My part is done, double dogs
Early voting started in Florida on Monday. I was originally going to try to vote then at the early voting location on our government campus but every time I looked the line was longer than I was willing to stand in. I guess since it was the first day I should have expected it. Of course 90% of the people in line were already of government entitlement collecting age.
Yesterday afternoon I saw only a few people in line so I decided to get it over with. In a general election the ballot is quite long, taking up both sides of two huge pieces of paper. As a tech person I still find it sort of amazing and sad that in 2016 we are still voting with paper and pen although they do scan the paper ballots at the end so the results are electronically tracked.
The voting process took me maybe 5 minutes to get through darkening in all of the appropriate circles, a lot of which I had no opinion on like if a long list of judges should be retained or not. Of course I happily darkened the circle for medical marijuana, I can only hope big pharm’s brainwashing attempt against medical marijuana is unsuccessful this time around. I don’t need to even waste time talking about my presidential choice other than saying it did not rhyme with Dump. At this point I just want this election season to be over. It has been the most corrosive, most depressing, and most ignorant campaign I can recall in my lifetime. I can only hope that I never see anything close to resembling it in the future.
Last night I went out on my wheel for a short ride. I once again crossed Immokalee Road and headed to the sparsely populated side streets on the other side. I had two separate dog incidents during the ride. The first one was some small dog, not much more than chihuahua size. I heard it’s annoying bark as I approached. As soon as it saw me it came sprinting down the driveway and out into the road in hot pursuit. I pushed the wheel to it’s top speed of about 14 mph. Despite doing so I could still hear the little dog keeping up a short distance behind me. Eventually it got tired and gave up but I bet it chased me for a couple hundred yards.
The second dog encounter had much more danger potential. This dog was in the front yard with two of it’s owners which looked like a father/son. As I approached they must have known there was a potential problem as they started squeaking the dog’s toy to try to get it’s attention off me. They were unsuccessful in doing so and the boxer mix was after me and closing quickly. I quickly realized I was not going to be able to out run this guy. Within a few seconds he was by my side which was very dangerous for both the dog and myself. If he decided to dart my direction all sorts of bad things could happen.
I could tell the dog wasn’t ferocious so I decided to just slow down and grab a nearby stop sign. I stayed there until one of the owners ran up and apologized. Once I stopped the dog wasn’t even interested in me and instead took a dump by the side of the road. I told the guy it was no problem and that I have a dog as well. So although I do like riding on the mostly empty streets in that area, the amount of people that don’t seem to care about restraining their dogs because of the remote geography makes me think I need to cross it off my normal riding list. Well cross it off until I get the Msuper which has the ability to go 20+ mph which should make it very difficult for most dogs to track me down.
On my return trip down our street I realized I had a very easy way to see if there is any traffic sneaking up on me instead of awkwardly trying to look over my shoulder which can affect my balance. I instead just used the camera on my phone in selfie mode. It worked great. I know a fellow rider that has a small rear view mirror attached to his helmet for even more safety which is a good idea as well.