Call if you must ... but please, not while driving!

Thirty-two countries in the world -- including Germany, Ireland, Denmark, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, China, Egypt and the United Kingdom -- either ban all use of a phone or just a hand-held phone (read: cellphone) by anyone operating a motor vehicle. Four Canadian provinces, including the largest, Quebec, do likewise.

In the United States, no state imposes a blanket use of telephones while driving, although six states -- California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Washington plus the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands -- do ban the use of a hand-held phone by a vehicle operator (which means the use of phone earpieces while driving in those states would be OK). Only six states. Six other states have laws prohibiting local jurisdictions from enacting any restrictions on phone usage while driving.

Are legislators and the people in this country really that naive to trust the majority of people to drive undistracted while talking on the phone at the same time? I realize that I'm only one voice, but I find such trust incredulous. Blind, even. I don't even think it's a close call. I don't think half of the vehicle operators in this nation can drive and talk on the phone simultaneously without significantly diminishing their focus and attention to where it belongs -- the road.

To me, that's scary because it also means the likelihood of serious consequences on the road are significantly greater. As if we need another good reason -- aside from drunk drivers, who we already have a challenge trying to police and eradicate -- to be fearful about being "caught" driving while sober and phoneless.

Why is it our nation cannot put the hammer down -- much harder than it does already on drunk drivers, and simply "at all" on people who have to operate cellphones while behind the wheel? This is a rhetorical question, of course, because I don't know the answer -- other than to say Americans so value their right to get liquored up and to jabber away with their fancy hand-held electronic devices, the latter because it makes them look important. Hey, that's all that I can come up with. Important -- and deadly.

Perhaps you think I exaggerate, or am beating the drum to a pointless issue. I don't think so. I can't tell you how many times I -- just me, myself and I -- have come across a cellphone-using driver making a bonehead maneuver with the vehicle that I'm pretty certain was made because his or her attention was totally fixed somewhere other than the road or traffic.

I consider myself an accomplished multi-tasker. And yet, while I'm driving, and especially while driving in heavy traffic (e.g., rush hour or locales I'm not familiar with), I have trouble holding a simple conversation with a passenger in my vehicle -- someone sitting right next to me -- because I feel that to do so significantly affects my ability to remain adequately attentive to driving. As a result, I'm sure many passengers have thought me to be an antisocial while driving ... and certainly one who has trouble composing intelligible responses or comments if I do try to communicate.

So if someone who otherwise is a darn-good multi-tasker cannot, in good conscience, feel comfortable simultaneously driving and talking WITHOUT jabbering into a hand-held device, how many people are out there to you suppose are fooling themselves into thinking they can? Or simply ignoring the fact ... and risking so much -- like, oh, human lives -- doing so?

The latter two questions are what scare me the most. I suppose I could dismiss this fear by chalking up myself as a human anomaly, but I really don't think so. My years of observing human nature tell me too many people who feel the need to use phones at all times and places also fool themselves into thinking they jabber and drive without sacrificing the needed attention required of the latter.

I have no quip-laden ending for this. Except, please, don't ever try to call me if you're driving a vehicle. I'm likely to launch into the rant above. Do you really want that?

A somewhat long hiatus

Yeah, I know. It's been over two months since I stopped to post an entry here. But I know "bloggers" who've been away from their writing or posting far longer, so I guess I don't quite feel so bad.

I'll try to summarize the busy-ness that's kept from being "regular" here in those weeks since I wrote about the Tour de France.

*** On Aug. 7, my second granddaughter, Addison Elyse, was born at St. Francis Hospital - South in Indianapolis. Two days later, Addison came home, and two days after that Addy's mother, Kelly Anne, noticed Addy had a fever and was twitching unnaturally. After a brief visit to the St. Francis emergency room, staff there had Addy transported to Riley Hospital for Children in downtown Indianapolis, where Addy remained -- invariably in the pediatric intensive care unit and the newborn floor -- until this past Monday, Sept. 28.

It'd be difficult to summarize the roller-coaster medical issues Addy weathered during her stay -- and she's still not totally over the hill yet. But it entailed seizures, infant apnea, three blood clots, a blood infection (MRSA) and a lower-extremities hematoma. She had ultra sounds, X rays, MRIs, blood tests, a spinal tap, antibiotics (intravenous and needle-administered), tubes coming from every place visible and temporary loss of vocal cords.

Family members made regular visits to Riley during the period, and I will cherish my several post-work, late-day few hours alone cuddling with her for a long, long time -- the almost perfect ones (where she slept in my arms start to finish) to even the ones where nothing could seem to comfort her. I was still with Addy, and I knew she was in far more discomfort than I.

*** Work has dealt me yet another formidable challenge. My staff merged with another in our features department, and I've been left to figure out how to make it work. People's work shifts and days off have changed, we're finding Tuesday nights and all day Wednesdays incredibly overwhelming because of the onerous workload. But this weekend, our two desks are now physically merging (from mid-July until now, we'd still been operating in separate locations in the newsroom), so I'm hoping the proximity and ability to have access to all staffers to throw on the sundry triages that surface on those Tuesdays and Wednesdays will give us a little better means to deal with it all.

*** I had my first public display of my photography in an art gallery show for a one-night, monthly First Friday art tour along the Massachusetts Avenue cultural district of downtown Indianapolis. Actually, I was among five members of a photo club who contributed images for the display. That occurred Sept. 4. At my photo blog, Photo Potpourri, I have a picture of one of three walls from our photo club's exhibit (which was at the Art Bank gallery).

*** A staffer at the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library called me last month to seek permission to use six images from my Irvington neighborhood gallery (at my Fototime.com online site) in a display the downtown main library plans to put up in January to represent the Eastside of Indianapolis. The display will be available on the sixth floor of the library's new wing throughout the month of January.

*** I spent last Saturday at Faught Stadium on the grounds of Franklin (Ind.) College, shooting photos of an exciting football game between the host Grizzlies and Trine University (Angola, Ind.). The Grizzlies came from 13 points down late in the third quarter to win it 30-29 on a 13-yard pass from Nick Purichia (a graduate of Cardinal Ritter High School in Indianapolis) to Adam Mellencamp with only 2 minutes and 25 seconds left in the game.

Pictures from my shoot there can be found also at my online gallery at SmugMug; a few of the images and a text summary also can be found at Photo Potpourri. I include this shoot in this summary because I took more than 1,000 images at the game, and the process of editing them all ... and selecting the 150 I decided to post on the online gallery was time-consuming. But it was worth it; it was a beautiful day for a college football game, I enjoyed the small-college atmosphere there (reminiscent of my years at UW-Eau Claire in northwestern Wisconson), and, perhaps most importantly, I was extraordinarly pleased with with quality of images.