So much for nicer weather...

I think it's safe to say that the heatwave that we were having last week (90degrees from Friday to Tuesday) is officially over as the cool breeze sets in before a rainy weekend and a weekend that threatened rain pretty much put a damper on any outdoor plans that we were hoping for.

Yeah... the Ricketts Glen trip keeps getting postponed - perhaps someday at this rate - but alas, there have been so many things happening and so much eternal laziness that even when I start to post, I don't finish.

Take last Wednesday for example. I went to get a haircut, waited a while for the gossip hags to finish yammering amongst themselves (while pretending to cut hair) and eventually got in, so I don't feel like a hippie anymore, which is definitely a good thing (even if I have been enjoying the Grateful Dead's 16 minute version of Eyes of the World - the 1 with Marsalis on sax).

When I was finished, I ended up at the office supply store that Carl Edwards does not endorse to recycle my printer.

On the note of Carl Edwards, how about that wreck!



But back on the whole feeling of not feeling like a hippie, I explained to them that I just wanted to give them the printer for recycling (they were offering $50 off a new printer for an old printer to recycle). The woman tried to make me pay $10 for that, but I looked at her and explained that I would throw that technological hunk of junk away before I gave them $10 to relieve my conscience. That said, my conscience is clean because if they really cared about technological waste and 3rd world kids digging through printers for valuable metals, they would have taken my printer and recycled it instead of taking all that raw material out of the ground to make a new one.

So yeah... it's been a week.

Time to clear out what I was going to reflect on here now and respond to Whimsical Ranter.

Reading, Pennsylvania, my city, my city I was from (and the surrounding area) seems to have a lot of problems with its illegal / undocumented alien population and the people who live in contact with them.

For instance, in Shenandoah (up above Pottsville), several youngens were charged with killing an illegal alien, but alas, they were let off the hook of SERIOUS charges because it was felt that the Mexican guy instigated some of the action.

On Saturday in Reading, an illegal alien decided that psychotic anger was the answer to his issues, so he stabbed his girlfriend and bit a chunk out of his 1-year old child's neck. He was arrested after grappling with the child's grandmother, and then, when he got to prison, he hung himself.

While conflicting in nature, these 2 issues show a population that is angry and frustrated and out of control. While I would usually tend to veer away from "over-used" words like racism, I look at the issues of Shenandoah and wonder how this situation wasn't dealt with harsher - even if the people doing the killing were underage. Perhaps, it's the nature of the region, and perhaps it's something in the courtroom discussion, but in something that amounts to a serious show trial, one wonders how these kids weren't handled more effectively. As for the prison suicide, I would wonder how a person could be left alone without someone viewing him to see him commit suicide or if it was a situation that echoed the comments of so-many locals (flagged for offensiveness) that it was just one more dead scumbag (even if he was a horrible and evil human being that nearly killed his own kid).

One must wonder about the sheer animosity and instability that drives someone to the act of cold-blooded murder (be it thought out or not) and wonder what have we become as a society.

I know I do, but then, I would just rather think about happy things like Jacoby Ellsbury's steal of home plate as we go into the second Yankees Red Sox series of the year.