Wow, two months since an update. Ahem.
The garden has been cleaned, tilled, re-bordered, and planted. I even got the borders around the house done halfway. Ian and his girlfriend have split, meaning the bills and mortgage have gone up, now that they’re split two ways rather than three. (However, the latest appraisal says we’re sitting on about $40k in equity!) I finally have a replacement assistant at work, and he seems like he’ll work out fine. We finished teaching one week of Senior Deputy classes with another week coming up and have somewhat of a lull, although I need to get Radar Instructor materials put together; and the Fall Citizen’s Academy and Banquet video are still hanging over my head. Just have to split some stuff off to the other guy and get busy.
I was in Forsyth at Digital Photography class when the I35W bridge collapsed in Minnesota. I predicted while watching it that there would be a slew of “Are our bridges safe?!?” stories and indignant outrage all over the media in the days that followed, and I was right. Not that this was an astonishing prediction. And I knew I would get annoyed by it.
Why annoyed? Because the fact that a huge percentage of bridges in the US are in bad shape is not news. We’ve known that for at least twenty years. I can remember news stories and articles from the 80’s discussing the need for bridge repairs and upgrades across the country and the enormous costs involved. The fact that one collapsed is not incredible, it’s inevitable. There have been major bridge collapses in this decade, in fact. But the trend lately is towards 24 hour coverage (repeating ad nauseum the same tiny snippets of information) and breathless “experts” rendering their opinions, which the general public gobbles up as pre-digested fact so they can avoid having to decide what they think about it. There’ll be some tsk-ing, some self-serving aggrandizing and grandstanding by politicians, and the issue will slowly fade away; or quickly, if some other news-worthy tragedy appears on the horizon. And everyone will forget what we’ve known for a long, long time- the nation’s bridges are in poor shape.