Just

Have you ever wondered how many bugs you kill in one day?

I'm not trying to be gross or silly or anything; I'm being completely serious.

The thought occurred to me as I was driving home tonight. Here in the south, on summer nights, ---especially on country back roads where there is not much traffic--- bugs come out and fly, hop, crawl, flutter, buzz, and drift across the road and inevitably, but usually always wind up splatting against my car as I make my way home. I must kill tens, if not hundreds of bugs during a summer drive home at night. And what about when I cut the grass? I have about four acres of grass to cut. That's four acres of grass metropolis for bugs. Ants, grasshoppers, crickets, spiders, ticks, worms, just to name a few; they're there going about their daily business when along come the steel tornadoes. The bugs' skyscrapers of grass shredding and being blown around violently into a vortex of destruction under the mammoth blades. Many bugs make it out unscathed, but still many more die from severe blunt trauma and smushing.

To us, we're just going about our day, doing the things we do without much thought to the rest of the living things around us. We rationalize that they are just bugs, or more than likely, we go without really thinking about them at all. The grass must be cut, and we must have transportation. Too bad for the bugs. They're too small and insignificant for us larger lifeforms to even notice or care about.

What if large moving machinery the size of several city blocks randomly took out entire neighborhoods, and we were left helpless to do anything about it, other than continue to go about living on in our existence?

This is what the bugs have to contend with.

But how do they contend with it? They reproduce like crazy.

You think there are a lot of people on this planet? Well, there's roughly 6.8 billion of us here.

That's a lot... to us.

For insects that's nothing. At any time, it is estimated that there are some 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive.

That's more than 1.4 BILLION BUGS for every ONE person.

So I guess it doesn't make a difference how many bugs I kill in one day, one month, one year, or my whole lifetime. There's just so many of them, it will never even put a dent in their numbers. Several hundred of them killed while driving, or thousands killed by cutting the grass is insignificant compared to their total number.

No wonder they are thought of really as just bugs.

Five Years???

I am finding it hard to believe I have been randomly posting to my blog for a little more than five years now. How time flies.

I need to do a recap of everything that has happened since I first started posting. I'll save that for another post.

Speed Thrills

I really shouldn't even be writing about this, but I think someone should.

The old saying goes, "Speed Kills".

I totally agree, but then again, so do a lot of things.

I am almost embarrassed to admit that I have exceeded 160 mph on my motorcycle. I usually go over 120 on most days when I am on the interstate. Except for the 160 incident, all the other times are simply from being comfortable with speed and not realizing how fast I am traveling. When I am on the interstate and everyone around me is doing 80 mph, it doesn't take much (a slight twist of the wrist) to accelerate from 80 to 120 on the bike. Usually I am just trying to avoid other vehicles on the road all together, so when I near one, I accelerate to pass it so that I can always maintain a safe distance away from it. These are the times when 120 doesn't feel like 120. I guess having a jacket that dissipates the wind like a golf ball doesn't help either. I would think the sheer wind force would clue me into how fast I am going. Nope. It doesn't.

I do make amazing time when I am trying to get from point A to point B.

I think just writing about this is going to make me start using side roads and back roads more often. It doesn't feel safe going really fast down roads like these, and because of that, I take it easy.

One note worth mentioning about the 160 incident. When I looked down and the speedometer was registering 162, I began slowing down. It wasn't until after that I realized I was only in 5th gear. The bike has six gears. That's kind of scary. Not that the bike can go faster than that, but that I know it can. There will always be that little question in my mind that begs, "How fast can it really go?" I don't really want to know.

Maybe I should have bought a scooter.