Keep on truckin'

This got a little stream-of-consciousness and has almost nothing to do with anything nautical... you can choose to keep reading along, or not, I'm not promising it will ever improve in quality or arrive at a particular point.

So, I haven't wanted to say anything until the ink is dry, but there is something like a 99% likelihood that we have finally got our house rented out. Mandy is going to collect the first check tomorrow; when it clears, I'll consider it official.

But the upshot of that, other than that we can stop bleeding dollars on a mortgage payment for a place we aren't living in, is that we have to get it completely cleaned out finally before the 12/01 move-in date. We'd left some furniture there that we had been trying to sell (it's easier to find buyers for that sort of thing in town than out here in the sticks), but it hasn't sold, and the new renters have plenty of their own stuff they'd like to move in instead. So, a trip to town with the truck was called for; we took it in for Thanksgiving, before we even had a clue it was going to rent, and had already grabbed part of the stuff, but there was another load left and I picked today to pick it up.

I wanted to get going early, figuring traffic might get bad at the end of the holiday weekend. Driving around through Tacoma is, economically, pretty much a wash most of the time... gas costs about as much as a ferry ticket, and unless you time the ferry perfectly it's about the same length of time to get there. But with a load of stuff, mileage costs more than the ferry, so "early" meant an early ferry. There is a 0520 and a 0700 from Bainbridge on Sunday; it's about an hour to the ferry from here, so I would have to leave at either 0415 or 0600. I have been fighting off Mandy's cold, so I set the alarm for 0530 and figured I would catch the seven o'clock and it wouldn't be too busy.

As it happened, though, I couldn't sleep much last night, and I happened to roll over and look at the clock just after four. So I got up and headed out.

After about a mile, I realized I hadn't turned the alarm off and it was going to wake Mandy up early (bad, because of that cold and all). Irrationally, my first thought was to call her so she could turn it off, but eventually I realized there wasn't anything to do about it and just kept going.

I got to Winslow with about five minutes to spare, but to my surprise, traffic was stacked up past the light and only trickling in. I started to get nervous, imagining sitting around in the cold, dim parking lot for an hour and a half, but when I finally inched up to the booth the ferry was still there. The toll-taker, frazzled, was talking on the radio saying, "I'm going to let a few more through and that's it, they're still stacked up out there." Turned out it was the day of the Seattle Marathon; all the runners from the peninsula were heading over to make the start time. WSF had neglected to staff for it; I was one of the last aboard, and the ferry pulled out 80% empty with cars still stacked up way up the hill in Winslow, because there was only one toll-collecter on duty.

A private business, you'd have to think, hey, once it's clear you're not going to get everyone through the line, just wave the rest through and load as many as you can before the departure time (which has to be held firm, lest the schedule be off for the rest of the day). You are just ticking people off at that point, an empty ferry, empty parking lot, a lot of folks waiting. But it's the state, of course they're not going to do the smart thing. Actually, now that I think about it, from a certain perspective the state should be more willing to let people through... most of us pay taxes, so in essence we've paid at least part of our way on the subsidized service.

But of course no government worker is going to default on the side of service over adherence to regulation, so the boat left mostly empty.

Anyway, I got to the house ridiculously early and had to load a bedroom set, a weight bench, and other miscellaneous junk as quietly as possible so as not to wake the neighbors. I got most of the stuff; the weights I had to leave (boarded up out of reach of the four-year old and dog who will be occupying the place... geez, I was worried that Mandy forgot to ask for an additional deposit on account of the dog, but the toddler will probably do more damage anyway) since the only spot I had left for them was concentrated in the back corner of the bed and unbalanced the load too badly. Try loading and unloading 200 pounds of cast iron weights in the dark without making a racket! I think I managed it, though, no lights came on.

After that it was a pretty easy trip back; I had good ferry luck on the return trip, too, didn't wait more than ten minutes. A bungie snapped somewhere along the way and a back corner of my tarp shredded unnoticed in the wind stream, but nothing got wet or damaged.

I missed the Seahawks game, which was unfortunate, since it was a rare win. When I finally turned the TV on, the choices were San Francisco versus somebody or the Vikings and the Bears. Although it would have made more sense to watch SF since they're in our conference I pretty much have to tune in to Favre TV when Mandy is around.

I've been pretty well hard-wired to root against the Vikings from all the years Mandy was a fan of Brett in Green Bay so I almost reflexively find myself cheering when their opponents do well and groaning when Favre connects... which happened a lot today. He's having a monster season, and it sort of forces you to re-assess his career. Everyone knows the interceptions thing, but with an extremely solid front line (anchored by former Seahawk Steve Hutchinson, whose absence from the 'Hawks does much to explain their own lackluster performance these past few years), an extraordinarily capable receiving corps, and All-Pro running back Adrian Peterson in the backfield, he's got all cylinders firing and is at a career low in the season for interceptions, and near highs for everything else. It makes you wonder what he could have done with more talent around him earlier in his career, and to what extent it was his talent alone that dragged Green Bay along for all those years. Or perhaps he simply didn't have the maturity until this point in his career to make use of everything that was at his disposal. It's hard to say but interesting to consider.

The afternoon was diminished by news of the four Lakewood police officers who were gunned down at a coffee shop preparing for their shifts. It's especially chilling coming so close on the heels of the assassination of Seattle officer Tim Brenton last month. In fact, it almost makes you angry at them... what could they have been thinking? It's too early for any details of what happened exactly, but how, a bare month after a cold-blooded killing of another officer who was just sitting there, could they put themselves in that position? Were they in a booth? Was no one watching the door and did the killer not raise any hackles? It's not impossible for one armed man to kill four in a close-in gun battle, but you have to imagine it involves either incredible luck or the cooperation of the victims. And how could they have been unaware, bottled up, or otherwise unready in any way in the wake of Brenton's murder? Did they avoid firing back to avoid endangering others in the shop? If so, should they have, according to the cold logic of the active shooter response protocols adopted by many departments after the fiasco at Columbine?

Cops almost always are reacting rather than acting in these situations, as it must be; they are the good guys, they can't start pulling their guns every time they get a hinky feeling about someone. The crazies who do this sort of thing can conceal their intent and almost always get the first shot. Nonetheless, officers tend to prevail in these situations (to put it coldly, they have a 6 to 1 kill/death ratio versus criminals). Superior training and discipline has them making better use of cover, shooting straighter, and thinking more clearly than the opposition. American cops, by and large, are pretty ninja. Policing an armed and violent society has inherent risks that has upped the overall skill level of men and women in that dangerous job. Which is why it is so unbelievable that a single nut, in one fight, managed to kill four of them and escape. I can't off-hand think of anything like it; four officers have been killed by the same assailants twice in California in recent history, but in neither case were all the fatalities caused in the same incident... multiple encounters allowed the murderers to focus their efforts.

At any rate, as with any news of that sort, the whole thing made the rest of the already grey day seem particularly grim and unsettled. Mandy had to go back to town today to teach tomorrow, and I am, as always, irrationally worried about her being there alone after such a vivid demonstration of how unbalanced some parts of our society are. I know, of course, that in fact violence is increasingly rare, particularly involving strangers; still, as I write above how saddened I am that the four deceased were caught off-guard, it seems obvious that no matter how rare, it is a thing that it would be both hypocritical and folly not to prepare for. I guess if you want to find the connection to nautical matters in this post, that would be it: risk is the intersection of the severity of a possibility with the likelihood of it occurring. If a thing is both rare and inconsequential, then putting much effort into preparing for it is probably a waste. If it is uncommon, but serious, however, it's probably worth preparing for in some respect. I guess I would put "getting assaulted by a complete stranger" in that category, just like "hitting a rock and sinking your boat." Someone probably keeps odds on both those... be interesting to see how similar/dissimilar they are.

I see now they are looking for a guy pardoned by Mike Huckabee when he was governor of Arkansas in connection with the shootings. If it turns out that is in fact the killer, I imagine this will put paid to any further presidential aspirations Huckabee may have had.