Election Levity

A friend sent me this link. This could be true in any state.

Madness

"Sorry about your accident. my mommy fells really bad for you. so Soory!" An apology written to Meri Nalbandyan from the daughter of the woman who had killed her. The mother had dropped her own (letter-writer) daughter off at school moments earlier. In a moment of inattentiveness, she drove her SUV at 10 mph over 11 year old Meri at the mid-block crosswalk pictured below.
As I wrote in Walking and Biking, "Stop the madness". Traffic accident statistics prove time and time again, children who are hit by cars near schools are usually hit by cars driven by people picking up or dropping kids off at school. If more kids walk or bike to school, there would be fewer cars in a dangerous scrum around schools every morning.

The comments accompanying the LA Times story are dispiritingly illogical. One blamed cell phones even the story explicitly states that the driver was not using a cell phone at the time. Another comment said that kids were being murdered and kidnapped so much more these days, there was no alternative to chauffeuring them to school. No one dares to suggest that we get the cars out of the school zone.

Going off on a tangent...

I also mentioned in Walking and Biking that today's automobile fleet has much larger blind spots. The driver that killed Meri plowed a SUV straight into her, mid-block. The high, broad and flat hoods of SUVs create a larger blind spot in front of the driver than a car closer to the ground. (Even though a 11 year old would likely be taller than the hood, less would be visible, especially to a distracted driver.)

Minivans have smaller blind spots in front of them because their hoods are much shorter and slope down so steeply. Minivans are wedges on wheels, which is why they enjoy higher gas mileage than the blockier SUVs. In addition, the engines of minivans ride much lower than those of SUVs, giving minivans a lower center of gravity, decreasing their likelihood to roll over (relative to SUVs).

The companies that foisted SUVs upon the public as the family vehicle of choice are on life support. Explain to me why we shouldn't pull the plug.

Two Pumpkins

I bought a medium-sized and a small pumpkin, but Iris did not want to make the scary extreme pumpkin combo. She felt more comfortable painting her small pumpkin.

We browsed through a pumpkin carving pattern book and selected this pattern for the medium pumpkin. The pumpkin carving tools work well for carving through the pumpkin shell, but not so well when shaving the skin. The motion reminded me of cutting a linoleum block so I went upstairs to the craft room and found a linoleum cutter. (And some people think that I have too many craft supplies.)

My set only had two sizes of tips, none small enough for carving around the spider legs. Cuticle trimmers look about the right size and shape. It worked.
Iris wanted to try out the linoleum cutters. I had been working for a while by that point and really needed to visit the bathroom. I left her at it and ran down the hall. I was gone less than a minute before I heard a cry. How did she manage to cut her thumb with a linoleum cutter in such short time? Fortunately, the cut was superficial.

A friend from Boulder visited us last weekend. He drove with the top down through Utah's canyon country and several mountain ranges all decked out in fall colors . We will call that his pumpkin chariot.

Iris says that this will be our best pumpkin ever. I asked her how she can be so sure. She says it is because we never do the same pattern twice. She says that the best thing about our pumpkin is that it has a pumpkin inside of it, just like the extreme pumpkin, only not so scary.

So I guess it was a four pumpkin weekend.