And today I took a walk before breakfast!

Yep.  I did that.  Snapped the leash on the Daisy dog cause she has become abnormally attached to me.  I guess she knows I am kind of sad, but she never gets out of my sight or away from my side.  And she cries when I leave.  Tomorrow I may take them both.  Elvira has little short legs and I will probably end up carrying her home. 
We only went about 3/4 of a mile but it was very nice.  I used to do that a lot, but rather got out of the habit the last month.  And now this afternoon I have people coming to buy some of the cake decorating stuff.  More of it that I can sell outright, less I have to list on ebay.
And so I shall be off to church here in a bit.  Course I have to plug my book while I am on here anyway.  Oh, and tell you that I am working on book #2.  I am kind of having fun with this and probably not going to have as much sex and mayhem in the next one, so better get this one while you can.

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Want to buy your copy of Chapter One....Loose Ends?  It is available online at  www.loumercer3.com

or right here with the paypal button.

Pedestrian Access to the Kayak Course off fourth street

I have a friend who is doing the whole cancer and radiation thing and is not a well puppy.  So I do what I can and one of the things is walk his dog.  He lives on the bluff of the stretch of the river that runs through Pueblo between Fourth Street and Union Avenue.  That is also where the Kayak Course is located.  They have done a lot of work down there to include a very nice wide side walk, benches, trash cans, bags to pick up doggie do and also landscaped and planted the steep edges with wild grass and such.  To hold that in place they covered it with net.  Now comes the tricky part. 
That net is doing what it is supposed to do, it is rotting and going back to mother nature.  Well, kind of doing that, but not quite.  The plot thickens.  Click on my little slide show and be sure to read the captions.

The first shot is Pearl and Chapa.  That is right off of Fourth Street.  The fishing sign is 2 blocks away and is right behind my friends house.  So I go out the door, turn left and pass two houses, another left and across a vacant lot and there I am at the big wide side walk.   As you can see it is very nice.  Well, yeah, until it ends!  There I am left with the choice to either slip and slide down down the dirt incline which is rutted and full of rocks and no place a 70 year old woman out to be skittering down!  Or I can angle off across where you see those 3 young'uns walking down.  See that is steep, too.  So if I go at an angle I come to a gentle slope and then I reach the wide, safe sidewalk.  Unless, of course, I catch my shoe in the netting and then I face plant.  Last time I went that way I was so careful and I reached the sidewalk and had one foot in the air on the way down to the sidewalk and the other in the netting and face down on the cool concrete, my fall broken only by my poor old, mistreated knees.  There were two girls there with there dogs who were kind enough to offer to help me up, but the dog I walk is very protective of me, so that did not happen.

So, I have a message for the city of Pueblo.  I notice you have chained the steps that lead up the embankment beside the Chinese Resturant there on Fourth and the bridge heading into the city.  I have no idea what that is about.  How about taking some of those chains down there and draping them across the "Pedestrian Access" behind that big gravel pile in case another little old lady wanders down there and thinks that 3 foot wide sidewalk actually goes some where.  Or here!  Even better would be if you finished that other 30 feet so we could actually get down there safely.  How about that? 
When my son saw my bruises he was in hog heaven imagining the lawsuit we could have against the city.  This is a clear cut case of negligence on your part.  However, I am not a suing person, but you should know there are people out there who are.  I love to walk on that part of the river and that access is wonderful right up to the point that it becomes treacherous.  I am surely not the only one who would like to see that little stretch finished.  It just seems counter productive to do so much work and spend so much money and then not finish the project. 
So, I ask you to either finish it or take down the Pedestrian Access sign and chain that sidewalk, before some one else gets hurt.  I could loan you a padlock if you don't have one.

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Well, that was rather anti climatic if I do say so myself!

I some how wonder just what that was all about, the star business, I mean.  But I sure found out who my supporters are!  To refresh here, I needed only a few feedbacks to reach my thousand feedbacks and my star would change colors.  Several of you emailed me that you would leave me feedback on eBay if you could, but they do have thier rules.  First you have to buy something from me and then you can leave feedback.  And you can only leave one feedback a week.  So I lingered at the 998, then along came Cindy Darrow, my niece,  to the rescue.  She left lots of feedbacks for things she had bought previously.  That put me up to 999.  She then began buying Lip Bong and leaving feedback.  But they still did not count!  Only one per week counts. ;(
Then some time in the night pheadwood left feedback for an Avon necklace and my purple star quietly turned red.  That was it!  No glowing letter from eBay extolling my virtues as a seller.  No fan fare.  No nothing.  But I do have to tell you about this niece of mine.  She is the daughter of my late oldest sister.  She lives in Oklahoma, so I do not see much of her, but I may make the effort to remedy that this summer when I head south to see my son in Dallas.
I am not sure just what the girl does down there, but I do know she sent me 250 of the big Crown Royal Bags.  She also sends me lots of electronics that actually work along with new stuff that comes from Lord only knows where.  I think she may have connections and may be one of  "Lou's Little Angels" who are people who work quietly behind the scenes for my little causes. 
Some of this is routed through her brother, my nephew.  And why does she do this?  These things are earmarked for the AIDS clients that I work with here in Pueblo.  If we want money for something like candle wax to make candles for the homeless, the office in the Springs does not fund that!  If we want to have an outing away from the office and just let out hair down, like at the bowling alley, the office in the Springs does not fund that.  A long walk on the Nature Center trail followed by a hamburger some where; the office in the Springs does not fund that.  While I do my own funding for most of the social events as far as the food aspect goes, there are a lot of little things this money furnishes.  I call this the "Lou fundraiser". 
Of course this is not tax deductible for you or me either.  If I were walking the streets asking for money it would probably be illegal.  What I have done is just let it be known to  a few of my friends that here in the Pueblo office we like to do special things for our clients to kind of raise their spirits and make them feel a little more human.  This money goes through no channels except me.  My first donation came from my friends Kay and Frank.  Then Cindy took up the banner and ran with it.  Last week I put almost $300 in the "Lou Fundraiser"  and I have more stuff on eBay now, along with a box right over there that needs to be photographed and listed.  More then one way to skin a cat in this old world.
As long as I have friends like Cindy and Kay and Frank, I will do just fine operating on the skirt of  the organization.  And as for my feedback number and the sad little red star, life goes on.  I am now setting at 1002 and I do not know when the next change will be, but I do know that I have friends out there rooting me on and that is all that really matters! 
And do you know what sponsored links are?  Those are places that pay me money when you go there and buy stuff.  And where do you suppose that money goes?

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Pick ME! Pick ME!

I would dearly love to blame this on some one else,  but I feel that in all honesty I must take full credit for this.  Granted I do have a lot on my mind here the past few days, but I would be remiss if I let this one go by unnoticed.  You will need all the facts.

I went to the doctor and had blood work done.  When it got back nursie dear (and you know who you are, don't you, Deb?) called to give me the  news that every thing is through the roof except my bank account.  Now granted, I was about to get around to starting to exercise pretty soon, but she informed me that I was way to late for that.  And she was most firm about it and now I know why they call her "Sarge".    So I commiserated with my buddy Tim and he gave me a tongue lashing.  "You have the treadmill all set up down stairs for crying out loud!  Just get on it and quit saying you do not have time!  Just do it!"

Well, the man is right.  So after he left I got to thinking.  I am good at multi tasking and this might work.  I had 3 seed catchers that just needed elastic in them and they would be ready to go.  So I clipped a bodkin on each end of the elastic and started it through the little opening.  That was going well and so I reached up and turned on the tread mill.  You know that safety device that hooks on your belt and if you fall it will turn the machine off?  Yeah, that inconveniently place little do hickey.  The seed catcher kept getting wrapped around that and shutting the tread mill down.  So I unhooked it from my waist and wrapped it around itself.  Then we started again, 

Well all was going real well at the slowest speed so I kicked it up a notch.  And I finished both sides of the first seed catcher.  Things were going so good I actually thought about calling Tim's wife and telling her how good I was doing at this multi tasking thing, but I decided to just finish the seed catchers first.  So I started number 2.  Then I kicked it up another notch.  I had been at this little job about 9 minutes when I dropped the bodkin.  Now what do we do when we drop something?  We pick it up.  Natural instinct dictates that.  Well, let me just tell you when I realized that was the wrong thing to do. 

It occured to me about the time my right leg hit the Oleandar tree and my left leg was sticking out of the Fig tree and my whole backside was being sanded by the sure grip coating on the treadmill which was now spinning freely at about 30 miles per hour.  That was also about the time I noticed my safety cord dangling harmlessly behind the speedometer.  As I drug my poor broken little body across the floor to jerk that loose I thanked my God in heaven and all his angels that I was alone and not being videotaped.

So here I am the next day.  I am not real sure that right leg isn't broken and it is a very funny color.  The left one is sore, but still intact.  My backside resembles chicken skin after it has been barbequed.  Some where in the melee I whacked my head on something and I am not sure I don't have a severe concussion, but for sure there is something loose up there.

So, the words of wisdom for today are this:  Leave that damn safety thing on your belt, do not try to multi task and for crying out loud if you drop something, just leave it alone.  I must confess that I could not get to sleep last night and I am not sure whether it was because of the bone poking through my skin or because I was laughing so hard at the sight that must have been!


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