Possibly in poor taste, considering recent events, but it's true...

Smoke does get in your eyes. I've discovered online karaoke. This is more or less how the new lead singer for Boston was discovered, so I'm hoping Richard Carpenter or the Platters (do they need a singer?) will call me one of these days.

Rate this performance at The Sims On Stage

Diary

I wanted to have more bullet points, so here they are:

• 4:50 a.m. or so: woke up, kind of
• 5:25 a.m.: went to spinning class at the gym (a little late)
• 8:00 a.m.: breakfast meeting with a Chico city council member to talk about ACLU LGBT committee project(s) and any other letters of the alphabet
• 9:10 a.m.: arrived at work
• 1:30 p.m.: case review meeting, decided that welfare fraud cases and clients who act like they may have personality disorders should be recurring soap opera themes to complement all the comas and cases of amnesia.
• 3:30-ish: done with case review
• 5:00 p.m.: went to General Plan Citizen's Advisory Committee meeting to discuss preferred land use alternatives for eleven study areas in the unincorporated vicinity of Chico. Spoke twice in the meeting. One of my proposals for a 500-acre cluster of high density zoning in a 9,400 acre area, next to existing dense development in urban Chico, and pending a Specific Plan & City oversight, with the remaining 8,900 acres designated Resource Conservation, actually got two other votes besides mine (out of about 18...that's 16.6%! Wa-hoo!).

Worried that I sounded too meek or conciliatory and perhaps uncertain when I talked; decided it was just because the people who did most of the talking talked loudly, and a lot, and sounded like they believe they know quite a lot about everything. Coincidentally they were all white men over the age of 45. Occasionally a few white women over the age of 35 would say something too. You'd think that there were no people of other colors living in the county. I guess they didn't want to be on the Citizen's Advisory Committee. I wonder why?

• 11:00 p.m.: meeting adjourned
• 11:20 p.m.: came home, watered cat and fed plants.

The not-so-fast 50

It's that time again when daylight lasts just long enough to get a 25-mile ride in after work. A small group of us started about 15 minutes earlier than the rest of the pack so we'd have time to finish before dark. A little over an hour into our ride, the sound of many wheels, like the west wind, rushed up behind us and flew away again in their lycra of many colors. Up until then I thought I was going along at a good clip, averaging about 18-19 miles an hour and taking gallantly long turns at the front of my little péloton. The riders that passed us gave me a feeling of standing still. But they were glorious to behold, filling up the entire lane on the River Road, like a semi truck made of bicycles.

We ran out of steam in the last 20 minutes and slowed down to about 15 mph while the other group was probably already home, showered, dined, and moving on to dessert. Some day I'll have a speedy speedy bike that weighs less than my cat, and speedier legs to go with it. For now, I'm doing fine.