Just driving around, it feels like there’s more and more trash in the streets, along the curbs. You stop at the red light an a highway off-ramp, and alongside the road it looks like a garbage truck rolled over and they forgot to clean up after they hauled the truck away. Fast food packaging, beverage containers, cigarette butts, etc. etc.

I just don’t understand how people think it’s acceptable to just throw their trash wherever they want. Do they believe that it magically disappears when they let go? At night the little garbage pixies emerge and creep around collecting the rubbish?

Or is it that they just don’t care – as long as it’s not in their car or on their yard – as long as it’s not their problem, they just don’t give a damn? I bet these are the same people who never use turn signals and who coast through stopsigns.

Whatever may be going through their minds (or may not be, as the case may be), it makes me think that on some level, at some phase in their being, they are completely undeveloped. Some part of them is still in its infancy, and like an infant, they crawl around pissing and shitting their trash over the landscape, oblivious to what they are doing. Someone else has to come by periodically to clean up their droppings, and we all just hope that someday these individuals will perhaps start to develop.

Today is the birthday celebration for my little niece and nephew. They’re twins. They’re going to be 5 years old tomorrow.

I nearly missed the party – not because I forgot, or was late or anything. It was because there’s a parade down Main Street and when that happens, they close off either end of the street I live on. They don’t close my street – it’s a sort of side-street, and they don’t close traffic on it. But they do close traffic on the two larger streets at either end of my street. So I am free to drive up and down my little street all I want (less than 500 meters long), but I am not allowed to leave.

And you see, because my street is never actually closed, there are never any notices provided that there are going to be road closures.  So this morning when I saw a sign saying there would be a parade this afternoon, I realized there could be trouble. The parade is going from 2pm to 4pm. I wanted to be at the party at 4:30pm, so I’d need to leave about 3:30ish.

I checked the city’s website, no information about road closures. I checked the local newspaper’s website, no information about road closures. Why the hell don’t they have a posting, or even a crude hand-drawn map? Just something to say, yeah, we’re going to shut down these roads at this time. They do mention that Main Street will be closed for the parade, well duh. But they always park all the trucks and vehicles on the streets surrounding my little street, and I want to know if they’re doing that again. Appearantly it’s a big secret though. Asshats. I bet noone on city council lives on my street.

So at a little after 1:00pm I went out to get gas, and just in case, I took the kids’ gifts with me. Good thing, too. I just barely escaped, they were setting up the barricades and I just squeeked by.

The first time this happened, by the way, I had gone grocery shopping, and then was on my way home when I got caught at the barricade. I was gone less than 45 minutes, and in that time things went from not even a sign, to fully shut down / no access. I had to plead with a cop to let me through so I could get my groceries home – had to tell him my address to ‘proove’ I lived there.

Grumble grumble mutter swear curses hell and poop. Parades – PTOOEY! Oh what I’d give for a good solid thunder storm…

I lost a few days worth of posts… I think from Wednesday through Friday. My wonderful missive about the connection between aches, pains, and weather… all that eloquent prose, gone forever.

This morning was server maintenance day; I was migrating the web server to a brand new box with loads of memory, faster processor, bigger faster hard drive.. I had done a dry-run on Tuesday and everything worked, so it was supposed to be a snap this morning.  The new box was all ready to go, everything ready, all I had to do was do a fresh dupe of the databases from the old box to the new one. 

Dang blast drat buggely hell and bat doots!

I was tired and achy and the coffee hadn’t kicked in, and when I mounted the drives I got the assignments backwards and copied the new drive contents backwards onto the old drive, instead of vice versa. Effectively erasing the last few days.  Thank the gods that I at least had the tuesday files from the dry run. I’m usually way more careful about this sort of thing, I guess I’ve gotten a little cavalier since these upgrades / migrations have been so smooth the last few years. 

Sigh.

Anyways, what’s done is done and 2 hours’ work on a Saturday morning is teh suxorz so I’m calling it quits.  Have a good weekend.

Edited to add:  Hooray for Google page cache!  I was able to find a cache of the post from the 7th and bring it back to life.  Yay google!