Family update, bad drivers and UFC 102

Wow, it’s been a long time since my last post.  August has just flown bye for me.  It’s amazing how fast time goes as you get older.  When I was a kid the summers seemed to go on and on, but now as a nearly 40 year old man, the years go by so fast I can hardly keep track.  I guess it’s all relative to your age.  If you are 1 year old, a month is nearly 10% of your entire life experience, so it seems like a very long time.  That month to a 1 year old baby would be the equivalent to 10 years to a 100 year old person.  As a percentage of your overall life experience, the older you get the quicker months and years seem to go.

I have been wanting to write about a specific pet peeve of mine for a long time.  Incompetent drivers on the road.  It’s amazing at how poor the average driver really is.  Whether it’s just inattention or an outright lack of mental and physical abilities, poor judgement, bad decision making abilities, a lack of understanding of traffic laws or outright apathy…driving around in commuter traffic is enough to rile just about anyone.  Here is one of my hot buttons: refuge lanes.  When a car is turning left onto a multi-lane road there is often a refuge lane to pull out into.  It’s the left turn lane for the traffic coming from the right.  I can’t tell you how often I sit behind someone waiting for traffic to be clear from BOTH directions before pulling out into the refuge lane.  Usually, they don’t even use the refuge lane, but they pull all the way out into the lane of traffic.  The whole point of a refuge lane is to allow drivers to turn left, even if traffic is coming from the right.  As long as no cars are coming from the left, then pull out into the refuge lane and then wait for your opportunity to merge into the lane of traffic.  It’s really not that complicated, yet I am astounded by how many people can’t seem to grasp this concept.  I am normally very forgiving and patient with people, but this one scenario really gets my blood boiling.  Especially if the car in front of me waits for several minutes, letting many perfectly good opportunities to pull out go by.  That’s my rant for this post. 

A lot has happened in August in our house.  Our daughter started walking and turned 1 year old a week later!  She is a bundle of energy, into everything.  She’s also very vocal and demanding when it comes to reading books.  She absolutely loves to be read to, which is a delight for my wife and myself.  She’s our little bookworm. 

Our son turned 3 last month, and now we are going without diapers!  Just pull-up’s during naps and a diaper at night.  The rest of the time it’s just cotton underwear.  He’s had a couple of accidents, but is really doing well about going to the potty on his own.  We lavish him with praise and rewards when he does this, which seems to be working.  I am so happy to be changing half the number of diapers now.  When I put out our garbage cans the other night, a couple who are pregnant were out for a walk and asked me how many diapers we go through.  That got me thinking… around 10-12 diapers a day for the baby, and about 6-8 for our toddler.  That’s roughly 20 diapers a day, 140 per week or  600 per month.  That’s a lot of diapers!  At around $.25 each, that’s $150 per month.  Wow.

So UFC 102 is coming to Portland tomorrow.  I am a big MMA fan, have been since the beginning in 1993.  I have never missed watching an event.  I have seen every single fight in the UFC’s history, and I love it.  I think the mainstream still doesn’t really get it though.  They think it’s too violent and misunderstand what’s going on.  The more you follow it and learn about the techniques and fighters themselves, the more you realize what an interesting sport it is.  Even my wife loves it.  She can’t stand to watch boxing, but she follows MMA.  I grew up a boxing fan, but after watching the first 3 UFC’s in the mid 1990’s, boxing seems very predictable and boring to me.  I personally know several top level fighters and even trained MMA myself for a few years, so I have a different perspective than most casual fans.  I even went to Torrance, CA and met Royce Gracie at his gym in 1996.  I was really into it back then, and now it’s in my backyard.  I have been to several smaller shows (Sportfight) but never a UFC event.  I enjoy watching from the comfort of my own home, and watching 2 guys fighting from 30+ yards away just doesn’t do it for me.  I am the fan who is into what’s going on in the fight, not the event surrounding it.  Anyway, I think MMA is the future of combat sports; and fighting is the original sport.  Most of the top level fighters are quality people as well, not the thugs the media likes to promote.  Just like most other sports.  The pretenders are all trash- talkers and full of themselves, but the real elite are humble, polite and down to earth athletes who want to compete and be the best at their sport.  The casual fan doesn’t get that, because those are not the personalities the media likes to talk about… and that’s a shame.

www.dadsworld.com hopes you are having a good summer, and we encourage you to sign up on the main page if you haven’t yet.  The next free t-shirt drawing is Tuesday of next week!!!

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