Coffee and Maple Logs in the Lobby

Yes, I’m about to launch into a boring safety presentation that affects a very small population in my neighborhood, and I don’t even have coffee and maple logs in the lobby to make up for the boredom you’re about to endure. Sorry.

Nevertheless, we’ve got a problem, right here in River City.

We live three houses south of the intersection of Matchpoint and Tiebreaker drives, on Matchpoint. At the second house, Matchpoint, which starts out in an easterly direction southbound, makes a turn to the south two houses in.

Two of our neighbors are engaged in a (mostly) silent war over who gets to park and when on the south end of the curve, headed south. Most often, there’s a trailer there belonging to one neighbor, or a black SUV belonging to the sister of another neighbor (both appear in the picture above).

Occasionally, there’s a red pickup with a camper in the bed (seen here parked in the driveway) on the corner. Such as this week. It’s a *leetle* hard to see around.

Additionally, there’s almost always a car parked on the northbound side of the curve (the white one you see here).

It may be an optical illusion, but I’m fairly certain Matchpoint narrows a bit as it enters the curve, widening up a bit again once the curve is passed.

That narrowing road, combined with the constantly-parked vehicles, is the problem. Or at least the root of other problems.

This is going to shock you, but people travel fairly fast on this street. I don’t have a radar gun so I may be exaggerating a bit, but I’m fairly certain some people approach this curve at more than 30 miles an hour, sometimes pushing 35. This is a 25 mph zone, as are all residential streets in Ammon.

Problem?

• Street narrows in the curve (maybe)
• Cars or trailer constantly parked on the curve, both sides
• Drivers going fast through the curve

There are blind spots. We have to be really careful, backing out of our driveway, to make sure there’s no one approaching the curve from the north because if they come around the corner and we’re backing out, well, that’s not a good thing.

Also, we’ve nearly been hit once in the winter when a car going a bit too fast came into the curve at about the same time we did. He couldn’t see us coming because of the parked obstruction and went into a skid when he saw us. We were able to slow and move as far to the right as we could. He got out of the skid and moved as far to his right as we could. But it was a close thing.

I’ve mentioned there’s a (mostly) silent war going on amongst the two neighbors. So talking to them about the problem isn’t going to fix things. Neighbor one got the city/police involved at one point. The result? A trailer I had temporarily parked in front of our house, far enough from the curve not to be a problem in this particular situation, was tagged as “abandoned” by the city and I only knew about it because the neighbor who contacted the city or police pointed the obscurely-placed tag out and said I should probably get the trailer moved. I did. And yet the trailer/truck/camper combinations are constantly on the curve, without a peep from police or the city.

They’re causing the problem. And I’m the one who almost had a trailer towed over it.

I’ve got a solution. The city should implement a “no parking” zone on the southbound portion of the curve, where the problem parking occurs:

The no parking zone (in red, above) would still leave plenty of room for parking, including a parking spot even closer to my driveway (not ideal for us, but I concede there’s a need for parking here).

Will it happen?

Probably not.

I contacted the city this week, and they said they'd have an engineer come out and take a look. I did not bring up the idea of a no-parking zone, because that ought to be up to the city to decide. We'll see what happens.

I'll Give them A Forty-Hour Day

For the past 10 ½ years, I’ve worked four days a week.

The days are a bit long – 10 hours of work, yes. Factor into that my commute, which starts at 5:30 AM and gets me home shortly before 7 PM, and you could say I’m “at work” fourteen hours out of each 24, Monday through Thursday.

I love this work schedule and would find it a challenge to adapt to a different one.

And while I acknowledge some of the stresses and sacrifices this job schedule makes, as Allard Dembe mentions in his article on extended work times at Slate.com, I can’t help but to wonder how Dembe and Slate’s editors thought this article made sense.

I’m a technical writer at the Radioactive Waste Management Complex (the nature of the work explains the necessity of a long commute, though I live in a town of only 75,000 residents). I ride a company bus each day, for which I pay about $30 a week – a significant savings over driving the 113-mile commute to and from work each day in my own vehicle.

While I typically sleep on the bus, making the trip much more pleasant , I have used some of that down time for reading, creative writing, grading papers – I also teach English part-time at a local university. The commute give me a little bit of me-time, and I look forward to it.

And the hours are regular. I used to work as a journalist, and got tired of the odd hours – invading my evenings and weekends – that took me away from home and family.

Working four ten-hour shifts, with Fridays off, has been a godsend, no matter what Dembe says.

Three-day weekends afford me time to work on our house – I’ve tiled the kitchen and dining room, I’ve installed a sprinkler system – with significantly larger blocks of time I would not have on a five-day work schedule.

Three-day weekends offer us more opportunities for family travel, particularly when combined with federal holidays and time off school.

Three-day weekends also tie in nicely with my volunteer work as a Scoutmaster with the Boy Scouts of America. I don’t have to scramble on a Friday workday to get ready for a weekend campout – I have all day to get things pulled together.

Yes, there are times I get tired of my long days, particularly during the darkest days of winter when I leave for work in the dark and come home in the dark. I often have to race from the bus stop straight to ballet recitals or band performances, and sometimes even miss them entirely.

But the pros outweigh the cons.

Four-day work weeks may not work for everyone. But I sure like them.

Girl Scouts – Unhinged

Look at what the BSA is focusing on: Family.

Take my family, for example.

I’m a Scoutmaster, and have been for coming up on four years. Our oldest son is an Eagle Scout. Our youngest son is a Life Scout, with only an Eagle project in his way to that ultimate reward, and is also a member of the Order of the Arrow.

My wife both works for and volunteers for the local council. She gets paid as the council food coordinator, guiding the council through food- and nutrition-related aspects of feeding Scouts at the council’s three Scout camps. She also gets paid working as a commissary director at Treasure Mountain Scout Camp for eight weeks in the summer, a role she’s had at two camps for the past six years.

We also have a daughter. Thanks to Venture Scouting, which has allowed girls 14 years and older to join for a very long time, she’s involved in Scouting as well. She’s worked as a Scout camp counselor and has been to Cedar Badge. Twice.

Clearly, we’re a Scouting family.

But our daughter’s missed some of the adventure. She went to many a Cub Scout meeting with my wife when she was a pack leader and then the den chief, but couldn’t earn any of the rewards. She saw her oldest brother earn the Eagle rank and participated in many an activity – including his Eagle project – but couldn’t earn the rank herself.

This is the target audience the BSA is looking at first and foremost: Girls who are members of Scouting families and could participate fully in Scouting if the organization allowed it.

As a Scoutmaster, I’ve participated in a few online surveys regarding the BSA’s potential inclusion of girls. What the Girl Scouts is calling “secretive” to me appears merely to be consulting with existing Scouters to get their feel for whether and where girls might fit in the program. In other words, they’re researching. They’ve asked questions along these lines:

1.      Would you support the formation of girls-only troops for girls between the ages of 12-14? (Fourteen, remember, is the age limit already wet where girls can already join Venture Scouting, in either co-ed or girls-only crews.)

2.      Should girls be allowed to earn the Eagle Scout award?

I don’t see anything sinister in these questions. It clearly makes a lot of sense for the BSA to ask current Scouters how they feel about including girls, and how they should be included, before any decisions are made.