costs will climb steeply and, for some, this will cause real financial hardship.”

Another potential kicker for consumers is the degradation in efficiency of internal combustion engines over time. “Most new ICEage cars are guaranteed for up to 100,000km but there’s no escaping the fact that from the moment you drive off the car yard the efficiency and performance starts to decline. Today, consumers can easily follow the degradation of their BEV battery by just looking at the dashboard. But it’s much harder to measure efficiency loss in ICEage cars without the expense and complexity of a rolling road test rig. It’s like the boiling frog,” says Sophie, “if you heat the water slowly, the frog doesn’t notice and jump out. With ICEage cars, consumers will be buying more and more fuel and releasing more and more emissions just to travel the same distance but they probably won’t notice.”

Community considerations Sophie, who grew up in central Otago, has been modelling the likely economic impact of the ICEage on rural communities around New Zealand. “There will be winners and losers,” she explains. “Many small towns and settlements in New Zealand have grown up around their BEV charging points. In the early days of BEV, the relatively limited range meant that travellers had to stop and charge up quite frequently. That’s why we have the amazing network of awesome cafes and eateries distributed so evenly around our countryside that we enjoy today. People can - and do - stop just about anywhere to charge up their car and grab a coffee or lunch.”

Sophie’s research assistant hands us both a flat white before Sophie continues. “What many people haven’t realised yet is that you need a heck of a lot more capital to build a refuelling station for an ICEage car – large bunded tanks, pumps, safety gear. Most small communities won’t be able to afford one. Combine that with the fact that ICEage cars will have a longer range from the outset, and it seems highly likely that refuelling points will only be installed in areas of relatively high population density. Given the capital required, I think we’ll see a lot of ICEage refuelling points owned by the multi-national corporations that control the rest of the fuel supply chain and it’s hard to see how small businesses and communities won’t lose out. They’ll be bypassed in economic terms if not in terms of the environmental impacts of ICEage cars.”

Geopolitics in the ICEage We’re joined in Sophie’s sunny office by her colleague Tim Daniels, Professor of Geopolitics, and Jessie, his guide dog. Jessie settles quietly next to Tim as we exchange pleasantries about the weather and the state of the All Blacks squad. “ICEage cars are going to impact massively on global politics,” says Tim. “As the fleet of ICEage cars expands we’ll see exponential growth in demand for petroleum products derived from refining crude oil to fuel and lubricate them. Global reserves of crude oil are concentrated in some of the world’s most politically unstable regions such as the Middle East. Instead of having a transport system based on distributed energy generation, we’re going to become increasingly dependent on a small number of states that can supply global demand. We will see colossal shifts in the distribution of wealth and power.”

Grid anxiety Around the developed world, electricity generation and distribution has evolved in step with BEV. We take for granted the resilience that comes from a power grid that can draw from BEV batteries at times of peak demand and top them up again overnight when demand is lower. I talked to Gridworks Chief Operating Officer Juliet Mackenzie to find out more about the implications of our transport fleet shifting to ICEage vehicles.

With a high speed delivery Juliet explains, “Electricity demand is very spikey through the day and through the year. For decades now the electricity supply companies have offered consumers attractive deals to sell ‘surplus’ charge from EVs back in to the grid for example in the early evening after returning from work. Other people minimise their exposure to peak rate charges by drawing on spare charge in their BEV battery. Either way, we’ve become extremely adept at utilising the megawatts of distributed power sitting in BEV around the country to help smooth out the spikes.”

Juliet pauses and leads me across her office to a map of New Zealand’s proposed grid upgrade. “It may seem counterintuitive that the shift from BEV to ICEage cars is going to put more strain on the grid but that is the case,” says Juliet. “Although total annual demand for electricity will diminish, we’re going to have to invest in generation capacity and distribution infrastructure to manage the spikes. That means more power stations, more pylons and ultimately a less stable grid than we’ve enjoyed in the past. And to make matters worse, to reliably provide power for the spikes we’ll need generation capacity that is independent of weather and can come online rapidly. That means gas-fired power stations.”

The new energy distribution paradigm Over decades we’ve grown used to access to the power for our vehicles being distributed via the electricity grid to charging points at our shops, community centres, cafes and even our homes. With the advent of the ICEage, liquid petroleum products will become a much more siginficant part of the overall energy mix in New Zealand. To find out what this will mean in practice I headed to Hagley Park one frosty Christchurch morning to meet up with Brent Smith, the owner of a new petroleum start-up called Scottish Petrol and a keen early morning jogger. Brent was visiting New Zealand from his base in Inverness, where he has been raising capital for a new type of offshore installation for drilling for crude oil.

“Right now we’re in a wee bit of a chicken-and-egg situation,” says Brent. “No-one wants to invest in drilling technology until the refineries to process the crude oil are in place. The refineries won’t start springing up until the international super-tanker fleet – needed to shift crude from the oil fields to the refineries - has grown. Aye and once that’s all in place, we’ll need to see investment in the retail distribution network. Globally there are one or two countries looking at reticulated systems for distributing refined fuel but in most cases there’ll need to be fleets of road tankers. This is great for the emerging petroleum sector as these vehicles in themselves will create demand for fuel. It’s exciting times laddie.”

With that, Brent promptly stands up, shakes my hand and continues his morning jog around the park.

Climate change Much has been said about the potential impact of the arrival of the internal combustion engine on the planet. We know from use of jet-powered ships and aircraft that the gases produced from burning liquid fossil fuels can lead to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. To find out the latest on this hot topic, I tracked down Dr Richard West in his laboratory at the New Zealand Insitute for Climate Science in Wellington.

Richard has been studying climate change for 30 years and has no doubt that burning fossil fuels is a major contributing factor. “We’ve been modelling climate change for decades now and have seen the effect of using fossil fuels in jet-engined planes and boats. If Joseph Etienne Lenoir and Nikolaus Otto had come up with the internal combustion engine before the likes of Robert Anderson and William Morrison got busy making BEV, we might all have been driving ICEage cars for the past 100 years. Thankfully that’s not the case or we’d have gigatonnes more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than we already do today.”

Given that the world is running out of lithium, what alternatives are there except flipping the fleet to ICE? Richard explains, “People won’t give up their cars so we’re going to have to take this epic gamble that massively increasing use of fossil fuels isn’t going to have the impact that all our climate models say it will.”

Sadly, the impact of this seismic shift in our transport system won’t only effect the global climate system. At a local level, the air that we breathe will diminish in quality with a range of noxious gases and particulates likely to accumulate especially in urban areas. Rachel Goldstein – mother of lively 3 year old twins Erin and Alexi - lives in California, where state incentives for saving lithium by shifting to ICEage cars have been in place now for several years. I caught up with her by phone. “As more and more of my neighbours have ditched their BEV for ICEage cars the place has gotten way more noisy and polluted. From 5am every morning you can hear engines firing up and some days the smog by midday is unbearable.” Rachel tears-up as she goes on, “I don’t want my kids growing up with all these exhaust gases around them but what can you do? The authorities tell us the risks are small but I want to know why we can’t just find some more lithium and hang on to our BEV?”

Other environmental impacts “We’re going to have to dramatically increase exploration for oil deposits if we stand any chance of keeping up with projected demand for petrol.” I’m talking to Mandy Pringle, policy manager at Environment Wellington – a not-for-profit environmental charity. Sipping lattes on the waterfront on a chilly but unusually still Wellington morning, with the sun glinting off Lambton Harbour, it’s hard to grasp the magnitude of the the risks Mandy sees in ICEage cars.

She goes on, “That’s going to mean drilling in increasingly hazardous and environmentally fragile areas. A bit of a double-whammy as the risk of leaks and spills will increase in areas that are particularly poorly placed to cope with them. We’ll see new oil tanker routes opening up through sensitive areas and new coastal oil refineries along with a distribution network that serves a rapidly expanding retail market for fossil fuels. These all pose oil spill risks and we know how deterimental they are to the environment.”

Mandy takes another sip of her latte and adds, “And brake dust. I’m really worried about brake dust. You see, regenerative braking in BEV captures some of the ‘waste’ energy from decelerating and uses it to recharge the battery a bit. This results in less wear on the brakes. ICEage cars don’t do that. Instead, they rely mainly on friction between the brake linings and a rotors and turn the kinetic energy into heat. In the process, the linings and rotors wear down. The dust from worn brake linings can accumulate on the road network until you get a rain event and then it’s washed into the storm water system. Growing evidence points to the harm that the copper often used in brake linings can do to aquatic life. And then there’s the risk of oil leaking from the lubrication system of the ICEage cars and the question of what you do with the waste oil when it’s changed as part of routine servicing.”

Early adopter? To get a first hand experience of this new technology I rented an ICEage car for a week and tried to use it just as I use my BEV. Living in Canterbury and it being winter, the first thing I noticed was not being able to pre-warm the car in the garage. On a couple of particularly frigid mornings I was tempted to ignore the large sticker on the dashboard warning me of the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. In the end, I just shifted the car out of the garage and let it run on the drive to warm up for a bit.

A must for any ICEage early adopter, I downloaded the PumpIt app so I knew exactly where I could buy petrol. At present there aren’t many filling stations and they’re mostly located on gloomy industrial estates because no-one really wants to live next to a large tank of explosive liquid with cars coming and going 24 hours a day. Compared to plugging in at home it seemed a bit inconvenient having to go out of my way to fill up but the pumps looked very much like a fast charging station. One important difference is that the fuel will flow out regardless of whether the nozzle is ‘plugged in’. I think that, along with the flammability, is why you need to be over 16 years old to refuel.

When I handed the car back at the end of the week and drove away in my BEV I became aware of an annoying interior rattle that I hadn’t heard before. I was reflecting that I wouldn’t be able to hear it in an ICEage vehicle thanks to all the other noise going on when I realised it was the keys for the loan car – I’d forgotten to drop them off. I turned the BEV around, handed over the keys and said to the man behind the rental counter, “When they can make them as convenient and easy to use as an BEV I might consider buying one.”

Afterthought The following sunny Sunday afternoon, accompanied by the quiet hum of my battery-powered lawn mower, I began to wonder whether internal combustion engines would one day be miniaturised and find their way into garden tools like mowers, hedge trimmers and weed eaters. But as my wife pointed out, it seems highly improbable that anyone – least of all the neighbours – would tolerate the noise pollution.

[marilynngmesalo]

‘BOMB CYCLONE’: Colorado storm barrels toward U.S. Midwest

‘BOMB CYCLONE’: Colorado storm barrels toward U.S. Midwest ‘BOMB CYCLONE’: Colorado storm barrels toward U.S. Midwest https://ift.tt/2W3dk8l

LONGMONT, Colo. — U.S. National Guard troops used specialized vehicles with tank-like treads to rescue stranded drivers in Colorado in the wake of a massive late-winter storm that unleashed heavy rain and snow on parts of the Midwest plains early Thursday.

South Dakota’s governor closed all state offices Thursday as the blizzard conditions moved in, while wind, blowing snow and snow-packed roadways also made travel treacherous in western Nebraska. Heavy rain caused flooding in eastern parts of both states and in Iowa.

Wednesday’s blizzard in Colorado caused widespread power outages, forced the cancellation of hundreds of flights and wreaked havoc on roadways as drivers became overwhelmed by blinding snow. A wind gust clocked in at 97 mph (156 km/h) in Colorado Springs.

The storm also contributed to the death of Corporal Daniel Groves, a Colorado State Patrol officer who was hit and killed by a car as he helped another driver who had slid off Interstate 76 near Denver.

“It is a tragic reminder that people’s lives are at stake,” said Shoshana Lew, head of the Colorado Department of Transportation. “The best place to be is at home and off the roads.”

Lew warned drivers that conditions would remain precarious at least through Thursday.

About 200 vehicles were disabled on Interstate 25 near Colorado Springs, and many more drivers were being rescued on secondary roads, said Kyle Lester with the transportation department’s Division of Highway Maintenance.

Canada geese battle choppy water as a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow sweeps over the intermountain West Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Denver.

One of the stranded drivers was Bria McKenzie, 22, who with her mother, brother and sister, was stuck in her car for more than two hours on a hilly road in Colorado Springs. She said the snow was so blinding and numbing, and the wind was whipping so hard, she didn’t feel safe walking to a hospital that was just down the road.

“It was just like every second you were out there, it felt like parts of you were just freezing,” she said.

McKenzie and her family were eventually rescued by her father in his pickup.

The window-rattling storm brought blizzards, floods and a tornado across more than 25 states Wednesday, stretching from the northern Rocky Mountains to Texas and beyond.

“This is a very epic cyclone,” said Greg Carbin, chief of forecast operations for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center. “We’re looking at something that will go down in the history books.”

Scores of motorists took refuge at truck stops in eastern Wyoming while blowing snow forced portions of major highways to close in Colorado, Nebraska and South Dakota. Meanwhile, hundreds of flights were cancelled at Denver International Airport, and nearly 40 were grounded in Colorado Springs.

Trucks are parked in the snow at the Pilot Flying J near Interstate 90 in Rapid City, S.D., Wednesday, March 13, 2019. I-90 was closed from the Wyoming border to Oacoma, S.D., earlier in the day.

The wind-whipped storm forced schools and government offices across the state to close for the day and cut power to several hundred thousand homes and businesses. Xcel Energy spokesman Mark Stutz said zero visibility made conditions difficult for repair workers, and it could take days to restore power to everyone.

The culprit was a sudden and severe drop in ground-level air pressure in Colorado, the most pronounced dive since 1950, Carbin said. It was caused by a combination of the jet stream and normal conditions in the wind shadow of the Rockies.

Air rushed into the low-pressure area and then rose into the atmosphere.

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“It’s like a vacuum cleaner, really,” Carbin said. When that much air rushes higher into the atmosphere, it causes severe weather.

Meteorologists call the rapid change in pressure a “bomb cyclone” or “bombogenesis.”

Parts of seven states were under blizzard warnings, and 20 states were under some level of high wind alert, Carbin said.

A tornado in New Mexico ripped roofs from buildings in the small town of Dexter, about 200 miles (320 kilometres) southwest of Albuquerque. Authorities said five people were hurt, but none of the injuries was life-threatening. A dairy euthanized about 150 cows injured by the tornado.

Chaves County Sheriff Mike Herrington said the tornado “took out” about 10 homes on one street.

High winds knocked 25 railroad freight cars off a bridge into a mostly dry riverbed near Logan in northeast New Mexico. No one was injured, New Mexico State Police said.

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[jamesgeiiger]

He’s a ‘tech addict’ who works in the tech industry

BELLEVUE, Wash. — The young men sit in chairs in a circle in a small meeting room in suburban Seattle and introduce themselves before they speak. It is much like any other 12-step meeting — but with a twist.

“Hi, my name is,” each begins. Then something like, “and I’m an internet and tech addict.”

The eight who’ve gathered here are beset by a level of tech obsession that’s different than it is for those of us who like to say we’re addicted to our phones or an app or some new show on a streaming video service. For them, tech gets in the way of daily functioning and self-care. We’re talking flunk-your-classes, can’t-find-a-job, live-in-a-dark-hole kinds of problems, with depression, anxiety and sometimes suicidal thoughts part of the mix.

There’s Christian, a 20-year-old college student from Wyoming who has a traumatic brain injury. His mom urged him to seek help because he was “medicating” his depression with video games and marijuana.

Seth, a 28-year-old from Minnesota, used video games and any number of things to try to numb his shame after a car he was driving crashed, seriously injuring his brother.

Wes, 21, an Eagle Scout and college student from Michigan, played video games 80 hours a week, only stopping to eat every two to three days. He lost 25 pounds and failed his classes.

Across town there is another young man who attended this meeting, before his work schedule changed — and his work places him squarely at risk of temptation.

He does cloud maintenance for a suburban Seattle tech company. For a self-described tech addict, this is like working in the lion’s den, labouring for the very industry that peddles the games, videos and other online content that long has been his vice.

“I’m like an alcoholic working at a bar,” the 27-year-old laments.

——

“The drugs of old are now repackaged. We have a new foe,” Cosette Rae says of the barrage of tech. A former developer in the tech world, she heads a Seattle area rehab centre called reSTART Life, one of the few residential programs in the nation specializing in tech addiction.

Use of that word — addiction — when it comes to devices, online content and the like, is still debated in the mental health world. But many practitioners agree that tech use is increasingly intertwined with the problems of those seeking help.

An American Academy of Pediatrics review of worldwide research found that excessive use of video games alone is a serious problem for as many as 9 per cent of young people. This summer, the World Health Organization also added “gaming disorder” to its list of afflictions. A similar diagnosis is being considered in the United States.

It can be a taboo subject in an industry that frequently faces criticism for using “persuasive design,” intentionally harnessing psychological concepts to make tech all the more enticing. That’s why the 27-year-old who works at the tech company spoke on condition that his identity not be revealed. He fears that speaking out could hurt his fledgling career.

“I stay in the tech industry because I truly believe that technology can help other people,” the young man says. He wants to do good.

But as his co-workers huddle nearby, talking excitedly about their latest video game exploits, he puts on his headphones, hoping to block the frequent topic of conversation in this tech-centric part of the world.

Even the computer screen in front of him could lead him astray. But he digs in, typing determinedly on his keyboard to refocus on the task at hand.

——

The demons are not easy to wrestle for this young man, who was born in 1991, the very year the World Wide Web went public.

As a toddler, he sat on his dad’s lap as they played simple video games on a Mac Classic II computer. Together in their Seattle area home, they browsed the internet on what was then a ground-breaking new service called Prodigy. The sound of the bouncy, then high-pitched tones of the dial-up connection are etched in his memory.

By early elementary school, he got his first Super Nintendo system and fell in love with “Yoshi’s Story,” a game where the main character searched for “lucky fruit.”

As he grew, so did one of the world’s major tech hubs. Led by Microsoft, it rose from the nondescript suburban landscape and farm fields here, just a short drive from the home he still shares with his mom, who split from her husband when their only child was 11.

The boy dreamt of being part of this tech boom and, in eighth grade, wrote a note to himself. “I want to be a computer engineer,” it read.

Very bright and with a head full of facts and figures, he usually did well in school. He also took an interest in music and acting but recalls how playing games increasingly became a way to escape life — the pain he felt, for instance, when his parents divorced or when his first serious girlfriend broke his heart at age 14. That relationship still ranks as his longest.

“Hey, do you wanna go out?” friends would ask.

“No, man, I got plans. I can’t do it this weekend. Sorry,” was his typical response, if he answered at all.

“And then I’d just go play video games,” he says of his adolescent “dark days,” exacerbated by attention deficit disorder, depression and major social anxiety.

Even now, if he thinks he’s said something stupid to someone, his words are replaced with a verbal tick – “Tsst, tsst” — as he replays the conversation in his head.

“There’s always a catalyst and then it usually bubbles up these feelings of avoidance,” he says. “I go online instead of dealing with my feelings.”

He’d been seeing a therapist since his parents’ divorce. But attending college out of state allowed more freedom and less structure, so he spent even more time online. His grades plummeted, forcing him to change majors, from engineering to business.

Eventually, he graduated in 2016 and moved home. Each day, he’d go to a nearby restaurant or the library to use the Wi-Fi, claiming he was looking for a job but having no luck.

Instead, he was spending hours on Reddit, an online forum where people share news and comments, or viewing YouTube videos. Sometimes, he watched online porn.

Even now, his mom doesn’t know that he lied. “I still need to apologize for that,” he says, quietly.

——

The apologies will come later, in Step 9 of his 12-step program, which he found with the help of a therapist who specializes in tech addiction. He began attending meetings of the local group called Internet & Tech Addiction Anonymous in the fall of 2016 and landed his current job a couple months later.

For a while now, he’s been stuck on Step 4 — the personal inventory — a challenge to take a deep look at himself and the source of his problems. “It can be overwhelming,” he says.

The young men at the recent 12-step meeting understand the struggle.

“I had to be convinced that this was a ‘thing,”‘ says Walker, a 19-year-old from Washington whose parents insisted he get help after video gaming trashed his first semester of college. He and others from the meeting agreed to speak only if identified by first name, as required by the 12-step tenets.

That’s where facilities like reSTART come in. They share a group home after spending several weeks in therapy and “detoxing” at a secluded ranch. One recent early morning at the ranch outside Carnation, Washington, an 18-year-old from California named Robel was up early to feed horses, goats and a couple of farm cats — a much different routine than staying up late to play video games. He and other young men in the house also cook meals for one another and take on other chores.

Eventually, they write “life balance plans,” committing to eating well and regular sleep and exercise. They find jobs and new ways to socialize, and many eventually return to college once they show they can maintain “sobriety” in the real world. They make “bottom line” promises to give up video games or any other problem content, as well as drugs and alcohol, if those are issues. They’re also given monitored smartphones with limited function — calls, texts and emails and access to maps.

“It’s more like an eating disorder because they have to learn to use tech,” just as anorexics need to eat, says Hilarie Cash, chief clinical officer and another co-founder at reSTART, which opened nearly a decade ago. They’ve since added an adolescent program and will soon offer outpatient services because of growing demand.

The young tech worker, who grew up just down the road, didn’t have the funds to go to such a program — it’s not covered by insurance, because tech addiction is not yet an official diagnosis.

But he, too, has apps on his phone that send reports about what he’s viewing to his 12-step sponsor, a fellow tech addict named Charlie, a 30-year-old reSTART graduate.

At home, the young man also persuaded his mom to get rid of Wi-Fi to lessen the temptation. Mom struggles with her own addiction — over-eating — so she’s tried to be as supportive as she can.

It hasn’t been easy for her son, who still relapses every month or two with an extended online binge. He’s managed to keep his job. But sometimes, he wishes he could be more like his co-workers, who spend a lot of their leisure time playing video games and seem to function just fine.

“Deep down, I think there’s a longing to be one of those people,” Charlie says.

That’s true, the young man concedes. He still has those days when he’s tired, upset or extremely bored — and he tests the limits.

He tells himself he’s not as bad as other addicts. Charlie knows something’s up when his calls or texts aren’t returned for several days, or even weeks.

“Then,” the young man says, “I discover very quickly that I am actually an addict, and I do need to do this.”

Having Charlie to lean on helps. “He’s a role model,” he says.

“He has a place of his own. He has a dog. He has friends.”

That’s what he wants for himself.

——

Online:

Internet & Tech Addiction Anonymous: http://www.netaddictionanon.com

reSTART Life: https://netaddictionrecovery.com

Children and Screens: http://www.childrenandscreens.com

——

Martha Irvine, an AP national writer and visual journalists, can be reached at mirvine//twitter.com/irvineap

He’s a ‘tech addict’ who works in the tech industry published first on https://worldwideinvestforum.tumblr.com/

[mikemortgage]

He’s a ‘tech addict’ who works in the tech industry

BELLEVUE, Wash. — The young men sit in chairs in a circle in a small meeting room in suburban Seattle and introduce themselves before they speak. It is much like any other 12-step meeting — but with a twist.

“Hi, my name is,” each begins. Then something like, “and I’m an internet and tech addict.”

The eight who’ve gathered here are beset by a level of tech obsession that’s different than it is for those of us who like to say we’re addicted to our phones or an app or some new show on a streaming video service. For them, tech gets in the way of daily functioning and self-care. We’re talking flunk-your-classes, can’t-find-a-job, live-in-a-dark-hole kinds of problems, with depression, anxiety and sometimes suicidal thoughts part of the mix.

There’s Christian, a 20-year-old college student from Wyoming who has a traumatic brain injury. His mom urged him to seek help because he was “medicating” his depression with video games and marijuana.

Seth, a 28-year-old from Minnesota, used video games and any number of things to try to numb his shame after a car he was driving crashed, seriously injuring his brother.

Wes, 21, an Eagle Scout and college student from Michigan, played video games 80 hours a week, only stopping to eat every two to three days. He lost 25 pounds and failed his classes.

Across town there is another young man who attended this meeting, before his work schedule changed — and his work places him squarely at risk of temptation.

He does cloud maintenance for a suburban Seattle tech company. For a self-described tech addict, this is like working in the lion’s den, labouring for the very industry that peddles the games, videos and other online content that long has been his vice.

“I’m like an alcoholic working at a bar,” the 27-year-old laments.

——

“The drugs of old are now repackaged. We have a new foe,” Cosette Rae says of the barrage of tech. A former developer in the tech world, she heads a Seattle area rehab centre called reSTART Life, one of the few residential programs in the nation specializing in tech addiction.

Use of that word — addiction — when it comes to devices, online content and the like, is still debated in the mental health world. But many practitioners agree that tech use is increasingly intertwined with the problems of those seeking help.

An American Academy of Pediatrics review of worldwide research found that excessive use of video games alone is a serious problem for as many as 9 per cent of young people. This summer, the World Health Organization also added “gaming disorder” to its list of afflictions. A similar diagnosis is being considered in the United States.

It can be a taboo subject in an industry that frequently faces criticism for using “persuasive design,” intentionally harnessing psychological concepts to make tech all the more enticing. That’s why the 27-year-old who works at the tech company spoke on condition that his identity not be revealed. He fears that speaking out could hurt his fledgling career.

“I stay in the tech industry because I truly believe that technology can help other people,” the young man says. He wants to do good.

But as his co-workers huddle nearby, talking excitedly about their latest video game exploits, he puts on his headphones, hoping to block the frequent topic of conversation in this tech-centric part of the world.

Even the computer screen in front of him could lead him astray. But he digs in, typing determinedly on his keyboard to refocus on the task at hand.

——

The demons are not easy to wrestle for this young man, who was born in 1991, the very year the World Wide Web went public.

As a toddler, he sat on his dad’s lap as they played simple video games on a Mac Classic II computer. Together in their Seattle area home, they browsed the internet on what was then a ground-breaking new service called Prodigy. The sound of the bouncy, then high-pitched tones of the dial-up connection are etched in his memory.

By early elementary school, he got his first Super Nintendo system and fell in love with “Yoshi’s Story,” a game where the main character searched for “lucky fruit.”

As he grew, so did one of the world’s major tech hubs. Led by Microsoft, it rose from the nondescript suburban landscape and farm fields here, just a short drive from the home he still shares with his mom, who split from her husband when their only child was 11.

The boy dreamt of being part of this tech boom and, in eighth grade, wrote a note to himself. “I want to be a computer engineer,” it read.

Very bright and with a head full of facts and figures, he usually did well in school. He also took an interest in music and acting but recalls how playing games increasingly became a way to escape life — the pain he felt, for instance, when his parents divorced or when his first serious girlfriend broke his heart at age 14. That relationship still ranks as his longest.

“Hey, do you wanna go out?” friends would ask.

“No, man, I got plans. I can’t do it this weekend. Sorry,” was his typical response, if he answered at all.

“And then I’d just go play video games,” he says of his adolescent “dark days,” exacerbated by attention deficit disorder, depression and major social anxiety.

Even now, if he thinks he’s said something stupid to someone, his words are replaced with a verbal tick – “Tsst, tsst” — as he replays the conversation in his head.

“There’s always a catalyst and then it usually bubbles up these feelings of avoidance,” he says. “I go online instead of dealing with my feelings.”

He’d been seeing a therapist since his parents’ divorce. But attending college out of state allowed more freedom and less structure, so he spent even more time online. His grades plummeted, forcing him to change majors, from engineering to business.

Eventually, he graduated in 2016 and moved home. Each day, he’d go to a nearby restaurant or the library to use the Wi-Fi, claiming he was looking for a job but having no luck.

Instead, he was spending hours on Reddit, an online forum where people share news and comments, or viewing YouTube videos. Sometimes, he watched online porn.

Even now, his mom doesn’t know that he lied. “I still need to apologize for that,” he says, quietly.

——

The apologies will come later, in Step 9 of his 12-step program, which he found with the help of a therapist who specializes in tech addiction. He began attending meetings of the local group called Internet & Tech Addiction Anonymous in the fall of 2016 and landed his current job a couple months later.

For a while now, he’s been stuck on Step 4 — the personal inventory — a challenge to take a deep look at himself and the source of his problems. “It can be overwhelming,” he says.

The young men at the recent 12-step meeting understand the struggle.

“I had to be convinced that this was a ‘thing,”‘ says Walker, a 19-year-old from Washington whose parents insisted he get help after video gaming trashed his first semester of college. He and others from the meeting agreed to speak only if identified by first name, as required by the 12-step tenets.

That’s where facilities like reSTART come in. They share a group home after spending several weeks in therapy and “detoxing” at a secluded ranch. One recent early morning at the ranch outside Carnation, Washington, an 18-year-old from California named Robel was up early to feed horses, goats and a couple of farm cats — a much different routine than staying up late to play video games. He and other young men in the house also cook meals for one another and take on other chores.

Eventually, they write “life balance plans,” committing to eating well and regular sleep and exercise. They find jobs and new ways to socialize, and many eventually return to college once they show they can maintain “sobriety” in the real world. They make “bottom line” promises to give up video games or any other problem content, as well as drugs and alcohol, if those are issues. They’re also given monitored smartphones with limited function — calls, texts and emails and access to maps.

“It’s more like an eating disorder because they have to learn to use tech,” just as anorexics need to eat, says Hilarie Cash, chief clinical officer and another co-founder at reSTART, which opened nearly a decade ago. They’ve since added an adolescent program and will soon offer outpatient services because of growing demand.

The young tech worker, who grew up just down the road, didn’t have the funds to go to such a program — it’s not covered by insurance, because tech addiction is not yet an official diagnosis.

But he, too, has apps on his phone that send reports about what he’s viewing to his 12-step sponsor, a fellow tech addict named Charlie, a 30-year-old reSTART graduate.

At home, the young man also persuaded his mom to get rid of Wi-Fi to lessen the temptation. Mom struggles with her own addiction — over-eating — so she’s tried to be as supportive as she can.

It hasn’t been easy for her son, who still relapses every month or two with an extended online binge. He’s managed to keep his job. But sometimes, he wishes he could be more like his co-workers, who spend a lot of their leisure time playing video games and seem to function just fine.

“Deep down, I think there’s a longing to be one of those people,” Charlie says.

That’s true, the young man concedes. He still has those days when he’s tired, upset or extremely bored — and he tests the limits.

He tells himself he’s not as bad as other addicts. Charlie knows something’s up when his calls or texts aren’t returned for several days, or even weeks.

“Then,” the young man says, “I discover very quickly that I am actually an addict, and I do need to do this.”

Having Charlie to lean on helps. “He’s a role model,” he says.

“He has a place of his own. He has a dog. He has friends.”

That’s what he wants for himself.

——

Online:

Internet & Tech Addiction Anonymous: http://www.netaddictionanon.com

reSTART Life: https://netaddictionrecovery.com

Children and Screens: http://www.childrenandscreens.com

——

Martha Irvine, an AP national writer and visual journalists, can be reached at mirvine//twitter.com/irvineap

from Financial Post http://bit.ly/2GGrQ2O via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

[jamesandanna12]

Sturgis (South Dakota) to Pincher Creek (Alberta) - 8-18 Aug 2017

We left Rapid City the following morning. We were going to ride through a little bit of the Black Hills national forest and pass Mount Rushmore. We were pottering slowly enjoying the hills and gentle twists of the road. 

We got to the entrance of Mount Rushmore and were planning to pay the entrance fee but as we rode on...

There it was! 

Beautiful!

Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore featuring heads of four United States presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. 

We spent a good hour admiring Mount Rushmore and chatting to some friendly people who took a photo for us as we left...  There were lots of Harley riders - on daytrips from Sturgis. 

We rode around the mountain and... Got another glimps of Lincoln's head 😊

Riding was fabulous! 

Long straight roads - easy riding. 

The last half an hour or so of the ride to our motel in Casper, Wyoming was a complete downpour! We got soaked! We arrived in The Royal Inn - it wasn't very royal and we had to wait 40 minutes for housekeeping to prepare a room despite it being nearly 6pm 😉

We went out to get a bite to eat - Casper was nice despite the weather. 

We decided to stay an extra day.

Most importantly....... We found good coffee! 

Walking around was very mellow. 

We didn't do too much - we just needed a lazy day. In the evening we rode to Domino's pizza a few miles away and brought back a yummy pizza. James was the pizza delivery man!!!!

We packed up in the morning and rode towards Dubois, Wyoming. We intended to camp for a couple of nights in order to visit the Grand Teton national park. 

The ride started a little unexcitingly...

But it quickly become spectacular!

We saw gorgeous antelopes 😊 

The countryside was harsh but beautiful!

We arrived in Dubois and needed to buy food for supper. 

James was in charge of operating the trolley 😉

We stopped in the liquor store and got a big box of Malbec 😁 Camping without wine is not camping! 😋

The town looked really nice but we didn't have much time to explore - we had to find a campsite and pitch a tent. 

We hadn't eaten all day so when we saw this cute little cafe, we couldn't resist going in before leaving town 😁

The owner was incredibly friendly! 

And the coffee he made was to die for! 😍

We were ready to go when we got talking to a very friendly lady. She thought the campsite we intended going to would be full so she told us about a couple of alternative ones. 

She even drew us a map! ☺

The weather was changing a little - we hoped we wouldn't get wet. 

We saw more antelopes and elk in the distance. 

Eventually we arrived at the turnoff for the campsite. We wanted to see if we could get a pitch at the Shoshone national forest campground.

We rode around the campsite a couple of times and found a nice and quiet spot. 

We had a huge bear box all to ourselves - handy for storing all the food and toiletries. Apparently the bears like anything that smells 😱

James started the fire ☺

And I sat in my kitchen preparing supper 😁

We had our favourite camping food - sausages and fresh tomatoes with red onions. 

Dinner was delicious! All washed down with a few glasses of wine. Yummy! 😁

The campsite was incredibly peaceful and quiet. We sat around watching the fire.

It got cold quite quickly but the campfire kept us warm.

There's something mesmerising about watching a campfire... We stayed up quite late - so relaxing! 😊

We slept really well and woke up quite rested. We made coffee and set off on the ride to the Grand Teton national park. 

It was quite hazy but we could just about to see the Grand Tetons mountains. Gorgeous! (We discovered later that the haze was in fact smoke from wildfires that had been burning all summer in the Pacific Northwest).

Beautiful mountain range!

After a full day riding around the National Park, we headed back to the campsite. Lovely ride. 

We got back to base and went for a walk around the campsite. 

We found a pretty waterfall.

Then it was time for some bike maintenance. James maintained, I supervised 😉

We had some visitors - two elk wondered around our campsite for an hour 😊

We had an early night and set off early the following morning. We were on our way to Yellowstone national park. 

We stopped to top up with petrol and saw these snowmobiles. Winter was coming!

But they looked like fun!

The road to Yellowstone took us through the Grand Tetons again... And we were very happy about that - so beautiful! 

The riding was great! 

We arrived at Yellowstone national park ☺

We were surprised that we couldn't see very much - we rode through dense forest and there were hardly any pullouts. We stopped at them all 😉

When we finally arrived at the visitor's centre, there were huge crowds outside. People gathered to see Old Faithful - a cone geyser that is highly predicable with eruptions every 45 minutes or so. Our timing was good - we only waited 10 minutes. 

The eruption started very small..... 

Got bigger..... 

And bigger! Eruptions shoot about 20,000 litres of boiling water to a height of 50 metres. The one we saw was pretty big! 

We rode on and saw several other geothermal areas of Yellowstone. Nice to see but we weren't really taken by them. 

After a while we reached a prettier part. We weren't seeing any animals though... 

We found a very picturesque geyser!

We were nearly at the end of Yellowstone and weren't that impressed. We kept hoping to see something with a wow factor.....

That wow moment never came....

We left Yellowstone underwhelmed. It was incredibly busy, over commercialised with absolutely no sign of any wildlife.  Perhaps August wasn't the cleverest time to visit!  The road out and the scenery were great though 😉  

We stopped to look at the river disappointed that we didn't see any animals in Yellowstone, only to find three elk looking at us 😊

As we rode away, there was an almighty downpour! We hid in Subway - the only place other than a petrol station. 

By the time we got to Bozeman, Montana it was geting dark. We were staying in a motel in the middle of nowhere. The only "restaurant" within walking distance was McDonald's... Ugh... 😕

The following day we got up early and set off for a little town in Montana called Missoula. 

We arrived in our motel in Missuola - it was a sweet little place! We checked in for a couple of days. 

We instantly liked Missoula. The town was clean, friendly and quite sophisticated. 

We even found something we craved for ages.... Indian curry! 

In the morning we went to a local art gallery - lovely place!

All the artwork was beautiful and had stories behind it. 

After a couple of hours in the gallery it was time for some chores. 

My summer gloves needed to be replaced! 😉

After trying on several pairs and managing to get a little discount, I purchased this pretty pair ☺

We arranged with a bike shop to have front tyres installed. We dropped off our bikes and when we got back, we were told that the front wheel bearings were shot on both bikes! The mechanics were so good - thank you Big Sky Motorsports! Our wheels are not standard as we raised the suspension to withstand riding on bad or nonexistent roads in South America.  The mechanics tried to identify the bearings we needed... Luckily James found out that our bearings are also standard for other models of motorbike. And Big Sky had two sets in the shop! We were very lucky! 

The mechanics were telling us about the wildfires in the area. One of them had to be evacuated and had not been home for a week. We hope he got his home back. Very scary! The smell of smoke was very strong and you could see in the air. 

We walked by the river when we heard some music.... 

There was a band playing great music in the park  😁

We sat there for a while until James spotted a barber shop - it was time! 😉 

Missoula was a lovely place to walk around. We were very happy there. 

The smoke was getting worse! 

In the morning the wind changed direction and we had clearer sky. We were very near Canada but wanted to visit Glacier national park before crossing the border. We planned on camping near a small town called Colombia Falls. 

Riding and scenery were great. 

We found a quiet spot and set up our house for the night. 

After a refreshing shower we prepared a bite to eat but first thing first.... 

A glass of wine 😁

We didn't have the greatest night's sleep... There's definitely a tolerance limit  for camping... And we've reached it! 😴😴

We packed up and set off to see our next national park - Glacier. 

After a while on some nice roads... 

We arrived! 

The scenery was gorgeous! 

We got our first glimpse of a glacier.... 

Without knowing too much about this national park, we expected to see some  big glaciers.... But that wasn't the case. The remaining glaciers are predicted to all disappear by 2030 - due to the warming climate.  

Glacier national park was nice - the scenery was definitely spectacular, just not the glaciers! 

As we left the park, we were very near the Canadian border - a little tiny crossing called Chief Mountain. 

There wasn't much of a queue. 

Welcome to Canada! 

The scenery was beautiful! 

It was a long day. The wind picked up and riding was very tough. We stopped in a little town called Pincher Creek and decided to stay there for the night. We found a lovely little campsite.  

There was a little Chinese restaurant in town so we didn't have to cook. We went for a walk - it was a cute and friendly little town. 

[oanda-pp]

The end of the road for Kampong Cham’s iconic bamboo bridge?

The bamboo bridge connecting Kampong Cham town to Koh Paen has been built every dry season for decades, but with the construction of a modern bridge downstream, this year might be its last. Eliah Lillis

Fri, 5 May 2017

Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon and Rinith Taing

Kampong Cham’s bamboo bridge is one of the province’s most popular attractions and a sustainable feat of engineering. But with a modern government-funded bridge being built up the river, this could be its last year

With every dry season, the waters of the Mekong River separating Kampong Cham town from the roughly 1,000 families on Koh Paen recede, becoming too shallow for a ferry. Each year, for decades, the island’s residents have employed a unique solution: building a seasonal, kilometre-long bamboo bridge until the rains swell the river, then tearing it down again.

Aside from a few missed years due to war, the bridge has been an iconic annual fixture of life in the province.

That is likely to change after this year, however, when modernity finally catches up to the tradition. Two kilometres south of the bamboo bridge, a team of Royal Cambodian Armed Forces engineers is putting the finishing touches on a new government-funded concrete bridge. Once the river rises, the bamboo bridge is likely to come down for the last time.

While the bamboo bridge inspired little romanticism among locals interviewed this week, it has become an object of fascination among foreigners and Cambodians from the rest of the country.

“It is an important attraction in Kampong Cham,” says Yung Oun, the current bridge owner. “Both local and foreign tourists come here. Losing the bridge means losing a lot of tourists.”

But with the construction of a permanent bridge, the cost of building and maintaining the bamboo structure which requires constant repairs will no longer be worthwhile for Oun.

Made from mature bamboo stems from Kratie province that cost $1 to $2 per piece, the bridge’s construction and maintenance requires about $50,000 to $60,000 a year, Oun says.

Owner Yung Oun shows a sketch of the bridge. Eliah Lillis

That cost is recouped throughout the dry season from tolls, which bring in 1 to 2 million riel per day (about $250 to $500). Already the increasing irregularity of the seasonal patterns is making the business hard for Oun, who during the wet season operates the ferry crossing to Koh Paen.

Speaking to Post Weekend, moto driver Yong Sarim says that though there are downsides to losing the bridge, the practicality of a modern alternative is hard to overlook.

“It will be easier to travel with the new bridge, especially at night and we do not have to pay for it,” he says. But standing on the rickety bamboo bridge overlooking the river, the 32-year-old betrayed a sense of nostalgia at the prospect of its disappearance. “I have been using it since I was a child, [and] it is also a great tourist attraction spot, which exists only in my country.”

Spanning generations For local residents, the bridge has been a backdrop to daily life since they can remember – only disrupted between 1973 and 1986 with the civil war and emergence of the Khmer Rouge – though the specific history of the bridge has all but vanished.

Prior to 1973, the bridge was owned collectively by a company of 14 villagers from Koh Paen, according to Nai Seang, 74. She joined the company in 1964, purchasing two shares for 7,000 riel (about $1,500 after adjusting for inflation). Back then, it was only a foot and bicycle bridge built from locally sourced bamboo, with a 1 riel toll for pedestrians, or 2 riel for a bike (about 750 and 1,500 riel today, respectively). As the youngest in the company when she joined at the age of 22, she is the sole surviving member.

“The knowledge would be passed down from one generation of builders to the next,” she says. While Seang says she never asked the older members of the company about the bridge’s history, she remembers it when she was an infant, which means it dates back to at least the 1940s.

That the bridge has become a tourist attraction is a strange curiosity for Seang. “I did not know the bridge has become such a tourist attraction. I was very young when I bought my shares, and to me it was just a thing that helps people cross the river, and a business,” she says.

Requiring about 50,000 pieces of bamboo to build, the bridge is an expensive and, given the maintenance throughout the dry season, time-consuming project. Eliah Lillis

Srun Srim, 70, was the first owner following the collapse of Democratic Kampuchea, and won the rights in a public auction in 1986, holding them until 2004. He says that even in his time the bridge became a costlier endeavour once bamboo had to be sourced further afield, and that the end of the bridge is simply a fact of progress.

“This is development. If the business cannot catch up with modern times it will come to an end,” he says. “This is how it’s going to be.”

Even Oun says it’s been harder with each year to find workers, as the families who used to build bridges have with the development of the Kingdom taken jobs in offices or moved to Phnom Penh.

Though the day-to-day repairs are relatively simple, the bridge itself is a small marvel of engineering, with the support structure consisting of a crosshatch of thousands of sturdy bamboo poles, held together by metal wiring. The surface, meanwhile, consists of four layers of split bamboo matting, which Oun says is capable of bearing as much as 4 tonnes of weight.

The support beams of the bridge. Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon

Gordon Evans, a technical adviser for the local NGO Buddhism for Development Action, who also has an engineering background, says that bamboo warps under pressure, meaning it “bounces” rather than breaking due to passing cars. As such, the experience of driving a car or motorbike over the bridge is like riding a wave, accompanied by the percussive and deafening rattling of the deck under the tyres.

“The deck is also a sacrificial structure, meaning that it is constantly failing under the point loads,” Evans wrote to Post Weekend. “Hence the permanent maintenance team required to keep it patched up. They’ve been doing it so long that they’ve probably developed an optimal cost/use balance for the structure; they certainly only patch up when they absolutely have to, but I don’t think anybody ever fell through it up until now.”

Weighing the benefits Villagers on Koh Paen are of two minds about the new bridge. The location of the old bridge, which connects to the northern tip of Koh Paen, is considered by many to be far more convenient than the new site, and better serves the majority of the island’s population which is clustered towards the northern beachhead.

The new bridge under construction, located 2 kilometres to the south. Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon

Hour Sothida, who sells sugar cane and fruit juices on the road outside her home in Koh Paen Kor village, the closest town to the bridge, says that like many villagers she will likely have to rethink her business model when commuters and tourists are no longer passing through.

“Some villagers want it, and some don’t,” she says. What’s more, for villagers without transportation – the elderly in particular – who would otherwise walk, the new bridge is far, “and we have to spend more on travelling, although we do not have to pay for crossing it”, she says.

Village Chief Tiev Meng Ean, 76, says it’s a matter of practicality. Villages on the south side of the island, where the new bridge connects, are happy about the modern replacement. However, the loss of tourism will definitely have an effect on the whole island economy, he says.

“[Villagers] are selling fruit to the tourists, and making quite a lot of money,” he says, adding that moto drivers, tuk-tuks and horse carts that carry tourists all benefit from the tourism the bridge brings. But as far as bridge owner Oun has noticed, the local government has expressed no interest in trying to preserve the bamboo bridge for its tourism value.

“It depends on the provincial government. I can’t afford to do it. The cement bridge may be a bit farther, but the tourists want to see this bamboo bridge. They also want to rest in the cottages, play on the beach and swim,” he says.

A man on a horse cart crosses the bamboo bridge, heading towards Koh Paen.Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon

Oun, whose rights to the bridge extend for another two years, notes that he also won’t be compensated for income lost from having to abandon the business. His plan is to simply become a businessman in town and sell off the bridge materials and ferry boats.

Reached yesterday, Deputy Provincial Governor Sy Vantha says she does not know if Oun will abandon the bridge, but said that despite its value, there’s no thought being put into a plan to keep it, such as a subsidy.

“I am afraid the government will not pay anything to the owner to keep the bridge,” she says.

“I acknowledge the tourism value of the bamboo bridge, as well as its status as the signature landmark of Kampong Cham. I will be sad to lose it,” she says, although no actual estimate of the bridge’s economic value exists. However, she adds, the authorities believe that value is outweighed by the transportation benefits of the new bridge.

“The people will be able to travel faster and more safely with the new bridge, which will also help them in emergency situations, for example when a woman has to deliver a baby. Plus, they do not have to pay for it either. Moreover, the new bridge will help create more business operations as more people and cars would be able to travel in the region.”

Hok Om looks down on the Mekong River from the new bridge. Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon

For 72-year-old Hok Om, who lives in Koh Sotin village, it can’t come soon enough. “I am so happy with the new bridge . . . my family and the other people could travel more safely and anytime. I wish it would be finished soon,” he says.

But Sarim, the motodop driver, wishes they could have it both ways.

“It will be good if we can keep it, but I am afraid we could not do anything.”

[ozsaill]

Finding Confidence Cruising

It’s a long journey from the midwestern shore where a kid uncertainly pushed her Sunfish out into the lake, to this beautiful beach of powdery sand and turquoise water in the Bahamas.

Back then I wondered if I’d later be able to steer the boat back to point where I launched. Today I find satisfaction in knowing that I am both capable handling Totem and also have a tremendous amount to improve. Getting to that place of confidence in fundamental capabilities relieves stress and quells fears; knowing that there remain endless opportunities to learn is a joy of cruising.

San Francisco, 1970. No skills yet, but togged in a sweet sailor dress

It is a journey to find that confidence. Looking back over some decades at that uncertain teen on a Michigan beach, there isn’t any single turning point but a progression of experiences that describe it.

It helped, and it didn’t, that my partner in this adventure is an accomplished sailor. Jamie has been on boats since he could walk and raced at a professional level. On one hand, his skill gave me the space to grow my own capabilities without shouldering the responsibility of ownership for our safety. On the other hand, it makes it easy to cede responsibility to him instead of tackling things I should learn. And hten, it can sometimes be tricky to learn from those you are closest to!

The antidote for insecurity is knowledge and experience, but the best way to acquire them varies: it depends on how you learn and what your opportunities are.

Time on the water

When Jamie and I work with coaching clients who need to build skills, one of the first tactics we suggest is to get involved in casual racing on a smaller boat. It typically costs nothing more than time, and will surround a learner the proper terms while drilling in tasks that make a better cruising sailor. Small-boat sailing is also an excellent way to internalize the fundamentals of bigger-boat handling; and the afternoons I spent learning how to steer that Sunfish with my foot from a prone position (the better to ponder life… or work on my tan) were better training than I allowed myself credit for at the time. Racing dinghies in college later steeped me in terminology, rigging basics, efficiently routing from A to B, internalizing that flat is fast and the telltale dance that is good trim. I’m not exactly a cutthroat competitor (anyone who knows me well is giggling right now), but this transition from lazy day sailing to team competition ignited my passion for sailing in unanticipated ways.

Celebrating Siobhan’s birthday in Staniel Cay this week, with ice cream at the dock

Judgement-free learning

Among the best preparation in my path was a week-plus of sail training with an all-woman crew cruising the Pacific Northwest’s Salish Sea. We studied, discussed, and practiced everything from rules of the road to sail selection to self-steering, radar use, docking, anchoring, and more as needed – it was as if we had embarked on a cruising journey already. In an open learning environment, I was gently guided, allowed to make (and learn from) mistakes, and ask as many questions as I wanted without feeling any of them might be ‘dumb.’ My experience was with two-time circumnavigator Nancy Erley of Tethys Offshore in the Pacific Northwest; chief among other programs I’d reach for is the east-coast-based Morse Alpha Expeditions led by Ben & Teresa Carey.

Another kind of confidence: shark selfies?! Our anchorage companion this week

A good book

Kinesthetic learning is essential, and some studying can’t be avoided. One of the best ‘books’ in my journey isn’t in any store. Before we started cruising on Totem, we had a 35’ Hallberg Rassy—Mau Ke Mana—as our training wheels for cruising skills in Puget Sound. Like too many Americans we crammed our summer holiday in a few long weekends and a stolen getaway week. To extend our range afloat, we made an arrangement with trusted friends: we’d sail the boat north up through the San Juans and to the Canadian Gulf Islands and expend all our vacation days in one direction; they’d drive up to meet us, we’d trade vehicles, and they’d sail down for their summer escape while we hustled south in the car to jobs and daycare. Every boat has idiosyncrasies, and boats set up for cruising have more complex systems than the typical daysailer. To help our friends take over Mau Ke Mana, Jamie created “The Boat Book” as an orientation to her quirks and equipment—a mix of how-to and maintenance schedule in one. I was the unexpected beneficiary, as this basic orientation guided my initial learning process in cruising systems stepped through the particular equipment and oddities of our boat.

Sharing sundowner snacks with curious birds

For more readily available material to purchase, there’s not a prettier or simpler way to learn the basics of sailing than Jan Adkins’ Craft of Sail (thank you to Teresa & Ben for reminding me of this beautiful book: I was given a copy years ago and the pages were well thumbed). Another is Chapman’s Piloting, Seamanship and Small Boat Handling: I’ve never quite gotten over the fact that a family friend, who I’d been sailing with many times, passed me over and gifted a copy to my younger brother (uninterested in sailing, but The Boy) years ago. Our edition stems from Jamie’s teen years, but is perfectly applicable today. If it’s resources to plan cruising you’re after, there is none better than Beth Leonard’s The Voyager’s Handbook. For more ideas, we’ve curated a list of recommended reading in a number of categories.

Racing, training, reading: ultimately it’s whatever works for you to learn. Situations that facilitate learning for some may inhibit learning for others. All-women’s courses were a gift for me, as was racing. Sailing schools, passage, training, there are a myriad of options.

What does it take to gain confidence?

How long is a piece of string? While was confidence in my sailing skills I was after initially, it was the freedom of sailing that has brought a greater confidence to my person.

Sea trial for Totem’s purchase; San Francisco Bay, 2007, with Jim Jessie

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege to spend two days with a room full of women who plan to go cruising. They’d signed up for the 2-day Cruising Women seminars I delivered with Pam Wall as part of “Cruisers U” at the Annapolis Boat Show. Talking through their reasons for participating, I saw myself in so many stories and faces: I remember what it was like getting ready for this massive change in our lives. Excitement about the future, but trepidation about the realities. My mind too once swirled with what-if worries, uncertainty about my own capabilities, and wondering if we’d be able to pull it off.

In truth, I’ve failed to appreciate when this confidence settled in, but on the heels of Cruising Women I’ve had another opportunity to appreciate that strength week. Jamie’s not on Totem right now, an unusual scenario.

He’s flying to a few Caribbean ports to give practical evaluations for coaching clients to boats they have under contract. So for at least a week and a half, it’s just me and the kids, keeping up with… well, everything.

None of it is a big deal: just keeping up with everyday life on board, but it made me realize how much I count on his relative depth of experience in arenas where I’m not used to flying solo, whether managing voltage on board in the delicate dance to balance incoming power with draws from the watermaker and refrigeration and screens. Moving Totem to anchor in a new spot based on our needs. Staying mindful of the weather forecast and what it may hold: if we’ll be fine in this pretty curve of bay, or need to move for shelter from a shifting breeze. And it’s fine. I’m fine. When did this happen? I can’t say, but wouldn’t recognize this in myself even just a few years ago.

Heading back to Totem after an ice cream / garbage run to “town.”

In the subtle gilt trim of the Naval Academy conference room in Annapolis, I wanted every woman in the seminar to internalize that she too has this confidence and capability entirely in her reach, but how to fit that into words? So Pam and I gave our best effort to shed light into dark spaces where niggling worries fester and scare them off. Offered points to follow and place to seek information and resources. Provided tangible skills in basic knots, coiling and heaving a line. Reinforced that physical size or strength is not a detriment: it is simply an issue to address mechanical advantage. And ultimately, I hope, communicated through personal experience that it’s possible to go from that person who wondered if she’d get her little 14’ dinghy back again into an adventurous cruiser with undreamed of stories to tell.

Late 1980s, Pointe aux Barques, Michigan

from Sailing Totem http://ift.tt/2ptpxHG via IFTTT

[robertmcangusgroup]

The Daily Tulip

The Daily Tulip – International News From Around The World

Wednesday 5th April 2017

Good Morning Gentle Reader….  Yesterday, the beaches on the Costa del Sol were packed with tourists and locals alike as they all began their annual sun worshipping… bodies large and small were slathered in suntan lotion and suffering; part of the rights of passage were inflicted on young children as they were made to enter the cold water, with the vailed threat of “I will never bring you on holiday again!” .. the process will be repeated daily when the sun comes out again today …. But at the moment we have no sun only planetary bodies to gaze in awe at, and an ocean that looks like glass, as Bella and I walk the empty streets of Estepona….

BRITAIN, SPAIN ESCALATE GIBRALTAR SPAT….  They’re between a rock and a hard place. EU negotiation guidelines for Brexit indicated that Spain will have a say in decisions about Gibraltar, a tiny British territory on Spain’s southern tip. Now a former Conservative party leader in Britain has escalated the dispute with talk of war, comparing it to the 1982 Falklands conflict. While actual war appears a remote possibility, neither side is backing down. This could jeopardize Britain’s hopes of Spain being an ally in Brexit negotiations — unless Prime Minister Theresa May makes concessions, which could outrage U.K. conservatives.

MEXICAN NEWSPAPER SHUTS OVER JOURNALIST MURDERS….  They won’t take the risk. Oscar Cantú Murguía, editor of Juarez newspaper Norte, informed readers in a front page letter that it’s simply too dangerous to continue publishing after three Mexican journalists were killed last month. Cantú admitted the paper, one of five in the city, has also seen financial problems. But the Committee to Protect Journalists described Mexico’s situation as a “full-blown freedom of expression crisis,” estimating that 88 journalists have been killed there since 1992. It warned that the situation affects not only the newspaper industry, but its readers.

ESTONIAN POLICE TEDDY BEARS WILL COMFORT CHILDREN…. Police cars in Estonia will soon be equipped with teddy bears to help comfort children at the scene of incidents, if a crowdfunding plan comes together. A group of students were "stunned" to discover that children are involved in more than a thousand accidents a year at school, in the home, in playgrounds, or on the roads, and are often left "injured, in a state of shock, or just in need of comfort," the Jarva Teataja newspaper reports. So they set up the Traumamommik (trauma teddy) charity, which aims to put two teddies in each Estonian police car and border patrol vehicle by 1 June - which is marked as Children's Rights Day in many formerly Soviet-run states. The police and border guards have readily agreed to the scheme - Paide town police chief Margus Toomsalu told Jarva Teataja that "incidents of domestic violence often mean that children need comforting". Traumamommik has set up the Kallikaru (teddy bear) site and an account on the Hooandja crowdfunding platform for anyone who wants to help. They need to raise 7,000 euros (£6,077/$7,550) by 28 April, and have already received more than 1,000, as well as the support of several companies. Traumammomik considered using second-hand bears, but decided it would be better to opt for new ones for health and safety reasons, the paper says. The money will go to buy, clean, transport and store the bears, which the children are free to take home with them or swap for another at their local police station.

POLICE ARREST 14-YEAR-OLD FOR SEXUAL ASSAULT ON FACEBOOK LIVE…. If you see something, say something. Chicago police say 40 people watched the sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl broadcast on Facebook Live on March 19, yet nobody reported the crime. Now one 14-year-old boy has been apprehended and charged with sexual assault and child pornography. Police say they expect to make more arrests. Meanwhile, Facebook condemned the crime, one of a spate of recent atrocities streamed live on social media, as “hideous” — and committed to removing such videos from the site.

FRENCH PENSIONERS DEMAND END TO CHIP DROUGHT…. Pensioners living in a retirement home in France are so annoyed at not being served chips with their meals that they have complained to the mayor. The residents of the Hubiliac home in Saint-Marcel, a town in the east-central Burgundy region, have missed their favourite side order because the fryer in the kitchen has been out of order since early 2015. With no end to the chip drought in sight, the pensioners have formally appealed to the management and the local council, which is responsible for maintenance of the care home, the local Journal de Saone-et-Loire newspaper reports. "We always had more people signing up for lunch on days when chips were served, it's true", admits the home manager Elisabeth Moreau, but she is still surprised at how far the row has gone. School pupils who also lunch in the restaurant of the home haven't objected to a lack of chips, but then, as the paper notes, they don't take all their meals there. "Chip day was a convivial time, when everyone gathered around to enjoy their favourite finger food", one family member told the paper, recalling a fortnightly treat that "seems like a distant memory". Mayor Raymond Burdin told the pensioners they will just have to be patient. "We need to reconsider all the equipment that's no longer up to scratch, and buying a fryer alone would cost about 4,000 euros (£3,473; $4,315), so it will have to wait until all the work is completed" - a state of affairs he blamed on neglect by the previous town administration. Online comment is firmly on the side of the pensioners, with readers complaining a little tongue-in-cheek that depriving them of chips is "tantamount to abuse", and casting doubt on the unaffordability of a new fryer given the fees the families pay, Others are unimpressed with the mayor's attempt to blame his predecessor, as he has already been in office three years. Mr Burdin remains adamant. His priority is to build a new canteen for the school, so that pupils won't have to share a dining room with the retirement home. He told the paper that everything should be ready by early next year, but "chips are off the menu for now".

Well Gentle Reader I hope you enjoyed our look at the news from around the world this, Wednesday morning…

Our Tulips today are red tulips reaching for the sky....

A Sincere Thank You for your company and Thank You for your likes and comments I love them and always try to reply, so please keep them coming, it's always good fun, As is my custom, I will go and get myself another mug of "Colombian" Coffee and wish you a safe Wednesday 5th April 2017 from my home on the southern coast of Spain, where the blue waters of the Alboran Sea washes the coast of Africa and Europe and the smell of the night blooming jasmine and Honeysuckle fills the air…and a crazy old guy and his dog Bella go out for a walk at 4:00 am…on the streets of Estepona…

All good stuff....But remember it’s a dangerous world we live in ….. Be safe out there…

Robert McAngus

[dhavaer]

Agreed except I don't think Rainbow Dash has a minimum wage job. Any time we see other weather pegasi in Ponyville they're reporting to her. She's like the chief of road maintenance in a small town, something like that, and almost certainly makes more than the other five.

One of tbe brilliant things about mlp:fim is that the main cast aren't wayward children or highschool students they're just a bunch of young adults. Like. Twilight is a postgrad forced by her supervisor to go find friends. Apple Jack has responsibility of gaurdianship of her little sister. They're all employed. They pay rent and taxes. Fluttershy has to deal with her deadbeat underachiever older brother who can't seem to move out by himself when she visits her parents. She also has anxiety she hasnt grown out of since high school. Rainbow Dash spends most days getting high and goofing off on her minimum wage job. Pinkie Pie has a culinary apprenticeship and lives with an older couple after she left her small mining town when nobody there was as into psychadelics as her. Rarity balances running her slowly growing etsy fashion bussiness with going on tinder dates with the worst men you've ever seen. They all vote. They have to pick up their own medical perscriptions. These are 26 year old girlies going through first quarter life crisises. So, yea, that fanart of Fluttershy smoking forever weed is highly accurate.