Truck meeting, cancer

Last night Alison and I attended a meeting regarding dump trucks and their relationship with the community. Dump trucks are pretty well hated for several reasons. They start up at 4-5am in residential areas of the estates and in many cases become unwelcome alarm clocks at these wee hours of the morning. Some truck drivers are wreckless and most importantly to me, the trucks are a huge part of the daily traffic quagmire we have been in since they have been allowed to leave earlier for the past month.

The meeting had 7 speakers and a moderator who was one of the writers for the local paper. The meeting was well covered with reporters from all the local TV networks as well as the newspaper. There was a big turnout, between 200-300 people. From glancing around the room it looked like the truckers had a large majority of the audience. Each speaker had 8 minutes to talk then an hour of question and answer followed. Some of the speakers were good, there were 3 that were pretty worthless. It was a bit annoying hearing things said up on stage that you would have loved to stand up and refute but there was no real time interaction permitted. The Q&A session was a mess. The moderator did a piss poor job of presenting the questions. He did not throw out questions that asked the exact same thing in a slightly different manner. Then after he asked it he would keep asking for additional responses from the panel even though the question had been answered previously.

Surprisingly to us, the biggest question that kept coming up was the issue of truck drivers parking their trucks in the yard of their homes. I would guess 75% of the questions were tied to this issue. I can imagine if you had a dump truck next door that was firing up in early AM 6 days a week it would get very annoying. I suppose we are lucky we have no truck drivers in our immediate vicinity. Ali submitted a question regarding the trucks impact on the morning commute which was not really answered directly. The panel members that addressed it made statements that made assumptions that were just not true and just annoyed the hell out of both of us.

Ironically we got the most information AFTER the meeting when Ali talked to some of the deputies that patrol our area and I got to talk to the commissioner for our district at length about a few things. I’ve sent the man countless emails but never spoke to him so it was cool. I found out many things I didn’t know and it made me appreciate how the guy is trying to do whatever he can to help things along short of jumping into a front end loader and building the road himself.

It was a frustrating but informative 2 hours.

I JUST got the call back from the dermatologist. The spot near my ear is basil cell skin cancer. Basil cell is the least dangerous type of skin cancer but still it’s cancer which is more than a bit scary. In mid-October I go in to have it removed. They basically keep cutting away until they don’t detect any more bad cells. Ugh.