Remind me to never, ever go up to Lake Tahoe on the Fourth of July again. The party at our friends home, high up on the mountain side at Stateline was great. The view included the fireworks shows at Emerald Bay and South Lake Tahoe. The company and food were awesome. But, then it was time to leave.
It’s not an exaggeration to say we sat in traffic in South Shore for more than an hour. It was awful. As we came down out of our friends neighborhood, I was going to turn left and go down Kingsbury Grade, but the traffic was so heavy that I couldn’t even begin to safely attempt that. So, I turned right, with the idea of heading to Incline Village and coming back down to Reno thatta way. Wrong again. The uniforms down at the light weren’t letting anybody go that direction. So, we went straight into the mess at South Shore, and then had to make an entire circuit of Lake Tahoe to get home. We left the party at 10:30 p.m. and got back home to Reno at 1:00 a.m.
I love driving the road around the lake, but not at night so much. And, not with mobs of cars and foot traffic coming out of every dark shadow. Oh, and there was the knothead on a skateboard crossing Hwy 89 out of the darkness before you got to Sugar Pine Point. This is where Darwin’s work will do us some good.
As I said, the fireworks, food and camaraderie were great.
I did a really sweet 20+ mile bike ride yesterday morning, and found some new riding places via the use of the really most useful new iPhone app called, appropriately enough “Where the Hell Am I?” With this you can be confident in exploring new areas since you just stop and call up where you are, and you have enough information available to get yourself out of a bind or at least to a convenient connecting road.
I recommend it. It works really well out on the road in the car, too.
While riding, I found a fairly large band of wild horses that allowed me to approach them and take a few photos on the iPhone.
As you can see, we like our wild horses close to town and served up with a good measure of typical Nevada junk. This is just about 50 yards beyond a fairly expensive housing development. They folks who are moving in there from California will love the horses until they start leaving spent horse batteries on the lawns. Yes, I do know they’re from California, since I begged some cold water for my bike bottle. They were moving in from Fresno.
Further along my ride, I was musing on the number of imposing gates and gate houses that I saw in so many of these newer subdivisions. I’m not a fan of ‘gated communities’. It occurred to me that people who move into them are in essence ‘seceeding’ from the country/community.
They’ve decided to be ‘us vs. them’, withdrawing into every more isolated enclaves, where they can pool their resources among their economic peers rather than sharing them with a larger, more diverse community, or invest them in ways that would benefit a community or country at large. As they continue to do this, an ever decreasing proportion of revenue will be available to pay for ‘them’ and what they need. Poorer areas of town, and of the country (extending the analogy) will never be able to make up the difference that develops.
We seem to have become a society that is divided not so much by race or other of the old social cast markers, but divided by income with a decreasing sense of responsibility for those who have less. The idea of economic inter-dependence seems to have gone the way of the Glas-Steagall Act.
No, it’s become obvious that ‘we’re (not) in this together’. It worries me as to how such a sentiment - a zero-sum type of nationalism - will affect our country going forward.
I also wonder at the perhaps false sense of security that dwellers within the gated ‘communities’ have, remembering the unsolved murders several years back in that most snooty of gated communities, Montreux.
I probably think too much.
The Fact Checker in Sunday’s Reno Gazette-Journal - ‘Top Reid critiques on jobs don’t hold up’ - was good. Once again, those who would love to blame every ill facing Nevada on Harry Reid - would that he really was THAT powerful - have it blown back in their faces. It’s simply not true. As in not supported by facts. Not that a paucity of facts ever slowed down a Tea Party true believer.
But, blaming Reid for lost jobs in Nevada is nonsense. Two Fact Checker articles - June 27 and July 4 - have dismantled each of the Tea Party/GOP/Republican claims to the contrary. When will they get a clue and understand they can’t have it both ways - I refer to Sharron Angle’s claim that once in Washington, D.C. it’s not her job to worry about jobs for Nevada - but then to turn around and blame Reid for supposedly not providing them?
And, once again - this seems to be a continuing refrain in the local media - they contacted the Angle campaign for comment and were met with silence. I’ve worked on enough campaigns, in addition to other high visibility PR to know that you don’t meet criticism with silence. That’s the work of rank amateurs and/or the arrogant. Take your pick.
Oh, and Sparks Mayor, Geno Martini coming out in support of Harry Reid was good for a laugh, too. I like Geno when he was on the council, and he’s still a good guy. It’s too bad that the Tea Party true believers don’t understand a real Republican when they see one. To blame the whole support thing on a piss-ant contribution Reid’s campaign made to Martini’s back in January is simply silly.
So, now two old-time Repubs - Reno Mayor Bob Cashell, and Martini - are supporting Reid. The Angle camp should be worried, but I’ll bet they’re not. To be worried would imply that they fully ‘get it’.
Remember what I said about the ‘alternate reality’.
I feared that this week might have a very sad note coming up. We may yet be dodging the bullet, but not for much longer, I think. We’ve started to really have the ‘talk’ in earnest, and have decided on ‘plans’.
Our Jack Russell Terrier, Asta, has proved to be the most tough and durable of devoted little dogs, but at 19+ years, she’s really getting more and more frail, the ‘messes’ more frequent, and it’s obvious that we have to start getting our heads wrapped around the inevitable. Yesterday wasn’t good at all, yet today seems alright. I thought that we’d surely be down at Nick Klaich’s by Tuesday, with a lot of kleenex handy, but for now …
Sigh.
P.S. - If you find odd typos in my posts that I obviously not caught, blame them on my cat. Ladybird has decided that laying on my desk as I type - with her tail flopping down onto the keyboard - is wonderful. I’ve discovered a couple typos that I can only explain as ‘cat originated’.
-maven
Sunday, December 19, 2010 at 14:11 
