Lina's Blog

While I am writing today, I must put out an advertisement for one of the most interesting blogs around. Lina has a wonderful blog at www.shutitdown.net she is witty, funny, and just a little wacky. Thanks for being yourself Lina. Love reading your prose.

The Rapid

The City of Cleveland has a light rail service, The Rapid. The service usually operates fairly well, on-time, clean seats, graffiti-free, low cost to commuters. Now, Cleveland also has something else, gangs and troubled youth in certain areas of the city. As I ride the rapid to work most every day, I have witnessed various interactions among the riders. Saw a fellow collapse once, watched an argument start between a commuter and a troubled young woman, saw a person escorted off the train by the RTA Police personnel. Yesterday, down at the rail station in the West Side public housing area, there was a group of young men, acting up on the train, causing many travelers to be anxious. This was during the early portion of commuter time. My question, where are the RTA Police when this happens? Must people wait for an incident to occur or for the train operator to call before the police show up? Cleveland has a good system for the most part, it just requires some fine tuning to be excellent. This is not solving world hunger, just looking for a little public safety to be demonstrated.

Busy Week

Hi to all. Been a very busy week around here. Finished the first class after returning to college and the second is about to start. This next class requires a paper to be submitted on the first day, that's okay, just something else to do. Work has been very busy, taking up a lot of time. My boss told me I could work on some school work at the office if I needed to, that is wonderfully considerate. However, it only works if I can come up with the time to do school work, so far I have only found a few minutes here or there to look up something on the internet. All of next week I will be on a business trip, my presence is required, but I won't be heavily busy with any particular function, hope to find much time to work on school items.

Happy New Year

Greetings to everyone in the new year! I am hoping 2006 will in fact be better than 2005. Last year was okay for some things, starting back to school and traveling. My parents divorced when I was like 3 years old. I never met my Father after that, according to others he came around a couple of times, but because of not paying support for me, Mom wouldn't let him in. Actually, he had a lot of respect for my Mother to honor her request. In the internet age, I searched and found that my Father had died in 1999, buried in Kansas. He had a sister living there as well. In 2004 my Mother passed away and on her side pretty much all of the relatives have died. So, no family left. When Mom decided to shield me from my Father, she included all of his family as well. I guess she really didn't want him to have any means to contact me. Now with everyone gone, I contacted my Dad's side and they welcomed me as the missing cousin. His brothers and sisters have pretty good sized families. I visited my cousins and Aunt in Topeka over Thanksgiving, it was a wonderful experience, am so happy it went well. This was a good experience from 2005!