Use It or Lose It

Well, my employer has that policy with regards to vacation time. I was saving some days to go out to the NMBS race in North Carolina and/or Vermont, but I decided not to go. Traveling to races across the country just wears me out. You have to pack a bike, pack bike gear, and pack regular ol every day stuff. I usually have to rush around the night before leaving doing all of that because I have to go to work and ride on that day. Then you have to drag above mentioned stuff through the airport. You get on the plane and without doubt get stuck next to some sick kid or adult or both. Then, you finally get to the venue. You rush around putting your bike together and getting to the course for a pre-ride. Hopefully you have an extra day and get another day to pre-ride the course, but often times you (me) don't have enough vacation time to do that. Then, you race for about 2 to 2.5 hours. Then, sometimes you have to rush back to the room, repack the bike, skip taking a shower, and rush back to the airport to go home. Sometimes you don't.

Then then then. Well, it really is a lot of fun, but doing all of that and rushing back so you can go back to work for busy week kind of wears you out. Damn work. So the local series gets the nod for my focus this year. To be honest, it's a little more competitive than most of the NMBS races anyway. Plus, they changed the NMBS rules this year. You have to complete 4 races plus the final to compete for the series championships. That's 5 races and I probably wouldn't have made that many, so there goes my chances at being a repeat winner.

So here I sit. I'm taking today off and Monday off. Not going anywhere but to the couch. It's kind of nice. I woke up a little late this morning (7:30), and went over to a new coffee shop. The name of it is SML Coffee, and it actually has good coffee. There are a lot of shops around here where the coffee is mediocre at best. Some of them try to pawn off Daz Bog coffee on you. Daz Bog is ok, but it's not coffee shop coffee. Others just suck. Like the one that won't let me charge anything under $5. I think to myself, "it's a freaking coffee shop. Everthing you sell is under $5." I rarely carry cash anymore and always use my check card. I don't think I'm in the minority either. What is the theory behind the $5 minimum anyway? From what I understand of the credit card companies is that they charge something like 2% on each charge. 2% of a little is less than 2% of a lot. Is there some minimum amount the credit card companies take on small charge amounts that I don't know about?

Back to the coffee shop. It's located in this 60s or 70s looking office building. The building has a little drive through, covered area. Above the drive through are office buildings, and on each side of the drive through there are stairwells. The creative owner decided to put up a garage door on either side of the drive through and make it usable space. Pretty cool looking. If you have a myspace account, you can see the pictures on the website.

I had a macchiato (a real one, not the abomination Starbucks tries to pass off) and read my new Rolling Stone. There was a pretty good article about how Bush supposedly "stole" the 2004 election. It is a pretty slanted article, and I usually read such articles with great care. It did, however, have some pretty convincing arguments. I'll have to do some research. Here is a piece from that article. Click on it to see the whole thing.

• I. The Exit Polls
  The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the mark -- they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)

  Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)